Translation Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! ==== Near East ==== {{Expand section|date=March 2012}} Traditions of translating material among the languages of ancient [[Egypt]], [[Mesopotamia]], [[Assyria]] ([[Syriac language]]), [[Anatolia]], and [[Israel]] ([[Hebrew language]]) go back several millennia. There exist partial translations of the Sumerian ''[[Epic of Gilgamesh]]'' ({{circa|2000 BCE}}) into [[Southwest Asia]]n languages of the second millennium BCE.<ref>J.M. Cohen, "Translation", ''[[Encyclopedia Americana]]'', 1986, vol. 27, p. 12.</ref> An early example of a [[bilingual]] document is the 1274 BCE [[Treaty of Kadesh]] between the [[ancient Egypt]]ian and [[Hittite Empire|Hittie empire]]s. The [[Babylonia]]ns were the first to establish translation as a profession.<ref>Bakir, K.H. 1984. Arabization of Higher Education in Iraq. PhD thesis, University of Bath.</ref> The first translations of Greek and Coptic texts into Arabic, possibly indirectly from Syriac translations,<ref>Wakim, K.G. 1944. Arabic Medicine in Literature. Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 32 (1), January: 96-104.</ref> seem to have been undertaken as early as the late seventh century CE.<ref>Hitti, P.K. 1970. History of the Arabs from the Earliest Times to the Present. 10th ed. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.</ref> The second Abbasid Caliph funded a translation bureau in Baghdad in the eighth century.<ref>Monastra, Y., and W. J. Kopycki. 2009. Libraries. In: The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World. edited by J.L. Esposito, 2nd ed., vol.3, 424-427. New York: Oxford University Press.</ref> Bayt al-Hikma, the famous library in Baghdad, was generously endowed and the collection included books in many languages, and it became a leading centre for the translation of works from antiquity into Arabic, with its own Translation Department.<ref>Hussain, S.V. 1960. Organization and Administration of Muslim Libraries: From 786 A.D. to 1492 A.D. Quarterly Journal of the Pakistan Library Association 1 (1), July: 8-11.</ref> Translations into European languages from Arabic versions of lost Greek and Roman texts began in the middle of the eleventh century, when the benefits to be gained from the Arabs’ knowledge of the classical texts were recognised by European scholars, particularly after the establishment of the Escuela de Traductores de Toledo in Spain. [[William Caxton]]’s ''Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres'' (Sayings of the Philosophers, 1477) was a translation into English of an eleventh-century Egyptian text which reached English via translation into Latin and then French. The translation of foreign works for publishing in Arabic was revived by the establishment of the [[Madrasat al-Alsun]] (School of Tongues) in Egypt in 1813.<ref>S.A. El Gabri, ''The Arab Experiment in Translation'', New Delhi, India, Bookman’s Club, 1984.</ref> Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Christianpedia:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission! Cancel Editing help (opens in new window) Discuss this page