[Footnote 1: For details, Goldziher. _Muhammedanische Studien,_ I,
147-310.]

We noticed above the revival of scientific activities in Sasanian
Persia. This activity for the most part has its significance in its
quality of being a connecting link, in the first place, as the
transmitter of Greek knowledge to the East, and secondly, as the unifier
of this knowledge with the heritage which Sasanian Persia had received
from scientific works belonging to Semitic culture, as well as from the
science of India. The principal representatives of this activity were
not Persians, but Christians, mainly the Syrian Nestorians, and
Monophysites from the school of Edessa.[1]

[Footnote 1: For a general account of the character of this activity see
T.J. de Boer, _History of Philosophy in Islam_, 17-20.]

What was the share in these operations of the Persians themselves it is
hard to tell. But at all events, it was not considerable.[1] The general
character of this activity does not leave particular room for wide
creative science, since it has expressed itself pre-eminently in
compilations, translations of philosophical, astronomical, astrological,
medical, mathematical and ethical commentaries on Greek and some Indian
authors. It was not in this field that the activity of the Persian
sacerdotal community in the Sasanian epoch was concentrated. And
latterly in the period of the development of analogous scientific work
dining the eastern Khalifate under the Abbasides the principal role
belonged just to the same class of scholars, Christian Syrians, with
just this difference that the activity of the latter continued among the
Musalman alumni of various nationalities whilst in Sasanian Persia their