Food Sources: Earth, Water, and Air - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 3

indirectly from words either purely Arabic
or long Arabicized.

In the 10th/16th century, a Damascene
author named Riya al-Dīn al- fi azzī
al-Āmirī (935/1529) wrote a large book
on agriculture which has not survived;
but later Abd al- fi anī al-Nābulusī (d.
1143/1731) gave a summary of it in a
work entitled Alam al-milāa fī ilm al-filāa
published in Damascus in 1299/1882.
In general, the writers of ancient Ara-
bic works on agriculture dealt with the fol-
lowing subjects: types of agricultural land
and choice of land; manure and other
fertilizers; tools and work of cultivation;
wells, springs, and irrigation channels;
plants and nurseries; planting, prunung
and grafting of fruit trees; cultivation
of cereals, legumes, vegetables, flowers,
bulbs and tubers, and plants for perfume;
noxious plants and animals; preserving of
fruit; and sometimes zootechny.
It may be noted that the writers of these
works used several non-classical agricul-
tural terms, and made a distinction between
plants which fertilize (legumes) and those
which exhaust the soil (cereals and others).
The chief principles of dry-farming
were not unknown to them, and similarly
the principles of variation and rotation
of crops. Certain Arab agronomists in
Andalusia had at their disposal botani-
cal gardens and trial grounds where they
experimented with native and exotic
plants, practised methods of grafting and
tried to create new varieties of fruit and
flowers. We should also note that several
ancient Arabic dictionaries, encyclopaedic
works and Arabic treatises on agriculture
and botany contain the names of numer-
ous varieties of fruit, cereals, flowers and
other cultivated plants. Thus al-Badrī
(9th/15th century) in his Nuzhat al-anām fī
maāsin al- · ām gives the names, in Syria,
of 21 varieties of apricots, 50 varieties of
grapes, 6 varieties of roses, etc.
All the early Arabic (or other) works on
agriculture, being based on observation

2.— Works on agriculture
The oldest Arabic work on agriculture
which we know is al-Filāa al-nabaiyya
(Nabataean agriculture) of Ibn Wa ª iyya,
written (or translated from the Nabataean!)
in 291/904. A little later there appeared
a work entitled al-Filāa al-rūmiyya (Greek
or Byzantine agriculture). This topic, pub-
lished in Cairo in 1293/1876, bears the
names of usūs al-Rūmī as author and
of Sar ¡ īs b. Hilyā al-Rūmī as translator
from Greek into Arabic. According to
ā ¡¡ ī ‡ alīfa, the author's full name
was usūs b. Askūrāskīna, and we think
that this is the name of Cassianus Bassus
to whom agronomic works collected from
Greek and Latin authors are attributed.
ā ¡¡ ī ‡ alīfa names three other trans-
lators of this topic, one of them being
said to be usā b. Lūā. From another
source we know that the agronomic work
of Anatolius of Berytos (4th century A.D.)
had been translated into Syriac by Sar ¡ īs
Rāsanī (d. 536 A.D.), and there is reason
to believe that this text was also trans-
lated subsequently into Arabic and that
no manuscripts of it have survived. In
any case, in the two Arabic works that we
know ( al-Filāa al-nabaiyya and al-Filāa
al-rūmiyya ), we find a reasonable knowl-
edge of agricultural practice, side by side
with superstitious advice.
In Egypt, the best presentation of agri-
cultural questions at the time of the
Ayyūbids is to be found in a work of Ibn
Mammātī (d. 606/1209), entitled awānīn
al-dawāwīn , published in Cairo in 1943
by the Royal Agricultural Society. In the
following century ⁄ amāl Dīn al-Wawā
(d. 718/1318) wrote in Cairo the (unpub-
lished) book entitled Mabāhi ¡ al-fikar
wa-manāhi ¡ al-ibar , the fourth volume of
which is devoted to plants and agriculture.