Samar Najm Abul Huda's translation of Ahmad ibn Yusuf al Tifaschi's study of gems. Born in 1184, Al Tifaschi first learned about gems from his father, and augmented his knowledge through readings of Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Pliny, as well as through extensive travels to mines and trading centers. In 1253, he wrote what later became known as the most 'methodical and complete' work on precious stones. Gemologists of today are still astounded by the advanced observations that Al Tifaschi made in this work.

This book provides a lucid introduction to the basics of gemmology. It familiarizes archaeologists, art historians and conservators with the science of gemstones and allows them to understand the basic concepts of their provenance, typology and treatments. Which are the main types of gems? What treatments can be applied? How does one analyse gems? How can gems contribute to archaeometrical research? This volume is written by four experts in the fields of gemmology and archaeometry and addresses both students who need an introduction to this field and professionals who want to refresh their knowledge of the topic. This work is part of a series of introductory texts that deal with a broad range of materials-related topics in archaeometry.

This book traces the journeys of a stone across the world. From its remote point of origin in the city of Nishapur in eastern Iran, turquoise was traded through India, Central Asia, and the Near East, becoming an object of imperial exchange between the Safavid, Mughal, and Ottoman empires. Along this trail unfolds the story of turquoise--a phosphate of aluminum and copper formed in rocks below the surface of the earth--and its discovery and export as a global commodity. In the material culture and imperial regalia of early modern Islamic tributary empires moving from the steppe to the sown, turquoise was a sacred stone and a potent symbol of power projected in vivid color displays. From the empires of Islamic Eurasia, the turquoise trade reached Europe, where the stone was collected as an exotic object from the East. The Eurasian trade lasted into the nineteenth century, when the oldest mines in Iran collapsed and lost Aztec mines in the Americas reopened, unearthing more accessible sources of the stone to rival the Persian blue. Sky Blue Stone recounts the origins, trade, and circulation of a natural object in the context of the history of Islamic Eurasia and global encounters between empire and nature.

Despite its richness as a potential research field, the history of medicine in Portugal has received relatively little attention outside the country. This book develops some of the understudied themes of Portuguese medical history and delivers them to a wider audience by bringing together the work of a group of international scholars. Here, a unique set of innovative studies begins to uncover details of the lives, medical practice and research of some famous and less well-known Portuguese physicians, the Portuguese response to past pandemics, and analyses of a wide range of items of medical material culture and materia medica. The contributions here elucidate topics as wide-ranging as Graeco-Roman medicine and surgery, the history of spectacles, defence against plague and other epidemics, the history of medicinal emeralds and cinchonine, and echoes of the first female forensic physician in Portugal. This book will appeal to all those with an interest in the history of science, and especially those who enjoy the history of medicine and pharmacy.

O ye Gentlemen explores two vital strands in Arabic culture: the Greek tradition in science and philosophy and the literary tradition. They are permanent and, though drawing on Islam as a dominant religion, they are by no means dependent on it. That the strands freely interweave within the broader scope of Schrifttum is shown by more than thirty essays on subjects as varied as the social organisation of bees, spontaneous generation in the Shiʿite tradition, astronomy in the Arabian nights, the benefits of sex, precious stones in a literary text, the virtue of women in Judaeo-Arabic stories, animals in Middle Eastern music and the transmission of Arabic science and philosophy to the medieval West.

Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice brings together the latest research on Islamic occult sciences from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, namely intellectual history, manuscript studies and material culture. Its aim is not only to showcase the range of pioneering work that is currently being done in these areas, but also to provide a model for closer interaction amongst the disciplines constituting this burgeoning field of study. Furthermore, the book provides the rare opportunity to bridge the gap on an institutional level by bringing the academic and curatorial spheres into dialogue. Contributors include: Charles Burnett, Jean-Charles Coulon, Maryam Ekhtiar, Noah Gardiner, Christiane Gruber, Bink Hallum, Francesca Leoni, Matthew Melvin-Koushki, Michael Noble, Rachel Parikh, Liana Saif, Maria Subtelny, Farouk Yahya, and Travis Zadeh.

This book seeks to identify and describe all the rocks and minerals employed by the ancient Egyptians using proper geological nomenclature, and to give an account of their sources in so far as they are known. The various uses of the stones are described, as well as the technologies employed to extract, transport, carve, and thermally treat them.

In the Wake of the Compendia presents papers that examine the history of technical compendia as they moved between institutions and societies in ancient and medieval Mesopotamia. This volume offers new perspectives on the development and transmission of technical compilations, looking especially at the relationship between empirical knowledge and textual transmission in early scientific thinking. The eleven contributions to the volume derive from a panel held at the American Oriental Society in 2013 and cover more than three millennia of historical development, ranging from Babylonian medicine and astronomy to the persistence of Mesopotamian lore in Syriac and Arabic meditations on the properties of animals. The volume also includes major contributions on the history of Mesopotamian “rationality,” epistemic labels for tested and tried remedies, and the development of depersonalized case histories in Babylonian therapeutic compendia. Together, these studies offer an overview of several important moments in the development of non-Western scientific thinking and a significant contribution to our understanding of how traditions of technical knowledge were produced and transmitted in the ancient world.