Medicine Dietetics and Pharmacology - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 228

different names: Hayūlā ilā ¡ al-ibb, Kitāb
al-adwiya al-mufrada and Kitāb al-a ª āi ª .
It was an original translation from Greek
into Syriac which provided the basis for
the Arabic version; this was made by
Iifān b. Basīl, with the original text
before him, and corrected by unayn
b. Isā in Ba ∞ dād in the 3rd/9th cen-
tury; it was the only complete translation
made in the Muslim world. This transla-
tion, like the earlier Greek text, was issued
in two versions: 1) the original edition of
Dioscorides, which arranged simple drugs
systematically in groups, divided the work
into five topics; to these were added up
to three later apocryphal topics on poi-
sons.—2) for ease of reference, alphabeti-
cal order was introduced, an arrangement
which lent itself to expansion of the text.
The Arabic text of Dioscorides was
disseminated in extenso or in fragments
throughout the whole Muslim world and
has helped later pharmacological stud-
ies in the Arabic language. Two great
difficulties have been evident from the
start: the first a question of natural his-
tory, from the fact that botanical species
were not the same everywhere; the sec-
ond, a linguistic and lexical difficulty, for it
was not easy to name the different species
without ambiguity. The original Arabic
translation acknowledges these difficulties
by introducing into the text the original
Greek, Syriac and Iranian names.
For this reason, the marginal glosses are
of the highest importance for the manu-
scripts of the materia medica of Dioscorides.
One of the most precious, the codex cop-
ied at the imperial court of Byzantium for
princess Anicia Juliana, is of great inter-
est on account of the variety of its glosses
which bear witness to the hazardous prog-
ress from East to West of Greek as well
as Arabic manuscripts, giving proof of
the continuous scholarly work which they
have inspired. During the 4th/10th cen-

perfume merchant and a drug merchant,
they identified the two words. There exist,
therefore, in this case the same transi-
tions of meaning as those found in the
case of aār . The second consonant of
č/andanānī , the nūn , would then have been
miswritten or misread into yā . The fact
that the word aydala/aydalānī , as far as is
known to the writer of these lines, is com-
pletely unknown in the western Muslim
world, may be explained from its Indian
origin; in the West, the corresponding
terms are [ ilm ] al-adwiya al-mufrada or al-
murakkaba , in quotations often abbreviated
to al-adwiya or [ ilm ] al- uūr/al-aār (see
above).
As an oriental synonym of al-aydalānī ,
al-Bīrūnī also mentions al-dārī , with which
the Arabs in the old days indicated the
perfume merchant, because the ships
from India brought their goods to the port
of Dārīn, lying in the area of Barayn.
Al-Bīrūnī substantiates the meaning of the
word with examples taken from ancient
Arab poetry.

(A. Dietrich)

Dioscorides

Diyusuridīs is the most correct Arabic
transcription of the Greek ∆ιοσκορίδης ;
other forms, such as Diyāsūridūs, allow
a certain Syriac influence to be admit-
ted. In Islam the name always refers to
Pedanius Dioscorides (Ist. century B.C.),
born at Anazarbe in Cilicia, whose name
when fully arabicized is Diyusuridīs Ayn
Zarbī. After Galen ( ⁄ ālīnūs) (377/987),
he is the doctor most frequently quoted
by Muslims. His περί ὕλη ἰατρικής , which
was already considered by Galen to be a
definitive manual of materia medica and
which has been the foundation of Mus-
lim pharmacology is known in Arabic by