Scientifc textbooks and their application in practice: interdependencies of literary and documentary evidence of scientific activities

The purpose of the present article is to show how scientific activities appear in documentary evidence and in what way this agrees with evidence from scientific handbooks. This cannot be presented in a systematic way, since the research in the field of Arabic documents related to the sciences is only at its beginning and greatly varies across disciplines. Historians of the scientific disciplines in the Islamic world have based their accounts almost exclusively on literary works, and documents have played no significant role. This contrasts with the situation in research on the sciences in classical antiquity, in which both literary and documentary sources inform scholarly consensus/opinion. The aim of this article is to give documentary examples of scientific activities and to explain how they are a significant contribution to our understanding of scientific practice. In most cases, scientific textbooks give little information about their social context and their Sitz im Leben. Often it remains an open question if their relevance goes beyond the restricted areas of school and education. As in many other domains of civilization, documents shed more light on practices in everyday life. This is also true for the domain of the sciences. The following examples for medicine, pharmacy, alchemy, magic, geomancy, cryptography, astronomy, and astrology will provide positive evidence for their practice outside the great cities. Naturally, the materials presented here are all from Middle or Upper Egypt. On the one hand, this limits the results based on them. On the other hand, they shed new light on a region for which no other source for scientific activities is available. At the end, the question of the continuity of astronomy from late antiquity to Islamic times will be discussed. It turns out that it returned to Egypt, after a break of 300 years, which is where it had been created more than a thousand years ago