From My Notebooks: <em>Materia Medica et Magica</em> from Animals, including a Long, Unknown Passage from al-Mas῾ūdī

Abstract

Materia Medica et Magica from Animals, including a Long, Unknown Passage from al-Masʿūdī Y. Tzvi Langermann (bio) MS St Petersburg, Russian State Library Hebrew-Arabic I 2239 (IMHM F 55683, twenty-five folia) is a fragment of a longer work on the medical and magical uses of animals and their bodily parts. The language is Arabic, but the text is copied in Hebrew characters. There are no signs at all that the author was Jewish; this work thus appears to be one of many non-Jewish works written in Arabic that were transcribed into the Hebrew alphabet, especially in medicine and related fields.1 Two considerations in particular justify dedicating a note to this manuscript. First, texts belonging to the utilization of animal parts in medicine and magic have hardly been studied at all by historians of science. (Because some specimens are accompanied by beautiful illustrations, some manuscripts have been studied by art historians.) Second, the fragment we propose to describe contains a number of references to the famous historian and man of letters who flourished in the early tenth century, [End Page 169] ʿAlī ibn al-Ḥusayn ibn Alī al-Masʿūdī, including one very long citation, which we reproduce and translate below. As far as I have been able to determine, these passages are not known from any other source, and thus may preserve pieces from one of al-Masʿūdī’s lost writings, which are known to have been extensive.2 Some pages from II 877 were joined at some point in time to the manuscript classified as Hebrew-Arabic I 2239; presumably one of the Soviet era librarians correctly realized that they are part of the same text and put them together. The text is acephalous, but the end of the manuscript is the end of the text, though we cannot be sure if it is the end of the chapter or of the book. The final page ends about two lines higher than the others, and the last line has just a few words that are centered on the page; this is a usual graphic indication for the end of a chapter or a treatise. The manuscript is misbound; there is a long stretch of continuous text from 8a–18a, but otherwise, almost every folio is out of place. Some of the pages are damaged. It was owned once by a certain Shlomo (?) Cohen, who jotted down his name on f. 21a; and there is a marginalium, apparently a medical recipe, at the top of f. 20b. Several of the earliest writers on medicine and related fields in Arabic wrote extensive works on animals, covering their biology, the usefulness (manfaʿa/manāfiʿ) of their parts, including special properties, often occult or magical (khāṣṣa/khawāṣṣ) that particular organs were thought to possess. The genre has been covered by Manfred Ullmann with his usual precision and thoroughness; note in particular, that Ullmann knows of no citations from al-Masʿūdī on the magical uses of animals.3 I will take brief note here of the most relevant primary texts and scholarly articles that have been available to me for purposes of comparison in my quest to identify this text. One of the earliest and most famous of these was written by ʿUbayd Allāh ibn Jibrā’īl, scion of the famous Ibn Bakhtīshūʿ family, several of whom were prominent physicians to the early Abbasid caliphs. The full title of his book reveals the scope of topics covered: Kitāb Ḥayāt al-ḥayawān wa-ṭabāʿihi wa-khawāṣṣihi [End Page 170] wa-manāfiʿ mā fī aʿḍā’’ihi mimmā ṣannafahu al-ḥukamā’, “Book on the Life of Animals, their natures, special properties, and the usefulness of their parts, taken from what the scholars have recorded.”4 Abraham Yohannan prepared an English translation in 1917, but never published it.5 The same scholar contributed a short description of the beautifully illustrated copy (M 500, a Persian translation) deposited at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.6 More recently, Anna Contadini has written a very informative dissertation, still...