Andalusi Romance Terms in Kitāb al-Simāt fī asmāʾ al-nabāt, by al-Suwaydī of Damascus (d. 690 H/1291 CE)

Abstract

The circumstances surrounding the emergence of Arabic pharmacology, and its development within the broad geographical framework of the medieval Islamic world, left a lasting mark on the discipline’s terminology, and in particular regarding medicinal substances and the terms used to designate them. Without going into great detail, it is worth mentioning a few of the most relevant events and factors in this historical and scientific process. The most important of these phenomena is the translation into Arabic of Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica, enabling the work to be transmitted and commented on across the Arab world.1 Likewise, it is important to recall that Islam incorporated a number of pharmacological traditions, which brought with them new drugs that had been unknown to the Greeks and, in turn, new names to designate them. Along the same lines, we must bear in mind the process by which pharmacology was established, cultivated and developed across the widely diverse set of regions, peoples and languages with which the Arab-Islamic world entered into contact, a process which would reach its culmination in al-Andalus.2 The linguistic impact of this process was immense, involving a major influx of new medical terms from the most disparate array of regions and languages. Even the names of simple medicines (asmāʾ al-adwiya al-mufrada) were so diverse that, in the words of Max Meyerhof, “n’a pu manquer de déconcerter les médecins du moyen âge arabe”.3 As such, there was a pressing need to make sense of this great mass of foreign terms, and to identify these drugs and medicines being referred to by the strangest of names. The desire to reduce this mosaic to a set of known terms gave rise among Arab writers to a concern with linguistics, and more specifically lexicography. This concern is clear in the medieval pharmacological literature, where