The Regimen sanitatis or ‘Book of Pearls’ by ʿAlī ibn Sahl Rabban al-Ṭabarī (d. after 855 AD). Edition, Translation, Study and Glossary

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Ali ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari, physician and natural philosopher, was born a Christian in Turkmenistan, grew up in Persia, and died a Muslim in Iraq; he is to be considered one of the most important and most interesting exponents of Arabo-Islamic medicine during its formative period in the 9th century AD. His chief medical work, long since known and rightly lauded, bears the title “Paradise of Wisdom” and is distinguished by the diversity of materials accumulated therein, by the seamless coupling of rational and magical notions, and not least by an exposition, unique in Arabic literature, of the medical system of the Indians. Whilst a total of originally nine Arabic writings on medical matters are attributed to al-Tabari, only one other work, besides the “Paradise of Wisdom”, is preserved in manuscript form, and it is this text whose first-time edition, translation and scientific evaluation form the subject of the current research proposal: the “Book on the Preservation of Health”, also called “Book of Pearls”, may be smaller in size than al-Tabari’s chief work, but it constitutes in other respects an equally significant medico-historical document. Thus, the “Book of Pearls” represents the earliest, demonstrably authentic and moreover fully extant Arabic text on general hygiene or preventive medicine; then its author does not rely only on Greco-Syriac sources but equally invokes Indian and ‘Babylonian’ carriers of information — a fact that places his book on hygiene into a remarkably exceptional position when seen in the context of its time; furthermore, and unlike the “Paradise of Wisdom”, the “Book of Pearls” is not a full-scale theoretical compendium but rather a practical manual designed to serve people’s everyday needs, and one can therefore expect to obtain from it numerous, otherwise hardly tangible insights into the realm of cultural and social history; lastly, a comparative philological study of this work may cast a brighter light on some hitherto still obscure tracks of transmission from India to Arabia. All these factors combine to make the exploration of al-Tabari’s “Book of Pearls” a true desideratum of research.