ABSTRACT
The thread that connects people is the question of how, due to which motivations, means, people, and events and where did knowledge in its various forms flow through countries and among cultures around the Mediterranean basin, the Persian Gulf, and the Arabian Sea. On a different level, they raise questions of interpretation with regard to fundamental texts and acts of translation and transformation of knowledge across historical, geographical, philological, and systemic boundaries. As Akasoy and Niehoff, Fancy, Ansari, and Schmidtke study primarily knowledge forms within religiously defined epistemic, ritual, and behavioral spaces. One part of the globalization of knowledge thus takes place through audiences initiated in textualized knowledge and its forms of representation. Hence, translation across boundaries necessitates intermediaries on more levels than the philological one alone. Late antiquity in this sense was not perpetuated in full until the third/ninth century.
