Abstract
A little-known thirteenth-century manuscript preserved in Damascus contains by far the largest Syriac medical work that has survived till today. Despite the missing beginning, a preliminary study of the text allows us to argue that it is the medical handbook (entitled Kunnāšā) of Īšōʿ bar ʿAlī, a ninth-century physician and student of Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq. The seven books of the handbook appear to follow the model of Paul of Aegina’s Pragmateia both in composition and content. The actual significance of the handbook in the history of Syriac and Arabic medicine is yet to be assessed, but there can be no doubt that it will be a pivotal source that illustrates the development of Syriac medicine during a period of four centuries at the moment when it was being translated to lay the foundations of the nascent medical tradition in Arabic.
Highlights
The unique manuscript preserved in the library of the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate near Damascus is not totally unknown but it has never received a proper description, and due to its inaccessibility it remained out of scholarly attention and inquiry.1 At present, codex Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate 238 consists of 439 folios, but only the first 435 of those belong to the original codex whereas the four last ones were added later
What we find on those supplementary folios seems to be a fragment from an independent Syriac medical manuscript of a later date
There is an intriguing possibility to identify the scribe with a scribe Basil Meliteniotes, a Greek Orthodox Armenian, who produced in 1226ce a famous illustrated Greek manuscript preserved in the Gennadius Library (Athens)
Summary
The unique manuscript preserved in the library of the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate near Damascus is not totally unknown but it has never received a proper description, and due to its inaccessibility it remained out of scholarly attention and inquiry.1 At present, codex Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate 238 (hereafter sop 238, a previous shelfmark was 6/1) consists of 439 folios, but only the first 435 of those belong to the original codex whereas the four last ones were added later. The text was first mentioned in the eighteenth-century catalogue description of the manuscript28 and since it has turned up in scholarly publications but never received special interest.29 upon close reading it may even seem that the rubric refers to ĪšōbarAlī’s medical work mistakenly, because the fragment is nothing more than an inventory of Syriac and Arabic equivalents for Greek drug names.
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