Abu Mansur Muwaffak ibn Ali al-Harawi: The Foundations of the True Properties of Remedies

Abu Mansur Muwaffak ibn Ali al-Harawi: The Foundations of the True Properties of Remedies

The Foundations of the True Properties of Remedies by Abu Mansur Muwaffak ibn Ali al-Harawi, a 10th century Persian physician, is of special value because it is the oldest preserved manuscript in the Persian language. After Persia was conquered by Muslim Arabs in the 7th century, Arabic was the only written language until the 10th century. It was then that feelings of national identity began to reemerge in the courts of Persia’s dynasties, and works of poetry and science began to be written in Persian once more. It was in this time that Harawi undertook the project of creating a Persian translation of the De materia medica by Pedanius Dioscorides, a 1st century Greek physician serving in the Roman army. This original manuscript was likely created between 968 and 977. The specimen at hand is a copy that can be precisely dated thanks to its colophon: It states that the Persian writer and linguist Asadi Tusi (1000–1072) created the manuscript in the 10th month of the year 446 AH, that is, from December 1055 to January 1056 AD. The colophon also wishes the author good health and claims that he—who had long since passed away—was still alive at the time the copy was made. Little is known about the manuscript’s origins, but it found itself in the collections of the Imperial Library in Vienna by 1820. However, marginal glosses in Turkish suggest that it had previously been in the possession of a Turkish-speaking person for some time, perhaps in the Ottoman Empire. The codex presents 585 remedies: 466 plant-based remedies, 75 mineral-based, and 44 animal-based.