Seventeenth-century hopes for scientific data in Arabic manuscripts proved false.
Evidence
Despite Greaves’s hopes for the future of this kind of research, he was one of the last scholars to try to extract useful scientific data from medieval Arabic and Persian manuscripts. Eventually Greaves himself concluded that there was not really any useful geographic information in Abu al-Fida’s work. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 162
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the modern underwhelming of the belief that lost scientific riches lie in untranslated Arabic manuscripts.