 Let us approach the first feature of the encyclopedia, that is, its reworking the of foreign “scientific” contents. Various cultural elements come together in the Epistles: Babylonian, Indian and Iranian astrology, Indian and Persian narrative, biblical quotations and cabbalistic influences, references to the New Testament and Christian gnosis. A good survey of these contents can be found in Netton 1991, 53ff., 89ff. More recently, the scholar has emphasized as "Philosophically, the Rasâ’il  [...] constitute a marvelous epitome of the mixing of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism in the caldron of Islamic intellectual endeavour" (Netton 2009, 109). In spite of the commixtion of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic ideas – e.g., for identifying Aristotle's active cause with the faculties of the Universal Soul, "Aristotle's terminology is all-pervasive in the Rasâ’il" (ibid., 111–112). Most attention is paid to the Greeks, from the so-called “pre-socratics” to Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and the Stoics. The encyclopedia can thus be considered a compendium of foreign sciences, deserving attention even by those who are only interested to ascertain the extent of what the Arabs knew of ancient doctrines at that time.