The Work On the Prohibition to bury the Living of Ubaidallah ibn Jibril Ibn Bukhtishu' (d. after 1058 CE): Edition, Translation, Study and Glossary

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The Kitab Tahrim dafn al-ahya (Book on the Prohibition to bury the Living) of Ubayd Allah ibn Jibril Ibn Bukhtishu (d. after 1058 CE) is a medico-historical document unique in Arabic literature. The referential frame of Living is the clinical state of suspended animation, a deathlike condition of not infrequent occurrence. Ubayd Allah here discusses the quality of death as a transition from being to non-being, as well as its potentially treacherous nature, on a purely medical basis, and it is precisely this topical focus, blinding out all aspects of religion, mythology or ritual, which accounts for the huge significance of Ubayd Allah s writing. We can even go one step further and maintain that this treatment of the transitory character of death under the exclusive perspective of medicine has no counterpart in premodern European literatures either, nor indeed in the rich medico-literary traditions of the Indians and the Chinese. The Kitab Tahrim dafn al-ahya is preserved in a single, complete Arabic manuscript. Although a substantially larger and in many ways highly original literary production, Ubayd Allah s writing is conceived in the first place as a commentary to the small, now lost pseudo-Galenic treatise Peri tou mè thaptein entos mias hèmeras On not to bury before a Day has passed, which Ubayd Allah considered authentic and of whose medieval Arabic translation under the title Tahrim al-dafn qabl arbaa wa-ishrin saa (Prohibition to bury before 24 Hours have passed) we possess several manuscripts; later, in the high Middle Ages, this Arabic rendition was itself translated into Hebrew under the title Sefer Issur ha-qevurah (Book on the Prohibition of a Burial), of which latter we also possess manuscripts; the treatise, though never translated into Latin, became known in the scholarly tradition of Europe under the title De prohibenda sepultura (On Prohibiting a Burial). To this day, neither Ubayd Allah s extremely important writing nor the pseudo-Galenic treatise have been edited, never mind translated or evaluated for their historical and scientific contents. Core objectives of the proposed project are: the establishment of a critical edition of the Arabic text of the Kitab Tahrim dafn al-ahya (68 folios or 136 pages), together with its pseudo-Galenic template (ca. 7 folios or 14 pages); the provision of an annotated English translation of the edited Arabic text(s); the classification of the textual material in terms of scientific history, and its philological evaluation, within the framework of an introductory study; and the registration of all relevant technical terms in a glossary.