Retracing the Reception of Greek Ideas on the Rainbow: Transformations in Pre-Modern Hebrew and Arabic Sources

What colours do we see in the rainbow? Pre-modern discussions are often based on translations and commentaries of ancient Greek texts, in particular Aristotle’s Meteorology. This study traces how Aristotle’s colour terminology was received and reinterpreted in Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, and Hebrew texts from the ninth to thirteenth centuries, focusing particularly on Ibn Biṭrīq, Ibn Rushd, and Samuel Ibn Tibbon. It explores how translators and commentators negotiated between semantic equivalence and linguistic distinctiveness and argues that inherited Greek colour terminologies reflects both shared cultural environments and different processes of translation, interpretation, and adaptation.