_About an Arabic Dioskorides Manuscript

Three themes, each with its own set of questions, have traditionally dominated nearly all studies dealing with the numerous Greek, Latin and Arabic manuscripts of Dioskorides’ De materia medica. The text itself, together with Galen’s so-called Theriaka, was the most famous and most frequently utilized medieval source book for the making of drugs from plants and for healing snakebites. As it was usually known, at least in the part of the medieval world that wrote in Arabic ( there is, to my knowledge, one early copy in Persian), Dioskorides’ work consisted of five chapters dealing with plants and two with various cures for snakebites; the latter two chapters are now usually thought to have been written by someone else. The Greek version of the text also existed in an alphabetical edition with all plants listed by the first letter of their names, even though Dioskorides himself seems to have been opposed to this unscientific use of his work.