English to Turkish Art/Literary History Excerpts from The Arabic

how many removes???
the Platonic maxim next reported by al-Mas‘udI in the same passage (“Man is a heavenly plant; the indicator of that is that he is like an upturned tree with its trunk toward heaven and its branches toward the earth”) is surely derived from Plato’s Timaeus 9oa7, but we do not know at how many removes; it was common enough to be found, with different wording, in Ibn WahSiya’s Nabataean Agriculture (1.360.7-9), evidently translated from Aramaic (mentioned in this context also by T. Fahd, “Sabi’a,” EP, 8.675a-678b) and in an Isma'ill’s reminiscences of a conversation with a well-read da'i in Qayrawan in 909 (Madelung and Walker 2000: trans. 154, text 108). In any case, there is no indication that al-Mas'udi took this second saying from Harranians, as Tardieu thinks (1986:14); the conjunction (wa-qad qala Aflatun...) shows rather that this is just one of al-Mas'udi’s typical digressions (as also intuited by Lane Fox 2005: 237).