Download PDF | Mamluks and Animals_ Veterinary Medicine in Medieval Islam-Brill (2012)
593 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This study originated as a doctoral dissertation written at the School of History of Tel Aviv University under the guidance of Professor Ron Barkai. Iam greatly indebted to Professor Barkai for his support, encouragement and tutoring that enabled me to bring this complicated work to completion. The enlightening comments of Charles Burnett, who very kindly read the entire manuscript, have been most valuable in preparing the book for publication.
Research for the dissertation and for its further elaboration for publication was supported by several institutions and grants: the various grants received thanks to the coordination of Tel Aviv University School of History, including the Fred Lessing Fellowship, the Gottesman-Yavetz PostGraduate Scholarship, the Tel Aviv Prize for Ph.D. dissertations in Middle Eastern Studies, and the post-doctoral Bernard Lewis scholarship. I am also grateful to the Dan David Foundation for its award to young researchers for outstanding achievement and future promise in the field of preserving cultural heritage. The Wellcome Trust offered material support for the publication of illustrations in this volume.
This work could not be carried out without the help of the staff of several libraries in which I conducted my research or which provided me with copies of manuscripts, among them the Sourasky Library of Tel Aviv University, The Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, in Venice, the Library of the Dipartimento di Studi Euro-Asiastici of Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, The Cambridge University Library, the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford, the British Library and the British Museum in London, the Bibliotheque nationale de France in Paris, Dar al-Kutub in Cairo, the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul, the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin, the Keir Collection in London, the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciense in St. Petersburg and the Library of the University of Istanbul.
Friends and colleagues were helpful in locating and providing materials kept at various libraries and in providing an academic framework for my research. They include Joseph Terkel, Sabine Bertram, Mustafa Erdem Kabadayi, Vera Costantini, Gadi Algazi, Natalie Rothman, Alejandro Paz, Yariv Shok, Gerardo Leibner, Francois Zabbal, Avinoam Shalem, Stephan Conerman, Debra Noel Adams, Tony Greenwood and Amy Singer.
Part of my research has been conducted in Venice, and I should like to express my gratitude to the following friends and colleagues who assisted me in my efforts to overcome administrative difficulties and in creating the friendly atmosphere that enabled me to write my dissertation: Antonella Ghersetti, Rossela Dorigo, Marino Zorzi, Maria-Pia Pedani, Antonio Fabris, Giustiniana and Franco-Mario Colasanti, Pallina Pavanini, Nubar Gianighian, Giannarosa Vivian, Piero Brunello, Raffaello Vergani, Michela Dal Borgo, Reinhold and Laura Mueller, Ivo and Rossella Mattozzi, Dorit Raines and many others.
An essential contribution to this work was offered by those friends and colleagues who were generous with their time and read different parts of this study, adding their comments and corrections and suggesting ideas. They include Camilla Adang, Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Joseph Drori, Hanna Gershoni, David Katz, Marc Berthold, as well as the anonymous readers of my dissertation and of the book manuscript.
Special thanks are due to Hazel Arieli, who took upon herself the difficult task of translating my study from Hebrew into English, and succeeded in coping with all the strange and obscure terms that appear abundantly in this work. Patricia Radder, Brill’s editor and Karen S. Cullen, Brill’s production team leader, also deserve spicial thanks for their kind and professional help.
This study would not have materialized without the continuous and patient support of Benjamin Arbel, whose wisdom and erudition, meticulous reading of drafts and very sound advice, prevented me from falling into the many pitfalls which await any scholar when working on his first major project. My debt to him is enormous. Finally, our four-legged friends, Max, Moritz, Gibor, Due, Sonia, Ritsu, Aziza, Kochichka, Fairuz and Bianca, who revealed to me the fascinating world of animal life, have always been part of my thinking about human-animal relations.
INTRODUCTION
A. A NEW APPROACH
The present book is the first historical study in some hundred years to deal extensively with the history of Islamic veterinary medicine in general, and that of the Mamluk period in particular. The approach of this study is also new: it deals not merely with the scientific aspects of veterinary medicine, but also with the social, political and cultural framework in which veterinarians, writers of veterinary treatises and other persons dealing in one way or another with animals were active in the wide geographical area controlled by the Mamluks between the mid-thirteenth and the early sixteenth century.
The Mamluk period offers an impressive quantity of veterinary treatises, most of them unpublished, as well as abundant sources of information casting light on social, economic and cultural aspects related to the development of the veterinary profession. This combination has permitted an examination of the development of veterinary medicine in its broad historical context. From the scientific aspect, this study attempts to examine the characteristics of veterinary knowledge as expressed in the Arabic treatises written or copied in the Mamluk period, the theoretical basis for the treatment of animals and the extent of its similarity to medical treatment of humans. Beyond the purely scientific sphere, the present study examines the place of animals in Mamluk society, the place of veterinary medicine in Mamluk culture, and the social status and identity of the doctor or healer who treated animals compared to professionals in related fields.
B. TERMINOLOGY
The use of the terms “veterinary medicine’ and “veterinarians” in the contexts of the Mamluk period requires clarification of the relevant terminology found in Arabic classical sources. The verb batara (<2), according to classical Arabic dictionaries, signifies to cut, dissect, or amputate.! The derivative terms baytar or mubaytir, used in pre-Islamic Arabic sources to describe a person engaged in the medical care of animals, as well as of human beings, are evidently derived from the same root.
In the works of the great jahilt poets, known as “Ashab al-Mu‘allaqat,” the word mubaytir or baytar is used to denote a person who cures animals. Thus, in a description by the sixth-century poet al-Nabighah al-Dhubyani (d. circa 604 CE) of a battle between a bull and a dog, the poet compares the wound inflicted on the dog by the bull’s horn piercing his shoulder to a cut made by a veterinary surgeon (mubaytir) in a camel’s leg to cure it.? In the book Kitab al-Hayawan, the eighth-century writer al-Jahiz quotes verses of a poem by Sahm b. Hanzalah, in which a veterinary surgeon (baytar) appears as puncturing the navel, shaking the body or piercing a nerve.? He himself also uses the term baytarah in the context of castration of animals, comparing it to the cutting of a sheep’s tail, which he refers to as a form of baytarah.*
The eighteenth-century dictionary by al-Zubaydi (d. 1790), which is a revised version of a fifteenth-century dictionary by al-Fayrazabadi (d. 1415) (al-Qamus al-Muhit) includes, under the root 6.t.r., several sayings and proverbs dating from the Jahiliyah period. Thus one proverb goes: “Betterknown than a veterinary surgeon’s (baytar) banner.” Another proverb containing the term baytar says: “the world is as unpredictable as a whore, one day you go to the pharmacist (‘attar) and another day you go to an animal doctor (baytdr) (jle,)| us yy oles ve ley 2 Wall)”
Another saying refers to the veterinary surgeon (mubaytir) who dominates people by healing their animals: (OY! 54 jews Llydl 9 & cheesy deine lide).5 In view of this evidence, one may wonder why the terms baytar and its derivations should be described as an Arabicised form of the Greek term hippiatros (immiatpdc) (horse doctor), as is commonly claimed in modern scholarship.®
In the Mamluk period, the term baytar was rather a comprehensive title for the professional who gave medical treatment to various sorts of animals.” There were also separate names for professionals who looked after and treated specific animals; for example, kalbadhah means dealing with dogs, and kallab (pl. kalabidhah) was the term for experts in the treatment and training of dogs. Bayzarah is falconry and hawking (taming, training and treating of hawks, falcons and other hunting birds), and bazyar is the appellation for the expert on hawks and falcons.’ Zardaqah, or zartaqah, means dealing with horses, and from this word derived the word muzardigq, the specialist in treating and taming horses. The use of these terms is discussed in greater depth in other chapters of this book, referring to the different groups and their professional and social status.
While the two main branches discussed in veterinary treatises of the Mamluk period are baytarah and bayzarah, some of the writers of the Mamluk period chose to group these two branches together.? Although not all scholars are convinced of this, in the Islamic world of the Middle Ages veterinary medicine was a scientific and professional sphere in its own right, which is manifested, among other things, by the scientific and professional literature devoted to it.!°
C. HISTORIOGRAPHY
1. Publication of Sources
Interest in Islamic veterinary medicine started to develop in the modern academic milieu already at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The earliest work in this field was Josef Antonio Banqueri’s Spanish translation of the book on agriculture, Kitab al-Filahah, by the twelfth-century Ibn al-‘Awwam al-Ishbili, consisting of two large volumes with the Arabic text facing the Spanish." Although most of this treatise deals with enriching soil and agricultural crops, it also contains abundant veterinary material, including a description of animals’ diseases and ways of treating them. The veterinary material, dealing with almost all the farm animals of the Middle Ages, constitutes some third of the treatise.
A most important and comprehensive translation project was that of Nicolas Perron, who between the years 1852 and 1860 published three volumes containing French translations of medieval Arabic treatises under the title “Le Naceri”.!* The first volume, comprising 500 pages, presents an extensive account of the historical, geographical and social background of the Mamluk period in Egypt, and it also includes a comprehensive discussion of the Arabian horse and the various breeds that evolved from it in different places. The other two volumes contain the French translation of the fourteenth-century Arabic treatise, whose title appears in different versions: Kashif hamm al-wayl ft akhbar al-khayl, or Kamil al-sina‘ataynfil-baytarah wal-zartaqah, known as al-Nasiri. Perron added to the translated text numerous explanations and abundant information that was not drawn from the original Arabic source. Apparently he began this work as a translation but soon deviated from his main purpose, including everything relating to horses that he could find in Arabic writings. In the end he pub-lished three volumes containing extensive material on horses, their training, their illnesses and treatment.8
An exceptional event in the modern historiography of Arabic writings on animals was the publication in Aleppo, in 1930, of the fourteenth-century book on animals by al-Dimyati, together with a seventeenth-century book on horses. In 1954, Muhammad Asad Talas published an edition of a treatise on hunting by the tenth-century writer Kushajim," a treatise largely used by later medieval writers on falconry. These two editions do not testify to any significant interest in medieval veterinary medicine, but were rather part of a wider interest in adabd or in religious topics.
The person largely responsible for the revival of interest in medieval Arabic treatises related to veterinary medicine is undoubtedly Francois Viré, through his studies of Arabic falconry treatises that also include sections on the medical treatment of birds of prey used for hunting. The first treatise that he fully published in French translation in 1967 was the tenthcentury manual composed by the falconer of the Fatimid Caliph al-'Aziz billah.! Abd al-Hafiz Mansur published in 1968 the two chapters of a hunting treatise, written under the patronage of the Hafsi calif al-Mustansir billah, known as al-Mansur (1249-1277). These chapters, preserved in two manuscripts in the Hafsi Library of Tunis, deal with dogs, cheetahs and a few other hunting animals (not birds), and with their prey. The author, generally referred-to as al-Mansiuri, was identified by the editor as Muhammad Ibn al-Hashsha’. An English translation of these chapters was later published by Sir Terence Clark and Muawiya Derhalli.!”
Some twenty years later, Viré published a translation of the fourteenthcentury falconry treatise by Ibn Mangli.!® Finally, in collaboration with Detlef MGller, he prepared a reconstruction, in German translation, of the falconry treatise attributed to al-Ghatrif, considered to be the earliest Arabic book in this field, dating back to the eighth century.!8 Not a few manuscripts attributed to al-Ghatrif (or al-Ghitrif) have survived in European languages, and many references to the same author’s Kitab dawari al-tayr can also be found in later Arabic writings on falconry. Méller and Viré used these materials for a reconstruction of what they believed had constituted the original Arabic text.*°
The basic assumption behind this work is that the recurrent references in later treatises to al-Ghitrif and other presumed authors represent real figures, who lived and acted during the Umayyad and Abbasid periods. Although such an assumption cannot be excluded altogether, it can also be put into doubt, considering the habit of medieval Arabic writers to attribute various sayings to authoritative figures, be they real or imaginary.
An impressive number of printed editions of medieval Arabic treatises on veterinary medicine or related to this subject began to appear in the 1980s, mostly in the Arab world. The falconry book, al-Kafi fil-bayzarah, by the thirteenth-century ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Baladi, was published in 1983, edited by the two scholars Ihsan ‘Abbas and ‘Abd al-Hafiz Mansur.” Fuat Sezgin published in 1984 a two-volume facsimile edition of the manuscript of the important veterinary book, Kitab al-baytarah by the vizier al-Sahib Taj al-Din (d. 707/1307).2” Two years later, the same scholar published a facsimile edition of a fifteenth-century falconry treatise, entitled Kitab Dawartal-tayr, and attributed to al-Ghatrif.? In 1987, Yahya Wahib al-Jaburi of Qatar University published the veterinary treatise, al-Aqwal al-kafiyah wa-al-fusul al-shaftyah, written by a Yemenite ruler of the Rasulid dynasty, al-Malik al-Mujahid ‘Ali b. Dautd b. Yusuf b. ‘Umar (1306-1362).24 One year later Muhammad Kurd ‘Ali published the falconry treatise written for the Fatimid caliph al-‘Aziz billah (previously published in French by Viré), and attributed to Abi ‘Abd Allah al-Hasan b. al-Husayn.2° Ramziyah Muhammad al-Atraqji, a researcher at Baghdad University, published in 1989 the veterinary treatise of another Yemenite king—al-Malik al-Ashraf ‘Umar b. Yusuf al-Ghassani (d. 696/1296).”°
Particularly worthy of mention is Aba Bakr al-Baytar’s Kashif hamm al-wayl ft akhbar al-khayl, which was published in two volumes between 1991 and 1996 with a French translation by ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Daqagq, who is a professional veterinary surgeon.” The same treatise was published only in Arabic by ‘Abd al-Rahman Ibniq at the University of Aleppo in 1993.28 This year was particularly fruitful in this field: it saw the publication of another fourteenth-century manuscript (757/1356), written by an anonymous author and edited by Muhammad al-Tanaji, and that of Uns al-mala bi-wahsh al-fala, by Muhammad Ibn Mankali or Mankli (who fought in the service of the Mamluks in fourteenthcentury Egypt), which was published in the same year by Muhammad ‘Isa Salihiyah.9 In 2000, the treatise on hunting by al-Nashiri (1430-1520) was published by Abd Allah Husayn al-Sadah.3°
Two important translations from Arabic into western languages, carried out in the thirteenth century in two different centres, have served scholars in trying to reconstruct the sources underlying these works as well as the genealogy of early Arabic falconry treatises. The work attributed to Moamin, translated into Latin (c. 1240) in the Sicilian court of Emperor Frederic II, is believed to be a compilation of two main Arabic treatises: that of the above-mentioned al-Ghatrif, and another one (now lost, at least in its full, original version) whose author is referred-to as al-Mutawakkili, since he is said to have been the falconer of the Abbassid Caliph al-Mutawakkil (847861).9! Al-Mutawakkili’s work has been identified as the source of the translation from Arabic into Castilian, carried out in 1250 in the court of Alfonso X. On the basis of this translation, the name of al-Mutawakkil’s falconer has been identified as Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd Allah ibn ‘Umar alBazyar.°?
The identity of this author, as well as the contents of his work have also been the subject of a study by Anna Akasoy and Stefan Georges, who have considered, besides the Latin and Castillian translations, the few Arabic texts that seem to contain parts of the same treatise, authored by Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd Allah ibn ‘Umar al-Bazyar, particularly the one preserved at the Gotha Library, entitled entitled Kitab al-Sayd (Gotha Ms. 2092, I), which does not mention the author's name. The above-mentioned chapters on hunting animals and their prey, attributed to al-Mansuri, have been identified by Akasoy and Geogres as belonging to the same work. Their study also contains the publication and German translation of chapter six of Kitab al-Sayd, dedicated to the trteatment of falcons’ illnesses.3°
2. Islamic Veterinary Medicine in the General Historiography of the Profession
From the late nineteenth century, the general history of veterinary medicine has been the subject of various publications. Between 1891 and 1911, Leon Moulé, a veterinary surgeon, published a series of articles on veterinary history from ancient to modern times.*4 In the second article, which also came out as a separate publication, he deals with the veterinary history of the Middle Ages, dedicating a considerable part to the history of Arab veterinary medicine, including a comparison between Islamic and Classical veterinary medicine, based on his expertise in this field.35 Not being proficient in Arabic, he had to rely on the few existing translations of Arabic veterinary books that were available in his time, as well as information gleaned from library catalogues. Impressed by the existence of many Arabic treatises on hippology and hippiatry, Moulé suggests that the innovations and developments that took place in almost every branch of science in the Islamic world did not pass over veterinary science. .
He cites the Arabs’ love of horses as their motive for developing hippiatry and their reason for devoting so much attention not just to raising and breeding horses but also to their ailments and their cure. A useful section of this work is a systematic comparison between the Arab and the Greco-Roman veterinary medicine from all the professional aspects: the digestive system, diseases of the urinary tract, the respiratory system, the circulatory system, venereal diseases, external pathology such as injury to the legs, illnesses and wounds of the spinal column, diseases of the ears and eyes, and infectious diseases. Moulé notes that, although the camel featured as the subject of a separate pathology in Arabic treatises, the description of illnesses, symptoms and methods of treatment fell far below the level that characterised the treatment of horses. Since none of the existing treatises dealing with pathology and illnesses of birds had been translated in his day, he was unable to make a comparison with this subject.
Other useful parts of this work are a list of medieval Arabic treatises of veterinary medicine and agriculture, including their locations and ascribed dates, accompanied by descriptions of their contents; a discussion of pathology, with a systematic list of diseases according to the bodily organs as they are described in the Arabic veterinary treatises; an analysis of surgery, listing the instruments that were used (with illustrations of some of them) and describing the various operations performed; a description of methods of treatment with lists of medications, classified according to their source in nature— animal, mineral, or plant sources; and a discussion of shoeing.
Moulé concludes that while the Arabs had not advanced significantly in surgery, this was not the case with other methods of treatment. He notes that real progress was made by the Arabs in the preparation of potions, particularly by simplifying the composition of medications and introducing substances such as sugar, syrups, purifying agents and plant extracts. In his view, the Arabs’ contribution was also significant in the matter of hygiene in raising animals.
Despite the advantages of such a systematic presentation by a professional veterinarian, Moulé’s work suffers from his unfamiliarity with Arabic culture, and particularly with the classical Arabic writing style. Thus, noting that descriptions of diseases in al-Nasirt often end with sentences such as: “He was cured by the will of God,” “Sickness and remedy are In God’s hands,” “By God’s grace,” “God is the healer,” he writes that despite their faith in the veterinary surgeon, the Arabs’ fatalism dominated over any kind of knowledge, for they often prefered to rely on God’s help rather than on the veterinarian’s cure.°6
Emmanuel Leclainche’s research on the history of veterinary medicine includes a short chapter on Arab veterinary medicine.®’ He bases himself mainly on Moulé’s work, focusing on several treatises pertaining to the treatment of horses, arguing, however, that there was no significant difference between Arab and Greek veterinary medicine, except in the fields of medications and certain surgical procedures.
Unlike nearly all authors mentioned in this section, Manfred Ullmann, the authoritative historian of Islamic medicine, was a professional orientalist. The short section that he dedicated to Islamic veterinary medicine in his general historical survey, described by him as a bibliographical work of reference, is therefore of special interest. It describes succinctly Arabic writings on veterinary medicine from earliest times to the sixteenth century, including both extant works (for which he provides short descriptions) and others that are only mentioned in other sources. References to writings on other topics that include sections on animal illnesses are also listed in this short but useful chapter.3*
Several recent surveys of the history of veterinary medicine ignore the richness of materials related to this field in medieval Arabic sources. This omission is in startling contrast to the importance ascribed to human medicine in the Muslim world, which the scholars see as a link in the chain between the classical Greek and Roman knowledge and that of medieval Europe. For example, R.E. Walker, when comparing veterinary with human medicine in the West, refers to the classical Greek sources and does not ignore the early Egyptian medicine, but he skips from the early centuries of the Common Era and the School of Alexandria to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the West, totally ignoring the Islamic contribution.%° Lise Wilkinson, in her book on animals and their illnesses, ignores Islamic veterinary medicine in spite of her comprehensive treatment of the history of this field from the dawn of history in broad geographical areas.?°
Dunlop and Williams’ book on the history of veterinary medicine does include a short chapter devoted to Islamic veterinary medicine. Yet most of the references they provide are irrelevant to the subject, including an extensive discussion on sciences in Islam and on human medicine, as well as biographies of important doctors and scientists, such as al-Kindi, al-Razi, al-Majusi, Ibn Sina, al-Zahrawi, Ibn Rushd, Ibn Zuhr, Maimonides, Ibn Khaldin and Ibn Battitah, none of whom ever wrote a treatise on veterinary medicine. They mention very briefly some Arabic veterinary sources such as those of Ibn al-‘Awwam and Abu Bakr Badr al-Din al-Baytar, but these are mentioned alongside the treatises of al-Jahiz and al-Damiri, who were, in fact adab authors whose writings include rich zoological material. All that does not prevent them from concluding that the Arabs’ major contribution to veterinary medicine was in the treatment of the organs of movement, surgery to heal wounds, ophthalmic medicine and the development of a broad range of medications from natural products. With regard to the latter, they remark that Islamic veterinary medicine expanded significantly previous knowledge based on Dioscorides.*!
Most of the above-mentioned studies have been written by veterinary doctors who took an interest in the history of their profession. Scholarly works of this kind, though benefiting from the professional insights of their authors, suffer from two basic handicaps. First, being unfamiliar with Islamic cultural history and unable to read Arabic, they had to rely on the few translations into European languages that existed in their time, which were not always very reliable. Secondly, they were basically interested in the scientific development and in what they believed to be a process of transmission of medical knowledge from the Classical world, through medieval Islam, to the West. They were not particularly interested in the social, cultural, and even political aspects in which veterinary surgeons functioned in the Islamic world.
3. Studies Focused on Medieval Arabic Veterinary Medicine and Other Related Subjects
Among the early works on Arab veterinary medicine, mention should be made of the book (partly published in Arabic as a series of articles) by Habib K. Chiha, who documented the knowledge transmitted by word of mouth among the Bedouins in Mesopotamia. He recorded in writing everything he heard and saw among the Bedouin tribes concerning veterinary medicine. This work focuses only on matters relevant to the treatment of horses, enumerating eight types of diseases that affect these animals, their symptoms and their treatment, including the preparation and use medications made from familiar and accessible materials.*? It is, of course, questionable to what extent this knowledge, garnered among Bedouins at the end of the nineteenth century, is a continuation of the veterinary knowledge possessed by the Arabs in the Middle Ages. A comparison of this material with the treatises that are the focus of this book may provide an answer to this question.
Worthy of notice is also a series of short articles published in 1907 by D.C. Phillott and R.F. Azoo in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. In these studies the two scholars presented gleanings from a late fourteenthcentury manuscript dedicated to falconry, which also includes medical aspects of keeping birds of prey.*%
It took several decades before an expert in Greek philology, Gudmund Bjérck, dedicated a study to our subject, examining the originality of the Arabic veterinary treatises by comparing them with ancient Greek ones. He discussed the ways in which Greek veterinary knowledge was transmitted to Arabic, attempting to identify passages from the Corpus hippiatricorum Graecorum in Ibn al-‘Awwam’s book on agriculture.4
A renewed interest of Orientalists in the history of Arabic veterinary medicine can be observed from the 1960s onwards. Detlef Méller dedicated an important study to the Arabic falconry literature of the Middle Ages. According to him, Arabic falconry literature must have begun in the eighth century, and certainly existed in the ninth, with translations from Greek and Persian, quickly reaching an independent status. He maintained that the stagnation and temporary decline of the sciences after the flourishing of the ninth century were also manifested in the professional falconry treatises, while the thirteenth century saw the awakening of interest in falconry, expressed in the editing of material from previous centuries in encyclopaedic form. This second apex marked, according to Moller, the end of the original creative Arabic falconry literature. In other words, although almost all the treatises that he mentions, both those of a literary or encyclopaedic character and the falconry treatises, were written or copied in the Mamluk period, Moller does not attribute importance to the Mamluk period in regard to the development of writing on falconry.*® In any case, his work is very useful for locating the many unpublished falconry and hawking treatises that are scattered in various libraries throughout the world.
Besides the already-mentioned editions of medieval hunting manuals, Francois Viré also published several important studies on medieval Arabic falconry, and studies on cheetahs and dogs in Arabic hunting literature. He is also the author of many related articles in the Encyclopaedia of Islam.*®
Behind the promising title of “Islam and Veterinary Medicine,” ‘Adel a-Sayyid Ahmad’s book offers a rather disappointing presentation. Though mentioning the names of two authors of veterinary treatises (al-Dimyati and Abi-Bakr), he makes no use of such writings, and mainly refers to religious and adab sources, whereas the medical materials that he uses are gleaned from writings on human medicine. His approach is a kind of mixture between religion and philology.*”
Herbert Eisenstein has published several works relevant to our subject. His systematic survey of Arabic literature related to animals is quite useful, particularly in its chapters concerning horses and birds of prey used for hunting.** In an article published in 1995, the he points to the weakness of the early studies of Arabic veterinary writings, mainly ascribed to the reliance of earlier scholars on French translations of the Arabic sources, which were often inaccurate and unreliable. He also raises the question as to whether Arabic treatises devoted to veterinary medicine can be considered medical treatises or rather belong to the classical Arabic literary genre known as adab.**
In the final analysis, Eisenstein concludes that veterinary treatises did not attain the status of a separate genre, incorporating the spectrum of medical issues pertaining to domestic animals. He states that the only useful and accurate treatises on veterinary medicine were those devoted to horses and hunting birds, i.e., to valuable animals. On the other hand, these works were based on practical experience and could be applied in practise, which cannot always be said of other scientific treatises in Arabic literature, many of which can be attributed to the adab genre. In another article, Eisenstein discusses the role of the horse in Muslim-Arab cultural history.5° Its major contribution to our subject matter is a rich bibliography included in the review of the works written from the beginning of the previous century. Although not directly related to veterinary medicine, Eisenstein’s recent studies of the office of the Master of the Hunt (Amir Shikar) in the Mamluk court is nevertheless relevant to our work in its broader conceptual framework.*!
The relation between Greek, or rather early Byzantine veterinary treatises and medieval Arabic ones has been a recurrent theme in scholarly research. Therefore, Anne McCabe’s recent study of the transmission of the Byzantine Hippiatrica is of special interest, particularly since it includes a chapter on the treatise written by the fourth-century writer Theomnestus, the fullest version of which is only preserved in an Arabic medieval translation (both extant manuscripts are from the Mamluk period). As we shall see, Theomnestus is referred to in Mamluk veterinary treatises more frequently than any other ancient writer of veterinary medicine. McCabe's examination of the Arabic text, carried out in collaboration with Robert Hoyland, and its comparison with references to Theomnestus’ work in Greek sources, is instructive for the study of the transmission of knowledge in this field.52
A group of German scholars have been dedicated in recent years to an interdisciplinary examination of what is believed to be the earliest Arabic treatise of veterinary medicine (practically horse medicine) known today—that of Muhammad Ibn Y‘aqub Ibn Akhi Hizam al-Khuttuli, who lived in the second half of the ninth century. Philologists and veterinary physicians are collaborating in preparing a scientific edition of this work, and also in examining its contents. Martin Heide has published sections of this treatise in Arabic and in German translation, describing seven ailments that hinder the horse’s mobility.53 This work was used as a basis for further research in which, in addition to Heide, Veronica Veidenh6fer and Joris Peters were involved.** The first aim of this interdisciplinary research was to try and define, in modern medical terms, the ailments described in the medieval treatise.
Its second aim was twofold: on the one hand, to try and find out to what extent this treatise, or rather its above-mentioned sections, derived from ancient Greek, Roman or Byzantine veterinary writings; and on the other, to examine what influence this treatise had on later medieval treatises of veterinary medicine, both those produced in Arabic and those produced in the medieval West until the fourteenth century. The conclusions of this examination are quite revealing. No significant influence by Greek or Roman writings on this text could be de-tected. Likewise, there seems to be no significant influence of this work (at least as far as this section is concerned) on European veterinary treatises. However, there are clear indications of a continuous development between Ibn Akhi Hizam’s work and later veterinary works written in medieval Arabic. This conclusion is of great significance, challenging some accepted beliefs both on the sources of Arabic veterinary medicine, and also on Arabic knowledge as a source of Western science.
A few other studies have been dedicated to the roles of animals in Mamluk society, but barely refer to veterinary medicine and to the level of knowledge of those who treated animals. For example, the Mamluk postal system, barid, was investigated in the 1940s by Jean Sauvaget.®° This book provides comprehensive material on the history and organisation of this system, but he does not deal with the medical treatment and health of the post horses. Likewise, Yusuf Ragib’s book on the postal pigeons is a serious study on one type of animal, but he too does not refer at all to veterinary aspects or to the Islamic veterinary sources. His discussion on the keepers of the postal pigeons and the entire system of care, hygiene, diet and medication is limited to general books on animals, particularly those of al-Jahiz and al-Damini, which are zoology and adab books.°® The chapter dedicated to the Mamluk barid in Silverstein’s study of postal systems in the pre-modern Islamic world is only marginally related to our subject.5” Most recently Richard C. Foltz published his book on animals in Islamic tradition and Muslim cultures.5° Though including a section on scientific works on animals, there is no mention in this book of the rich Arabic literature dedicated to veterinary medicine.
Finally, mention should be made of the works of philologists, such as Joseph von Hammer’s old studies on the camel and on the horse, which, among many other sources, were also based on medieval Arabic veterinary treatises. These studies are helpful for their systematic presentation of Arabic terms describing different animal organs, as well as for the rich terminology related to the use of these animals in medieval Arabic culture.5?
The historiographical survey presented here, though unfolding a growing interest in a subject that had been neglected far too long, also reveals a few weaknesses and lacunae. For example, no attempt has hitherto been made to encompass all branches of veterinary medicine in a common analytical framework. Moreover, the Islamic society that was apparently the most productive in this field©°—Mamluk society, has not attracted sufficient attention by scholars dealing with these issues. No attempt has been made to anchor the profession and those engaged in it in the society and culture of their time. The present study embraces an integrative approach to the profession and also attempts to investigate its cultural and social background. This has been done by using not only the professional veterinary writings (both published and unpublished) and the respective studies, but a large variety of other sources and related studies, such as writings on human medicine, pharmaceutical and agricultural treatises, adab writings, encyclopaedias, biographies, chronicles, religious literature, manuals for the market inspectors, as well as a few contemporary contracts and documents from the Cairo Geniza.
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