Medicine Dietetics and Pharmacology - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 231

765-835), and, finally, in an abridged
form (?) by unayn himself, who also
made an Arabic translation of the text; of
the second part a Syriac translation made
by Sergius (Sargīs of Ri ª aynā, d. 536)
was corrected by unayn and turned into
Arabic by his nephew ubay ª . (The Book
of Compound Drugs also was translated into
Syriac by Sergius and unayn, then into
Arabic by ubay ª ).
The Pragmatia of Paul of Aegina was
highly appreciated by Muslim physicians,
who used an (abridged?) translation of its
seven topics by unayn. Apart from small
fragments no manuscript survives in Ara-
bic, but there are frequent quotations in
the works of later authors.
According to Bar Hebraeus, Ahron
the priest wrote his medical pandect in
Greek, and his work was translated into
Syriac. An Arabic translation was made by
Māsar ¡ is (Māsar ¡ awayh). The Kunnā ª
of Ahrun al-ass is often quoted by phar-
macological writers, and its author had a
great reputation as a scholar. Māsar ¡ is/
Māsar ¡ awayh, the first translator of
medical works into Arabic, was also the
author of two topics, one on food and
the other on simples ( al-Aāīr ), perhaps
identical with the two maālāt added to his
translation of Ahron.
After the time of unayn, pharma-
cology rapidly developed in the Eastern
countries of the Muslim world. About a
hundred Arabic authors on materia med-
ica are mentioned in the bibliographical
works of Ibn Nadīm, Ibn Abī Uaybia and
Ibn al-ifī. Some thirty are represented
by manuscripts in Eastern and Western
libraries. Only a few of these works have
been studied by Western scholars. For
the history of the Greek text of Galen etc.
these Arabic texts will certainly prove to
be of importance.
In the course of time, many hundreds
of names of simple drugs, not known to

the Greeks, were incorporated in the body
of learning transmitted by the Greeks to
their Arab and Persian disciples. Serious
confusion in terminology inevitably fol-
lowed from the great influx of names of
Arabic, Iranian, Greek and Indian names
of plants and drugs which were current in
theory and practice. In the course of time
many works were written with the purpose
of determining their true significance and
of putting together synonyms. For practi-
cal purposes the translation of Dioscorides
made in Ba ∞ dād was of little use to read-
ers, as long as the Greek names were for
the most part only transliterated in Arabic
characters. Arabic equivalents were intro-
duced into the text by Spanish scholars
in the middle of the 10th century. About
the same time the Arab translator of the
Syriac Kunnā ª ā of Yuannā b. Sarābiyūn
(Serapion) gave Arabic equivalents to the
great number of Greek and Syriac names
of simples contained in that work. One of
the oldest prose works written in Persian
is the al-Abniya an aāi al-Adwiya of
Abū Manūr Muwaffa b. Alī al-Harawī
explaining, in alphabetical order, the Ara-
bic, Persian, Syriac and Greek names of
584 different simples.
The most interesting work on pharma-
cological synonyms written in the East is
certainly that of al-Bīrūnī (361-440/972-
1048), al-aydana fi'l-ibb . Apart from two
MSS of a Persian translation, this work has
come down to us in a single, mutilated MS
in Brusa, representing the author's rough
draft of the work, probably written in his
old age and never completed by him. In
its unfinished condition it contains 720
articles, in the common order of the Ara-
bic alphabet, dealing with vegetable, ani-
mal and mineral simples with numerous
remarks on their names in Greek, Syrian,
Indian, Persian and other Iranian lan-
guages, philological notes on the meaning
of plant names and their synonyms used