A double-sided page from the Khawass al-Ashjar ('The Properties of Plants'), by Dioscorides, Mesopotamia, Baghdad, early 13th century AD

Arabic manuscript on paper, 2 and 9 lines to the page, written in naskh script in brown ink, each side with an illustration of a plant in gouache

Acquired in 1967

In fair overall condition, smudging, losses to leaf edges, some abrasions to paint, creasing, a few small holes and one side with small rectangular repair to paper, as viewed.
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This page comes from the Materia Medica of Dioscorides, translated from the Greek to Arabic in the ninth century. The style of these 'School of Baghdad' miniatures, of which only a scattered handful survive, marks the bridge between the classically-rooted Byzantine style of book illustration of the Late Antique period and the genesis of what would later be termed by Western scholars 'Persian painting' of the fourteenth century.

Dioscorides, who lived in the first century AD, was a Greek physician attached to the Roman army in Asia Minor and during his travels he studied in detail the plant life of the region. The result was his De Materia Medica, an encyclopaedia of some five hundred plants and their medicinal uses. It was a text of enormous significance in the ancient world and was translated into Arabic as early as the reign of the Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil (847-861). The ninth century was a period of great intellectual activity in Baghdad and other Arab cities, as the dormant wisdom of the ancient Greeks was revived, translated and developed by Arab scholars. in 1258 Baghdad was sacked by the Mongol armies of Hulagu Khan, grandson of Chingiz Khan, and the capital moved to Tabriz in northwest Persia.

The earliest illustrated Arabic version of De Materia Medica was completed in 1083 AD and contained 620 illustrations (University Library, Leiden, Cod. Or. 289). In the Arab context the text was important not just for its pharmacological and medical information but also for its role in developing the art of manuscript illumination. The Greek versions contained illustrations which were copied and gradually developed by the Arab artists, eventually giving rise to some of the greatest illustrated Arab manuscripts, such as the 1224 version produced at Baghdad, now mostly in the Suleymaniye Library, Istanbul (Ayasofya 3703). Only twelve complete medieval illustrated Arabic versions survive.

The present leaf, which dates from the first half of the thirteenth century, has two illustrations, and can be compared to two further leaves in the Aga Khan Museum (published in the exhibition catalogue Splendori a Corte, Arti del Mondo Islamico nelle Collezione del Museo Aga Khan, Milan, 2007, pp.130-1, no.100). One of these leaves was also included in the 1985 Treasures of Islam exhibition (see Falk 1985, p.40, no.10). Another double-sided leaf from the same manuscript is in the Los Angeles County Musuem of Art (see exhibition catalogue Earthly and Divine: Islamic Arts of the Seventh to Nineteenth Centuries from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Centro Cultural La Moneda, Santiago de Chile, January - May 2015, p.89). A closely related manuscript of De Materia Medica, dated 1240, is in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Ms.Arab.139, B. Robinson and B. Gray, The Persian Art of the Book, Oxford, 1972, no.2, pl.1). For illustrations of other Arabic versions of De Materia Medica and general discussion, see Ettinghausen 1962, pp.66-90; Atil 1975, pp.53-60; Louisiana Revy, p.88, no.103; von Folsach 1990, p.42, nos.17, 18; Encyclopaedia of Islam (2), article by Grube ‘Diyuskuridis’, pp.163-94.