Ah, this discussion has been very cathartic! But I do apologize for gross grumpiness leading me to gross generalizations - of course lots of manuscripts were saved by the Byzantines, by western monks, by lots of folks as well as by Islamic leaders. The last is just the one I for which I have seen many random "for instances" over the years. Yay - everybody wins!
For the curious, though Wikipedia is hardly the last word, a quick google found me a brief on one of the examples I've seen before (Aristotle) and a broader outline of everybody's role role (and when, JonLaw!) that seems reasonably useful (though I only got as far as specifically-Greek manuscripts - gotta do some real work today
:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_of_Aristotlehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_of_the_Greek_Classicshttps://www.qdl.qa/en/why-were-so-many-greek-arabic-translators-christiansp.s. and I learned but should have known that "Europeans learned about Indian numerals via Arabs, which is why they were mistakenly called Arabic numerals in the West."
