Of these texts the most important are those ascribed to Hermes Trismegistos by the Harranians and now preserved in Arabic, the Book of the Zodiac of the Mandaeans (a Gnostic sect still existing in Iraq and Khuzistan), the Apocalypse, attributed to the biblical prophet Daniel (extant in Greek, Syriac, and Arabic versions), and The Book of the Bee in Syriac.
They are extant in Ethiopic, Syriac, Greek, and Latin translations made by Christians rather than in their original Hebrew or Aramaic forms.
A Palestinian Syriac version, extant in fragments, is known to go back to at least 700, and a fresh recension was made by Jacob of Edessa (died 708).
In fact virtually each of the extant Greek, Arabic and Syriac parallel sources has in this respect a different date.
Abu Bishr Matta received his Aristotelian education at the monastery of Mar Mari and came to Baghdad, where in the first decades of the 10th century he had al-Farabi, a Muslim, and Yahya ibn 'Adi, a Jacobite Christian, among his pupils.[91] He did not know Greek and his translations were made on the basis of the Syriac translations already extant.[92] Plato.
A pious romance of Christian apologetics, the legend is extant in several versions, including Greek, Syriac, Coptic, and Georgian.
There are more than 30 extant Greek manuscripts and others in Coptic, Syriac, and Armenian.
The Arabic alphabet probably originated at some time in the 4th century ce, but the earliest extant Arabic writing is a trilingual inscription Greek-Syriac-Arabic of 512 ce.
Others believe that this epigraph shows characteristics of Arabic but is essentially Aramaic and that the earliest extant example of Arabic is a trilingual inscription in Greek, Syriac, and Arabic dating from 512 ce.
