Comparative Comparison of Scientific Imaging of Astan Quds Razavi's Extrusion Edition with Objective Images of Medicinal Plants

During the period of the Abbasid caliphs, the Islamic world became a center of knowledge, research and intellectualism and the city of Baghdad reached its peak of prosperity. In addition to inviting scholars to Baghdad, manuscripts were collected and translated from Syriac, Greek and Pahlavi to Arabic. These actions led to the migration of scientists from around the world to Baghdad and the boom in education and research which is also known as the translation movement. What is visible in the early Islamic centuries is the growth of scientific imagery, which can be attributed to Muslims' interest in scientific literature.
In "Scientific Imaging", the artist, while partially referring to the scientific text, also has a look at the formal appeal of the book to encourage the enthusiasm of the reader to study. Nowadays, with the expression "illustration" all audiences pay attention to the visualization of the pages of the book, because with the development of bibliography over the past millennium, the art of visualization has become more relevant to the context of books. Illustrations of handmade paper books largely reflect the fact that illustrators have tried to exploit this technique, while narrating various events of their day and expressing religious beliefs, historical events, as well as illuminating some theoretical and practical sciences and literary texts. Dioscorides, a Greek physician, pharmacist, and botanist who lived in the first century, arranged all his personal experiences on the medical properties of flowers and herbs in different areas. The illustrations of his Book of Materia Medica that became known as "al-Hashish", have been traceable to Europe since the sixth century. The first translation from the book was made by Hainan bin Isaac from Syriac in 250 AH. Hainan bin Isaac entrusted the translation into Arabic to one of his students, Asfat bin Basil. However, Stefan ibn Basil translated it directly from Greek into Arabic, and revised and corrected the translation as Hennan ibn Isaac realized his mistakes. Stefan was one of the first and most accomplished translators of Greek medical texts into Arabic in the third century AH/ 9th century AD. He replaced the Greek medicinal names that he knew with their Arabic equivalents, but brought the unknown names in the original Arabic text. One of the aims of this definitive research is to investigate the branch of imaging known as scientific imaging. The aim is to study and compare the images of herbal remedies (expensive preserved versions of Astan Quds treasures) with the actual images of these plants. Most of these names were translated and interpreted into Arabic a century later in Andalusia by a monk named Nicolas, who was sent by the Byzantine emperor to the court of Abdul Rahman Nasser and was knowledgeable in both Greek and Latin. The so-called stylized translation is undoubtedly the most important translation of the book of Dioscorides into Arabic. Another important translation, namely the source translation of the manuscript of al-Hashayash al-Mashhad (Astan Quds), was done by Mehran ibn Mansur ibn Mehran, who knew both Syriac and Arabic languages ​​well, and used the Syriac translation of the book done by Hinnah ibn Ishaq, and translated it into Diyarbekir during the reign of King Najmuddin around 550 AH. The general title of the “Abbasid School”, that continued for five centuries, is bestowed upon various ways of illustrating books in the cities of Baghdad, Mosul, Kufa and Wasit; most of which were influenced by Sasanian and Byzantine art. It is characteristic of the paintings of this period that the outlines and shapes of animals and larger individuals were drawn, and the organs delineated in a simple manner with little or no depiction of background. The colors are few, but coordinate, very precise and subtle. The faces belong to the Sami (Arab) race, but they also have a significant influence on Byzantine and Eastern Roman artists.
 The main questions of the study are: 1- To what extent are the images depicted in the transcript of Astan Quds Razavi's version close to the objective reality?
2- What is the relationship between text (visual description of plant) and visualization in the transcript?
This descriptive-analytical study is based on library research and references to objective images of medicinal plants. The authors have achieved research results through a comparative study of the manuscripts along with the historical description and analysis of the images. The research shows that the illustrator of the Astana Quds Razavi’s version of the extravaganza depicts unfamiliar plants, imitating the nature of plants, or imitating the work of ancestors, without modeling on nature.