The Arabic treatise, here edited and translated, was written in the middle of the 9th century CE by ʿAli ibn Sahl Rabban aṭ-Ṭabarī, a Christian convert to Islam and one of the most remarkable thinkers of his time. The text can be described as a manual towards the preservation of health, addressed directly to the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Mutawakkil and his household. It represents not only the oldest extant specimen of its kind, but is also distinguished by its largely non-technical language, as well as by a narrative style that creates an unusual interface with classical Arabic prose literature. The Greek and Indian sources upon which aṭ-Ṭabarī relied testify to the synthetic and inclusive character of early Islamic medicine.

This edition has been edited and translated by Oliver Kahl, Ph.D. (1993), University of Manchester, who is a Research Fellow in the Department of Semitic Studies at Marburg University, Germany. He has published several books (mainly with Brill) as well as numerous articles on the history of Arabic medicine.

This work will be of interest to Arabists, Indologists, scholars of Greek and Syriac, historians of medicine and science, cultural historians, and all those concerned with knowledge transfer in premodern times.