L'Agriculture nabateenne: Traduction en arabe attribuee a Abu Bakr Ahmad b. Ali al-Kasdani connu sous le nom d'lbn Wahsiyya.

• Author: Varisco, Daniel Martin

In the nineteenth century there was probably no single Arabic text that engendered more sustained debate among Orientalist scholars than the magical and agricultural Kitab al-Filaha al-Nabatiyya (Nabatean Agriculture). For the past twenty-five years it has also engaged the attention of Toufic Fahd, who has at last published his critical edition of the text in two large volumes (the general index will appear in a third volume). This is a staggering endeavor, one of those lifetime achievements that deservedly needs to be recognized as a major contribution cutting a broad swathe across Arabic studies. Fahd's comment (vol. 1, p. 8) that this edition "represente une somme enorme d'heures de travail" is certainly no understatement. For scholars interested in Arabic agriculture, medicine, botany, pharmacology, magic, astrology and natural science, this edition of a seminal source widely disseminated in the medieval Islamic world is a virtual godsend.

It is difficult to know how to focus a review on such an important and controversial text. The Nabatean Agriculture was one of the most widely quoted sources in medieval agricultural science, including the well-known medieval Andalusian texts (see Darby in Isis 33 [1951]: 433-38) and lesser known Rasulid Yemeni texts. It was, for example, also known to the Jewish scholar Maimonides and the Christian savant Aquinas. Although there is an extensive literature about the text, virtually the only modern account in English is what Fahd published in the second edition of the EI (3: 963-65). Fahd had earlier written a short summary of the text and the history of its study in French (Arabica 16 [1969]: 83-88) and Sezgin has provided a detailed description in German (Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, 4: 318-29). For a thorough list of the text's contents, however, the main accessible source has been Plessner's article (Z. fur Semitistik und verwandte Gebiete 6 [1928]: 27-56). Given the fact that most of the discussion has not been in English, I will expand this review of the text as an edition to include a few comments on the debate about the author and I will also provide a brief summary of the contents of this important medieval source.

The Nabatean Agriculture is attributed to a certain Abu Bakr Ahmad b. Ali al-Kasdani, better known as Ibn Wahsiyya of the third/ninth century. But, as Fahd has noted in several places, there is no reliable historical evidence that such an individual ever existed. The text...