Kitāb al-Māʾ: an Arabic medical dictionary of the mid-fifth Islamic century

In 1996, Hādī Ḥasan Ḥammūdī published an edition of a medical dictionary based on two manuscripts he had found in a private collection in Oran, Algeria. The dictionary was allegedly written by ʾAbū Muḥammad ʿAbdallāh b. Muḥammad al-ʾAzdī, known under the name Ibn al-Dhahabī (d. 456/1064). The author of the dictionary acquired his knowledge in several regions of the Islamic world and allegedly studied with such famous scholars as al-Bīrūnī (d. 440/1048) and Ibn Sīnā (d. 428/1037). Complaining that his contemporaries frequently used non-Arabic terms, he decided to compile a dictionary, arranging the terms in alphabetical order by their roots, and explaining their medical as well as their linguistic aspects. He entitled his dictionary the Book of Water (Kitāb al-māʾ), after its first entry, on water (al-māʾ). This paper investigates the text with regard to its author, content, principles of organisation, authorities, and intertextuality, with the aim of verifying the authorship of Ibn al-Dhahabī and of better understanding the literary environment and the reading culture of the fifth century