Phamacopœa persica. Kitāb al-abnīa ‘an ḥaqā’iq al-adwīa von Abū Manṣūr Mowaffaq bin ‘Alī al-Hirawī as a source of knowledge about mediaeval Persian pharmacognosy.

• Applicant: Dr. David Buyaner
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; Medieval History ; History of Science
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 557560138

The treatise by Abû Mansûir Mowaffaq bin ‘Alî al-Hirawî Kitâb al-abnîa ‘an ḥaqâ’iq al-adwîa (“Book of the Principles of the true Characteristics of Remedies”) is a thesaurus of materia medica, written between the end of the 10th and the beginning of the 11th c. A. D. By various estimates, the book comprises 547, 582 or 584 lemmas of different extent, which are arranged according to the Arabic alphabet and contains information about nature, properties and modes of application of the herbal, mineral and animal remedies (mostly simplicia). Kitâb al-abnîa holds a unique position both in the Persian philology and in the history of medicine. As the earliest original (i.e. non-translated) prosaic text in New Persian, which again is represented by the oldest extant New Persian manuscript (A. F. 340, 447 A. H. / 1055-56 A. D.), the treatise provides a unique source of knowledge about early stage of development of the literary New Persian. Moreover, Kitâb al-abnîa contains a lot of hapax legomena and seldom words (first of all disease names), whose explanation would make a great contribution to the Persian lexicography. Another important line of research is the question about origin of the sources, which the author used: while some of them, such as Galen, Dioscorides, ‘Alî ibn Sahl Rabban at-Ṭabarî, ar-Râzî et al., are well-known, the Indian and Syriac references of Abû Mansûr remain to a great extent unexplained. Last but not least, a re-evaluation of the own contribution of Abû Mansûr to the medical science must be mentioned. It is often argued, that his work has left no traces in the later Persian medical literature. However, this assessment is based only on the fact that later authors do not refer to the Kitâb al-abnîa explicitly. Yet if it be established that they mentioned e.g. a mode of application of a certain remedy, which had occurred for the first time by Abû Mansûr, the role and place of the Kitāb al-abnīa in the history of medicine must be revised. The extremely rich lexical material that stands in the wings in the Kitâb al-abnîa can only be properly analyzed once the work as such has been re-edited, translated and commented on. The immediate purpose of the submitted project is therefore to edit the text of the treatise on the basis of Vienna manuscript A. F. 340, to translate it into German and to supply the edited and translated text with a philological commentary. Such a study must lay the firm foundation for further lexicographical and historico-cultural research.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants