The Arabic transmission of Dioskurides: philology triumphant.

• Author: Gutas, Dimitri
• Position: Book review

Few works in the history of Western science (i.e., science among peoples and societies west of India) have had as much impact and enjoyed as widespread and longevous use as the Materia medica of Dioskurides, compiled in the first century A.D.; arguably none has. For eighteen centuries--and to this very day in some traditional societies practicing household remedies--pharmacology meant the contents of this book. It was translated into a number of languages, either wholly or partially and, in some cases, repeatedly, and it was continuously revised, re-arranged, enlarged or condensed, illustrated, and adapted to local knowledge from the Iberian peninsula to Central Asia. This constant revision, due to the needs of pharmacological practice over the centuries and in the vast geographical area just described, made for a very complicated and entangled history of the transmission of the text, in Greek as in the other major languages into which it was translated. The first major step in the study of this crucial work was accomplished a century ago by the publication of the critical edition of the Greek text by Max Wellmann (3 vols., Berlin: Weidmann, 1907-1914). Considering the said complexity, the edition was satisfactory for a first critical attempt, even if Wellmann did not consult any of the translations. The appearance of Manfred Ullmann's Untersuchungen constitutes the second most important publication for carrying research into this seminal text significantly forward.

Manfred Ullmann needs no introduction to the readers of this, or indeed, any, orientalist journal. In a gratefully long and astoundingly fruitful career, in book after book and article after article, each of which is a possession forever, he has single-handedly modernized the study of classical Arabic by elevating it to a new scientific level. His pioneering contribution to the grammar and lexicography of classical Arabic must be acknowledged. Until Ullmann, scholarship was beholden, with gratitude and awe, to the massive medieval Arabic lexica and grammar books which prescribed meanings and structures; Ullmann, with no less gratitude but with respect rather than awe, looked instead at words and syntactic structures as actually used in real texts--his method is descriptive, not prescriptive. The results are plain to see in the magisterial Worterbuch der klassischen arabischen Sprache (the letters kaf and lam, all that he intended to do, now happily concluded) as also in the booklet whose immense value is belied by its modest size, Adminiculum zur Grammatik des klassischen Arabisch (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1989-1993). The reader is regaled with page after page of examples from real literature documenting the use of a word or a particular syntagma. Ullmann himself summed up his procedure most aptly in the introduction to the latter (p. vii): "Die Beispiele sind wichtiger als die Regeln" ("the examples are more important than the rules"), which can serve as his motto.

In his latest contribution under review here, he applies the same method to the study of the Arabic transmission of the Materia medica. Complicated as this transmission is, it is rendered even more complex and difficult to disentangle due no less to the confusing reports about it in medieval Arabic literature than to modern misdirected scholarship. Ullmann looks at the texts themselves (all the manuscripts known to contain the Arabic translation of the Materia medica as well as related literature), compares them with the Greek text and one another, presents page after page of examples of usage, correspondences, and comparative tables, and concludes with a few sentences of his own in each section ("Die Beispiele sind wichtiger als die Regeln") that offer a fascinating and crystal-clear picture of the transmission of the work. ft is a magnificent and stupendous accomplishment, worthy to be read by all Arabists--and especially all graduate students--as much for its contents proper as for the method followed. I can do no more credit to its riches than to present Ullmann's results in some detail, following the transmission of the Materia medica in chronological order and starting with the Greek text in order to offer the full panorama.

The Greek manuscripts of the Materia medica were divided by Wellmann into two families representing the two major recensions of the work, each of which he further divided into three sub-families representing additional variations in the text they offer...