ABSTRACT
In the course of the eighth century, arabic was established as the new language of prestige and interregional communication from north africa to the edges of India. a long period of translations began, in which the parts of older literatures useful to the new elite were converted into arabic (c.750-1000). The contents of these translations, the social contexts that called for them, and their varied receptions are well documented and have received increasingly refined and convincing treatments in modern scholarship.2 For more than two hundred years, wealthy intellectuals in the new capital of baghdad paid translators large amounts of money to make much older texts available to them in arabic.3 Justly the most famous of these translations are the ones from greek, which, taken all together, included hundreds of works by dozens of ancient authors, and came to constitute one of the foundations of early arabic thought. all this is well known to historians. but, in the first decades of this period of translations, a relatively small number of works were translated from sanskrit into arabic, including texts on astronomy, medicine and political maxims. These have received very little attention among modern scholars, and the social circumstances of these translations from sanskrit remain unclear. The utility of such works may be selfevident, but that does not suffice to explain their westward transmission. Why would anyone in baghdad, muslim or not, have sought translations from the literary language of a distant country like India, and not, say, from chinese or
1 The following abbreviations are used in the notes. bd1 = nicholas sims-Williams, Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan I: Legal and Economic Documents. (oxford, 2000). bd2 = nicholas sims-Williams, Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan II: Letters and Buddhist Texts (london, 2007). Fihrist = al-nadīm, Kitāb al-fihrist, ed. gustav Flügel (2 vols, leipzig, 1871-72), vol. 1. my thanks are due to anna akasoy, christopher beckwith, michael cook, Patricia crone, christopher minkowski, everett rowson and Jonathan skaff for valuable comments on different drafts of this article. The remaining errors are all my own.
