The same Arabic authors were retranslated repeatedly across centuries because few manuscripts were available

Evidence

Nevertheless, he did important work in Arabic literature and he campaigned vigorously for it to be studied as a subject in its own right. He translated histories by Abu al-Fida and Ibn ‘Arabshah into Latin. It is noteworthy how in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the same authors got translated again and again. Pococke, Greaves and Gagnier had already worked on Abu al-Fida and, after Reiske, many were to work on Ibn ‘Arabshah, most notably Silvestre de Sacy. Other works or authors that were recurrently chosen for editions or translations included the Proverbs of ‘Ali, the Proverbs of Luqman, the chronicle of al-Makin, the Ramlah Maqamat of al-Hariri and the al-Tughrai poem known as the Lamiyyat. In part, this phenomenon may indicate how few worthwhile Arabic manuscripts had been acquired by European libraries. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 227

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: A quirky worldbuilding detail — a canon frozen because a civilization accidentally owns too few of the founding texts, forcing endless republication of the same few volumes.

Related

• Arabic translation of ancient texts peaked between 750 and 900 AD (similarity 0.80)
• ‘Arabist’ once meant someone reading Greek only through Arabic (similarity 0.79)