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The Significance of the Genizah's Medical Documents for the Study of Medieval Mediterranean Trade
Abstract
The medical texts in the Genizah have been analyzed mainly as part of other subjects, like the various professional classes within the Jewish community in Old Cairo. Until now few have studied these documents in their own right, despite the fact that they offer valuable insights into the medieval economy of the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond. Focussing on saffron and myrobalan, this article offers a tentative investigation of the significance of medical drugs for the study of Mediterranean trade in the Middle Ages on the basis of practical medical fragments found mainly at the Taylor-Schechter collection in Cambridge.
... One example is reported by Pigière and Henrotay (2012) in which they show the presence of camels and dromedaries in the northern provinces of the Roman Empire brought there to be used as pack animals. During the medieval period, Islamic products influenced all the northern slope of the African continent, thanks to the functioning east-west trading routes (Amar and Lev, 2007). ...
... The Genizah manuscripts reveal extensive consumption and trade of saffron in the Jewish community of Cairo from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries. 53 Maimonides even speaks of its importance in medicine in the twelfth century. 54 As an ironic benefit of the diaspora, Jewish traders developed an extensive trade network for precious commodity of the Middle Ages, making them the principal traders of saffron from Islamic Spain to Syria and India. ...
Through a comparison between Sir William Jones' initial intellectual project before his arrival in India and his Indian writings this chapter brings to light the crucial importance of place in the production of knowledge. Locality thus takes a central place in this analysis, and also helps shed light on the nature of its constitution: localities, in this perspective, are themselves not made of static elements, but rather are composed of multiple, differential, and conjuncturally changing long- and short-range circulations. These circulations, constructed on the material basis of trade and empire provide the basis for encounter, interaction and negotiation, which critically shape and reconfigure the nature and content of the knowledge produced.
Various issues involving theoretical and practical dimensions of medicine have been studied by using the Cairo Genizah. However, there are few in-depth studies on medical education. This article focuses on the medieval Arabic ophthalmology textbook, Masāʾil wa-ajwiba fīʿilm ṣināʿat al-kuḥl (hereafter MI), written by Dāniyāl ibn Shuʿyā. This is a textbook that arranges ʿAlī ibn ʿĪsā’s Tadhkirat al-kaḥḥāllīn (hereafter TK) into the question-and-answer format.
MI is a concise and comprehensive textbook that includes anatomy, physiology, diagnostics, therapeutics, and pharmacology. Whereas Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq’s Masāʾil fī al-ʿayn is limited to theoretical knowledge, MI contains the total procedure from knowing nature of eye diseases to treatment, and enables readers to apply certain medicinal substances to specific situations. However, MI’s crucial defect is that it arranges treatment plans along one linear disease progression, and cut off many derivative plans.
Schematic composition is the remarkable feature of MI. Dāniyāl ibn Shuʿyā adopted some medical categories, which had been recognized but left unused in earlier Arabic medical books, in order to present the content in the concise scheme.
The content of MI basically follows that of TK; therefore, it does not contain remarkably new elements. However, since Dāniyāl ibn Shuʿyā arranged TK into the roughly fixed pattern, he occasionally had to fill omissions of TK with his original questions and answers. These new components were presumably referred to by later ophthalmologists such as Khalīfa ibn Abī al-Maḥāsin al-Ḥalabī.
This paper reveals the practice of compounding medicines from the perspective of medieval Arabic medical books and the Cairo Genizah, focusing on ophthalmology. Some researchers have argued that, due to the large number of new remedies added through experience and trade, physicians gradually became free from the classical four-quality theory. However, our study shows that a kind of logic can be discerned in compound medicines, and that this logic requires knowledge of the classical four-quality theory. The practical dimensions have been neglected because most Arabic materials do not say anything about it. Given this textual restriction, The Cairo Genizah is important for Arabic medical history, because it o ers abundant information about medical practices.
Among medical fragments of the Cairo Genizah, we focused on the speci c genre, which we would call “notebooks.” The text found in notebooks is consisting of recipes for compound medicines. Quite often, the genizah notebooks contain original recipes that are not found in the medical books. These are thought to be clearer re ections of the actual practice in medieval Cairo. We took up treatments of conjunctivitis (ramad) and eruptions of the eyelids (jarab). Firstly, we explored several medical books, and summarized the descriptions that related to the treatments of these eye diseases. Secondly, turning to the genizah notebooks, we collected recipes for the eye medicines, listed all of the ingredients, and checked their qualities. Finally, taking the characteristics of each ingredient into consideration, we examined whether or not these recipes exhibited theoretical consistency. Through a close examination of these materials, we found that the ingredients in the notebook recipes are different from those in the medical books, although their temperaments fulfill the conditions required for particular treatments. The ophthalmologists might have recognized the required effects for certain eye diseases, and then chosen substances that met those requirements.
Hitherto, research on Arabic pharmacy and pharmacology has largely been based on the study of pharmacopoeias. While practical in nature, it is not clear to what extent the recipes in the pharmacopoeias were in fact used. The Cairo Genizah, the most famous and best preserved of the many depositories of documents written by medieval Jewish communities, provides us with a unique glimpse of practical medicine, by virtue of the prescriptions found there. These prescriptions reflect the medical reality that actually existed in the eastern Mediterranean basin in the 10th-13th centuries, and will be compared especially to pharmacopoeias known to have been used, or even deriving from, members of the Genizah community, such as Minha j al-dukka n, al-Dustūr al-bīma ristanī and the works of Maimonides. We will examine three prescriptions in depth, attempting to answer the following questions: Who wrote these prescriptions? Who made them up, i.e. prepared the medical recipes? What can be learnt from the prescriptions about medicine, public/community health, the use of materia medica? To what extent are these prescriptions original, i.e. how do they reflect the relationship between medieval medical theory and practice?
Ibn Jazlah was born and raised as a Christian in Karkh (Baghdad) and died in the year 1100. He acquired his medical education in Baghdad, worked at the ʿAḍuḍi hospital, and was appointed as a registrar and physician for the court at the ʿAbbāsid capital and later became a court physician of Caliph al-Muqtadī. Ibn Jazlah wrote several books on various subjects, mainly on medicine. During the process of reconstructing the medical library of the medieval Jewish practitioners in Cairo, a Genizah fragment of a unique tabular medical book in Arabic was identified as Ibn Jazlah's tabulated manual “Taqwīm al-abdān”, which is most probably part of the earliest known copy of the text. A study of the T-S Ar.41.137 clearly shows that it was an uncompleted draft, and can therefore teach us how the medieval copier worked. The image of the fragment is presented here, as well as its transliteration, translation and analysis.
This article presents the medicinal plants that were used by the inhabitants of the medieval Eastern Mediterranean (mainly tenth to thirteenth centuries AD) and analyzes their geographical/phyto-botanical origin and their frequency of use at the medieval time. It also discusses various issues such as their historical trade and the continuation of their use in present-day Middle Eastern traditional medicine.
The Cairo Genizah is an historical source containing about 250,000 documents, found in a semi-archeological context (synagogue and graves). Since Cairo became the capital and consequently the economic and administrative center of the Muslim empire, the Jewish community had close connections with the Jewish communities of the Middle East, North Africa, Southern Europe, Sicily and India. Therefore, these highly valued documents record every aspect of life and reflect on the whole Mediterranean region and beyond.
The inventory of the practical materia medica was reconstructed thanks to hundreds of documents such as prescriptions, list of drugs, and medical letters. It consists of 278 drugs, 223 of which are of plant origin. Asian medicinal plants became highly used in medieval Mediterranean medicine; the vast majority of them are still sold in Middle Eastern markets, although not with the same importance. It is important to note that some of them are sold today mainly for their other uses as spices, perfumes, incense, etc.
Perfumes have been known as utilizable but exclusive products since antiquity. Use of aromatic substances was first mentioned in archaic sources of the ancient world. The origin of such fragrant substances was mainly vegetable and animal. Throughout history, the use of subtle perfumes increased and some of the exotic materials became expensive and valuable commodities. They were the source of wealth for cultures and rulers. The contribution of the Arabs to the distribution of new crops, knowledge, industrial techniques and substances is a well-known phenomenon. In our article we intend to focus on the new perfumes that were distributed throughout the world thanks to the Arab conquests and the knowledge of their other uses, mainly medicinal, that was handed down along with the products themselves. About 20 common perfumes are known to have been used in the medieval world, though half of them were not mentioned in earlier sources.These phenomena will be dealt with and presented in a profile we built up for four perfumes: agarwood, camphor, musk and ambergris. The theoretical and practical uses of these perfumes that are presented in detail (based on various sources including traders’ documents, medical literature and practical Genizah fragments, dealing mainly with medicine) will serve as case studies for the understanding of new trends in the uses of perfumes after the Muslim conquest. Arab perfumes can be divided into three groups, according to their level of importance:
A. New perfumes, mainly from the vast region named “India”; most of which (such as camphor, ambergris and sandalwood and a compound made out of them known as nadd and ghāliya) were not known in the Middle East and the Mediterranean region until the Muslim conquests.
B. Perfumes that kept their popularity including: a variety of cinnamon, costus, spikenard, frankincense, saffron and rose.
C. Perfumes that lost their worth like balsam and myrrh.It seems that camphor was the best and most cherished perfume that substituted balsam. Like balsam, the importance of myrrh that was imported from Arabia and East Africa also declined and it seems that its substitute was musk. Transformations in perfume fashion were in fact only part of a wider revolution of the Arabic material culture which the Middle East, the Mediterranean region and even many European countries experienced due to the Arab conquests.
The rise of the Abbasid dynasty created uniquely favorable economic conditions for exchange of all kinds. Muslim rulers took advantage of the presence within their empire of various kinds of specialised knowledge and techniques, and in so doing generated a revolution, spreading agricultural innovations and the use of new drugs, the vast majority of which were imported from South-East Asia, India, China and Zanzibar. The present article focuses on the examination of medicinal substances known in the Muslim world that were not mentioned by Classical writers. Some Muslim physicians, most of them Andalusian, who dealt with the identification and re-evaluation of medicinal substances - writers such as Ibn Juljul (10th century) and al-Idrīsī (12th century) - were aware of the absence of many drugs in the Greek medical literature and devoted works to the discussion of such missing drugs. Another important source for our knowledge is Ibn Rushd, also known as Averroes (12th ca.). In his major work on medicine, the al-kulliyyāt (Generalities), written between 1153 and 1169, he devoted a chapter to the drugs not mentioned by Galen. Ibn Rushd's list consists of fortyone drugs, twenty of which are identical to drugs that feature in Ibn Juljul's and al-Idrīsī's lists. This article presents the potential hidden in Ibn Rushd's list and assesses and reconstructs the list of drugs that were distributed by the Arabs. In future studies, we intend to gauge the extent of this phenomenon. The list is diverse, and consists of medicinal plants, perfumes, and spices, domesticated plants, drugs of animal and mineral origin, and compounds. These affected the pharmacology and diet of the pre-modern world for hundreds of years, and many of the simples are still in use in modern societies today.
Aim of the study:
To asses the scientific value of the practical medical fragments found in the Cairo Genizah (10th century), as a useful source for ethnopharmacological purposes (in exposing rare and usually inaccessible original medieval practical knowledge of medicinal substances to present-day researchers), and to reconstruct the practical drugs and their uses.
Materials and methods:
A methodology distinguishing between theoretical (about 1500 fragments) and practical medical knowledge (about 230 fragments) was created and used. The information regarding the practical medicinal substances was extracted from prescriptions (140), lists of drugs (70) and few letters of physicians.
Results:
The reconstructed lists of practical (278) and theoretical (414) drugs allow us to recognize and quantify the gap between them in medieval times (136).
Conclusions:
We propose that the data obtained from ancient prescriptions is comparable to ethnopharmacological surveys. The finding of plants such as myrobalan, saffron, licorice, spikenard and lentisk, all of which have scientifically proven anti-microbial/bacterial and anti-fungal activity, sheds a helpful light on the medical decision-making of the medieval practitioners in respect of the plants they applied as drugs. With the wealth of information meticulously assembled from these time capsules we expect to make a significant contribution to contemporary efforts at locating modern drugs in ancient roots and gauging their feasibility.
Pod názvem: Centrum blízkovýchodních studií, Fakulta filozofická - ZČU v Plzni Monografie představuje badatelský výstup z grantového projektu Grantové agentury č. 404/08/J013 "Pastýři černohlavých" 210 výt.
It is a well-known fact that the discovery of the sea route to India and the ensuing scarcity of spices and other Indian products on the markets of Alexandria and Damascus resulted in their prices rising steeply. Judging from Venetian sources, the change in the condition of the Levantine trade was considered catastrophic. On the other hand, some scholars have already drawn attention to the fact that pepper prices fell considerably on European markets in the period preceding the expedition of Vasco da Gama, and especially in the second quarter of the 15th century. It is probable, a priori , that this was caused by a downward trend of prices in the Near East. But other factors, such as the level of demand in European countries and the conditions of trade (communications with the Near East, direct or indirect trade), could also have influenced the course of spice prices in Europe. In order to explain the tremendous impact of the rise of spice prices at the beginning of the 16th century, I have suggested, in my Histoire des prix et des salaires , the probability of a fall of prices in the Near Eastern emporia in the pre-Vasco period. In a paper published a few years later I tried to substantiate this conjecture by additional materials and, further, by the supposition that it was accompanied by a great increase in the volume of the Levantine trade, and also a general price-decline in the Near East at the end of the Middle Ages.
The Taylor-Schechter (T-S) collection at Cambridge University Library is the biggest of all Cairo Genizah collections in the world. The importance and the potential of research into the medical aspects of the Genizah documents were clear to researcher since the early 1960s. A few works have been published since, usually focusing on one subject, or even important single manuscripts. The current research concerned mainly with one aspect of the history of medicine of the Jewish community of Cairo (as a reflection of Eastern medieval societies), namely the practical uses of natural substances for medicine. The most interesting and original information is undoubtedly to be found in the 141 prescriptions, as they reflect the medical reality that actually existed. And indeed, 242 substances were recorded in the prescriptions identified: 195 substances of plants origin (80.6%), 27 inorganic materials (11.2%) and 20 substances of animal origin (8.2%) were recorded as being in practical used for medicinal purposes. The most frequently mentioned substances were the rose, myrobalan, sugar, almonds, and endive. The most prevalent ailments: eye diseases, headache, constipations (purgative), cough, skin diseases, stomach, fever, gynaecological problems, haemorrhoids, liver ailments, lice, swellings, dental trouble, ulcers, and problems of the urinary tract.
The importance of the Genizah for the research of the medieval Mediterranean communities, supplying information on almost every aspect of life, is well known among historian. Less known is that pharmacy was the most popular of all branches of the healing art in the medieval Jewish community of Cairo, according to the Genizah manuscripts. Sources for study of medieval practical drugs are extremely rare since most records naturally vanish over the years, and only some medical books, which contained theoretical pharmacology, have survived to the present day. Drugs lists enable us to understand medieval practical pharmacy and to reconstruct their inventories. This study reports on 71 original drugs lists that were found in the Genizah; they are different from merchants' letters dealing with commerce in drugs and give no instructions for the use or preparation of formulas as usually found in prescriptions. Twenty-six lists are written in Judeo-Arabic and 45 in Arabic, none of the lists is written in Hebrew. The longest list contains 63 identified substances. These lists were apparently used by pharmacists for professional and business purposes as inventories of drugs, records, orders, or even receipts. Two hundred and six different drugs are mentioned in the drugs lists of which 167 are of plant origin, 16 are of animal origin, and the remaining 23 are inorganic. The lists point directly to the place they occupied on the shelves of the pharmacies that could be found in the lanes and alleys of the Jewish quarter of Cairo. The most frequently mentioned substance were myrobalan (27), pepper and saffron (21), lentisk (15), almond, basil, rose, rosemary (14), cattle products, camphor and spikenard (13).