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Traveling Pharmaceutical Knowledge: Abridgements and Translations of Ibn al-Baytar’s Compendium of Simples (14th-17th centuries)
Abstract
The circulation of pharmacological-botanical knowledge throughout the Mediterranean involved a continuous modification and expansion of the Dioscorides tradition as it reached its culmination in Ibn al-Baytar’s voluminous Arabic text, The Compendium of Simple Drugs and Foods. Through the examination of the subsequent reception of this text and its abridgements and translations in Ilkhanid Baghdad, medieval Turcophone western Anatolia, Injuid Shiraz, and the Ottoman and Safavid realms, this paper examines how this pharmaceutical knowledge was reshaped in different formats and languages as it travelled through time and place and changing circumstances. Composed in 1242 for the Ayyubid sultan with around 1400 alphabetically organized animal, vegetable and mineral medicines based on over 150 authorities, Ibn al-Baytar’s Compendium represents the height of knowledge of non-compounded drugs in the medieval Christian and Muslim worlds. In 1311, in Mongol-controlled Bagdad, Yusuf b. Ismail ibn al-Kutubi produced an Arabic abridgement of the text, popularly known as Jam‘ al-Baghdadi. This Arabic abridgement formed the basis of subsequent Turkish and Persian translations in the fourteenth century. An unidentified translator rendered it into Turkish upon the bequest of ‘Umur Beg (r. 1334-1348), the Aydınid ruler based at Smyrna (İzmir). In 1368-9, Zayn al-‘Attar partially translated the work into Persian for the Injuid court at Shiraz. The contents of the abridged and translated versions of Ibn Baytar’s original text continued to be reworked throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in both the Safavid and Ottoman realms. This text, in multiple permutations, likewise became subject to criticism, as we see with Davud al-‘Antaqi’s Tadhkira alwa al-albab and Sayyid Muḥammad Mu’min al-Mazandarani’s Persian Tuhfat al-Mu’minin. Writing in 1669, the Safavid court physician al-Mazandarani intended his work to be a corrective to the above-mentioned Zayn al-‘Attar’s Persian version of the Jam‘ al-Baghdadi, which he describes as being full of mistakes and inaccuracies. In turn, the Tuhfat al-Mu’minin was translated into Ottoman Turkish.
Discipline
Medicine/Health
Geographic Area
Islamic World
Sub Area
13th-18th Centuries