Ibn al-'Awwam
Abu Zakariya Yahya ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Al-Awwam Al-Ishbili, was a Hispano-Muslim agriculturist who flourished at Seville about the end of the 12th century. He wrote the famous treatise on agriculture, Kitab al-fila-hah, one of the most important medieval works on the subject. It was published in Spanish and French translations.
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[edit] Kitab al-Filaha
In Al-Andalus, Ibn al-'Awwam al-Ishbili wrote the Kitab al-Filaha which synthesized his own agricultural knowledge with that of the Nabatean Agriculture and his other Arabic predecessors. This work was influential in Europe after it was translated into Spanish by Banqueri in Madrid in 1801 and into French by Clement-Mullet in Paris in 1864.[1]
Ibn al'Awwam's treatise on agriculture, Kitab al-filaha, is considered by some to be the most important Muslim work in the field.[citation needed] The treatise divides into two main parts, the first dealing with soils, fertilizers, water, gardens, trees, fruits and their preservation, whilst the second deals with ploughing, the choice of seeds, the seasons and their tasks, grain farming, leguminous plants, small allotments, aromatic plants and industrial plants, harvesting, farming engineering, livestock breeding, poultry, and the treatise ends with a section devoted to veterinary subjects.
The treatise is divided into thirty-four chapters, of which the first thirty deal with agriculture proper, and the last four with cattle and poultry raising and apiculture. Ibn Al-Awwam's treatise covers 585 plants, and explains the cultivation of more than fifty different fruit trees, besides containing striking observations on the different kinds of soil and manure and their respective properties, on various methods of grafting, on sympathies and antipathies between plants. Ibn Al-Awwam also studies gardening, water variety, irrigation, animal husbandry and bee keeping, the symptoms of many diseases of trees and vines are indicated, as are also methods of cure.
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
- ^ Fahd, Toufic, "Botany and agriculture", pp. 848–9, in (Morelon & Rashed 1996, pp. 813–52)
[edit] References
- Morelon, Régis; Rashed, Roshdi (1996), Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science, 3, Routledge, ISBN 0415124107
- Olson, Lois; Helen L. Eddy (Jan., 1943). "Ibn-al-Awam: A Soil Scientist of Moorish Spain". Geographical Review 33 (1): 100–109. http://www.jstor.org/stable/210621.
