AVICENNA - HISTORY'S PRODIGY
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37547/history-crjh-02-06-04Keywords:
Manuscript, capital work, encyclopedia, Koran, medicine, collection, mystery, folio, genius, Central Asia, EuropeAbstract
The earliest of the manuscripts available in the world, "Kitab al-Qanun fi-t-tibb" ("Canon of Medicine"), by the great Abu Ali ibn Sina (980-1037), dating back to the 12th century, is kept in the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. This major work has been the most complete encyclopedia of medicine for a millennium. As early as in the 12th century, it was translated in Europe from Arabic into Latin by the Italian Gerard of Cremona (1114-1187) and then disseminated in many manuscripts. "The Canon of Medicine," Avicenna began writing when he was twenty years old and completed this work in 1020-at the age of forty, when Avicenna's medical and life experience was vast. This article is just an attempt to lift the veil over the mystery of the genius' formation, and how this priceless folio, created in the ancient Uzbek land, came to St. Petersburg.
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References
Belyaev, Arabic manuscripts in the collection of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1935. Vol. VI, P. 55.
Abu Ali ibn Sino Vol. I, Medical Literature Publishers, 1996. P. 21.
Stephen Frederick Starr, Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane, Princeton University Press, 2015.
Peter Adamson, Philosophy in the Islamic World: A History of Philosophy Without Gaps. Oxford University Press. 2016, P. 115.
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso, Berkley Publisher, 2003. P. 928
