The ‘Science of Properties’ and its Transmission

This paper looks at Arabic compendia stemming from the Abbasid period that group together the properties associated with particular natural objects. This ‘science of properties’ usually gathered together all of the known properties of, say, the body parts and secreta of a single animal within a chapter. The materials in these compendia were often labeled as manāfiʿ or ḫawāṣṣ, terms that describe the ‘properties’ of natural objects and can be differentiated on the basis of the relative transparency of the causal mechanisms underlying a given property. Other labels describe a particular entry as ‘tried’ or ‘tested’, while two different comments that can be translated as ‘astonishing’ and ‘strange’ appear in a number of manuscripts as yet another way of qualifying individual entries. These different labels, in combination with the reorganization of compendia along new lines, were the primary means through which editors could comment of the reliability of particular entries. The paper concludes with a description of the compendia assembled by ibn Zuhr, who developed a set of sigla for assigning individual entries to a specific author. These different types of labels speak not only to questions of effectiveness and underlying models of causation, but also to the nature of authorship within the Arabic compendial tradition.