Language:
English
Year of publication:
2022
Titel der Quelle:
Aleph; Historical Studies in Science & Judaism
Angaben zur Quelle:
22,1-2 (2022) 157-182
Keywords:
Manuscripts, Hebrew
;
Manuscripts, Arabic
;
Drugs Dosage
;
Pharmacy History
;
Medicine, Arab
;
Jews Medicine
Abstract:
Premodern medical, and especially pharmaceutical, texts abound with names of weights and measures indicating the dosage of drugs and the correct quantities of ingredients of recipes. The fact that these units differed from country to country led to the compilation of metrological lists already in antiquity. Via translations from the Greek, these initiated the emergence of an Arabic literary genre of such lists that were often attached to the great medical handbooks. The miscellany Munich Cod. hebr. 275 contains two pages listing 93 Arabic and Arabicized names of medicinal weights and measures in Hebrew characters, edited and analyzed for the first time in the present paper. Because of characteristic differences from the preserved lists, an exact Arabic archetype could not be ascertained. A few Romance equivalents also show that our text, simply entitled al-Awzān wa-l-akyāl ("weights and measures"), does not represent a mere transcription of an Arabic list.
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