ACADEMIA Letters
A Review on Tarjumān al-aṭibbāʾ Manuscript (The
Interpreter of Physicians)
Ayman Yasin ATAT, Einstein Guest Researcher, Freie Universität Berlin, Seminar
für Semitistik und Arabistik, Fabeckstraße 23/25, Berlin
This paper is going to shed light on a rare Arabic pharmaceutical manuscript concerning
simple medicaments entitle Tarjumān al-aṭibbā’ wa-lisān al-alibbā (The Interpreter of Physi-
cians and the Language of the Wise concerning Simple Medicaments). The importance of this
text appears due to the mentioned synonyms of the simple medicaments, this point has a great
value as many substances’ names difered according either to the variation of geographical
area or the diferent dialects in the Arab World parts, and that was the main reason of author-
ing this text as the author (Taqī al-Dīn) himself stated (see below), therefore, it looks a valuable
and largely unknown text that will be of interest to many historians of medicine. Anyway, only
three copies are recorded (until now) over the world of this alphabetical pharmaco-botanical
dictionary.
To speak about the author of this book Taqī al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn maʿrūf al-Shāmī
(known as Taqī al-Dīn), he lived in the 16th century (1526–1585 AD) was better known
for his astronomical writings, and was active in Istanbul at the Ottoman court. He was the
founder and the director of the Istanbul Observatory and worked in the felds of mathemat-
ics, astronomy, optics, and mechanics. He made various astronomical instruments and was
the frst astronomer to use an automatic–mechanical clock for his astronomical observations.
Furthermore, he advanced the arithmetic of decimal fractions and used them in the calculation
of astronomical tables. (Hockey et al. 2014, 1122). In this entry in the Biographical Ency-
clopedia of Astronomers, İhsan Fazlıoğlu provides more details about the biography of Taqī
al-Dīn. Fazlıoğlu states that Taqī al-Dīn wrote only one medical book, without giving the title
of the work (Ibid, 1123).
Academia Letters, December 2021
Corresponding Author: Ayman Yasin ATAT, aymanatat81@gmail.com
Citation: Atat, A.Y. (2021). A Review on Tarjumān al-aṭibbāʾ Manuscript (The Interpreter of Physicians).
Academia Letters, Article 4191. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL4191.
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©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0