Verbascum Plants (painting with text, recto and verso), illustrated folio from a manuscript of the De Materia Medica of Dioscorides

Translations into Arabic of scientific and philosophical treatises from the Greco-Roman world laid a critical foundation for the advances made by Muslim physicians, scientists, and mathematicians. De materia medica, on the therapeutic properties of natural substances — plants, minerals, and animals — was written about two thousand years ago by the Greek author Dioscorides. Widely translated, emended, and supplemented, the text served as the basis for writing on pharmaceuticals and herbs until the end of the sixteenth century in Byzantium, western Europe, and the Middle East. The manuscript from which these folios come has attracted considerable scholarly attention for its inclusion of animal and human figures. Although extraneous to the text, the figures provide a view of medieval Muslims in the last decades of the Abbasid caliphate. On this page two birds create a symmetrical composition on the leaves of the plant Verbascum (mullein), which, properly concocted, soothes coughs, toothaches, eye inflammations, and ulcers.