Despite robust scholarship arguing for the salience of race in the study of premodern societies, it is still often asserted that such approaches are “presentist” or “anachronistic.” As Geraldine Heng observed in 2018, these anxieties about presentism are often expressed through terminological concerns about what words were used for “race” before modernity. In this paper, I argue that Arabic translations of Greek medical and philosophical texts from the ninth and tenth centuries contain vocabularies of race that were rooted in their ʿAbbāsid context. To accomplish this, I will explore the relationship between Hippocratic, Galenic, and Aristotelian texts translated by Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq (d. 873) and his circle. Within passages about biologized conceptions of human difference, these translations often exhibit more complex, varied, and specific terminologies than their Greek sources. The development of a common (but heterogeneous) vocabulary across these texts was facilitated by Ḥunayn’s scientific project (in which these Greek, Syriac, and previously translated Arabic materials were critically synthesized) and the social milieu that translators shared with imperial elites. In order to make their works more accessible (and perhaps more useful) to their audience, these translators employed administrative terminologies particular to the caliphate, transformed obscure groups into familiar ones, and inserted commentaries that linked different translations. The success of Ḥunayn and his circle at domesticating and elaborating upon these ancient texts is evident in the wide reception of these concepts within various genres—including medicine, geography, and adab—in the ninth century. In sum, this paper is a meditation on how the friction of translation produced systematic thinking on racial kinds that both reflected contemporary attitudes and shaped subsequent discussions on human difference.