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

阿里ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari，医生和自然哲学家，出生在土库曼斯坦的基督徒，在波斯长大，死在伊拉克的穆斯林；他被认为是阿拉伯伊斯兰医学在公元9世纪形成期间最重要和最有趣的倡导者之一。他的主要医疗工作，很久以前就为人所知，并受到正确的赞扬，具有“智慧的天堂”的标题，其特点是其中积累的材料的多样性，理性和神奇概念的无缝耦合，尤其是对印第安人医疗系统的阐述，这在阿拉伯文学中是独一无二的。虽然总共有九个关于医疗问题的阿拉伯语著作归因于al-Tabari，只有另一个工作，除了“智慧天堂”，是以手稿的形式保存，正是这种文本的第一次编辑，翻译和科学评估形成的当前研究建议的主题：“关于保持健康的书”，也被称为“珍珠书”，可能在尺寸上小于al-Tabari的主要工作，但在其他方面，它构成了一个同样重要的医学史文件。因此，《珍珠书》代表了关于一般卫生或预防医学的最早的、可证明是真实的、而且是完全现存的阿拉伯文本；因此，它的作者不仅依赖希腊-叙利亚语源，而且同样引用了印度和巴比伦的信息载体--这一事实使他的关于卫生的书在当时的背景下处于非常特殊的地位；此外，与《智慧的天堂》不同的是，《珍珠书》不是一个全面的理论纲要，而是一本旨在满足人们日常需要的实用手册，因此人们可以从它中获得许多否则几乎看不见的文化和社会历史领域的见解；最后，对这部著作进行比较语言学研究，可能会更好地揭示一些迄今仍不为人所知的从印度传播到阿拉伯的轨迹。所有这些因素加在一起，使得对塔巴里《珍珠书》的探索成为一个真正的研究愿望。

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may be smaller in size than al-Tabari’s chief work, but it constitutes in other respects an equally significant medico-historical document.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.