http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_...the_Middle_Ages
This is a subject on which I do happen to be an expert. While nothing in the article is utterly or hopelessly wrong, it really shows the pitfalls that a beginner will encounter in attempting to summarise detailed information set out in academic sources. It’s rather like if you had read the sources to a 10-year old, who then tried to repeat them with varying degrees of success. The writer says “a lot of this article is part of an essay I wrote for a history class, and may need wikification. Help will be appreciated.†Look, my friend, the problem is not the wikification, and it is not with the links that you need help. Stylistically I see a clear influence of ‘History of Western Eurasia’, now unfortunately deleted.
Some samples:
QUOTE
The Byzantines … were either reluctant or unable to ponder the likes of Plato and Aristotle while warring with Arabs, Turks, and Huns.
When considering the big picture, it is apparent that Europeans had an easier time accepting Greek philosophy than the Arabs.
Collectively, even if accidentally, the work was completed very rapidly, and before the West knew it, they had been reintroduced to a wealth of Greek ideas lost for centuries, freshly-laden with Arab commentary.
from the first, many Arabs were hostile to the Classics.[
The first text to be translated by Syriacs was probably the New Testament, which likely didn't help things for continuing Greek translations.
translation work exploded within the House of Wisdom,
Leaders of the Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire frowned upon rational philosophy, and the Empire had just gone through a period of plague, famine, and war.
All of these developments led up to the 12th century, by which time European fear of Islam as a military threat had lessened dramatically.
These linguistic borderlands were hotbeds for translation
Two other disturbing things (i) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wrad the guy's user page is festooned with barnstars. How exactly do you earn a barnstar (ii) the discussion on the talk, which is clearly escalating into an edit war, is missing the main point. It's not the facts that are the problem with this article. It's the presentation.
[edit] Even more disturbingly, he claims that his IQ is 160. My view is that anyone who states their IQ in a public place (or who even bothers to work it out) is, paradoxically, an idiot.