An 18th Century Book on Animals and Plants Copied in Aleppo: Al-Umari’s Masālik Al-Abṣār Fī Mamālik Al-Amṣār

Abstract

This article provides a comparative analysis of two illustrated copies of the sections on animals and plants in Mesālīkü’l-ebṣār fī memālīkü’l-emṣār, an encyclopedic work by the Damascene author Shihab al-Din al-ʿUmari (d. 1349). One of the examined copies, dated 1710, is housed in the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center collection (Schoenberg 447), while the other was produced between the years 1600 and 1602 and is preserved in the Revan collection of the Topkapı Palace (R. 1668). Both copies have over five hundred paintings of animals and plants. The illustrations in the Topkapı copy were influenced by sixteenth-century European botanical books, particularly the translations and commentaries of the first-century Greek physician and pharmacologist Dioscorides’ (d. 90) De materia medica by Pietro Andrea Mattioli and Andrés Laguna. The Siene physician and botanist Mattioli translated Dioscorides’s work into Latin and Italian. The Segovian physician and botanist Laguna translated this work into Spanish. These works were not mere translations of Dioscorides’s text but included the authors’ own observations, consultations and correspondences with contemporaries, as well as information about newly identified plants. These works also circulated widely in Europe at the time and may have reached Aleppo, a cosmopolitan commercial hub, serving as a visual source for the Topkapı copy. It is likely that the Topkapı manuscript remained in Aleppo at least until the early 18th century, providing a model for the Pennsylvania copy. The article further explores the organization of al-ʿUmari’s volumes on animals and plants, describes the physical features of the Pennsylvania manuscript, and presents a detailed comparative analysis of selected illustrations.