Gregory Bar Hebraeus's scholarship and political tact significantly enhance the cultural exchange between the Christian and Muslim worlds.
In the midst of thirteenth-century Muslim rule, he follows a conciliatory policy, seeking tolerance from the Arabs, whom he serves as physician, and promoting rapport among disputing Christian groups.
A Syrian scholar noted for his encyclopedic learning in science and philosophy and for his enrichment of Syriac literature by the introduction of Arabic culture, Bar Hebraeus has traveled to libraries throughout Syria and Armenia.
These journeys have enabled him to compile collections of classical Arabic texts in philosophy and theology, which he transmits to posterity through his own copies, condensations, and Syriac translations.
His treatises on grammar, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, theology, and history, have reinvigorating the Syriac language and made Islamic learning accessible to his fellow Jacobites.
Among his chief works is an encyclopedia of philosophy, He'wath hekkmtha (“The Butter of Wisdom”), in which he comments on every branch of human knowledge in the Aristotelian tradition.
Another is his Chronography, consisting of a secular history from the time of creation and an ecclesiastical history of the patriarchate of Antioch and the Eastern Jacobite church.
Born in Melitene, Armenia [now Malatya, Turkey] in 1226, Bar Hebraeus dies at sixty in Marageh, Iran.
