Ibn Bassal

Ibn Bassal (Arabic: ابن بصال‎1085 C.E.) was an Andalusian Arab[1] botanist and agronomist in Toledo and Seville, Spain who wrote about horticulture and arboriculture. He is best known for his book on agronomy, the Dīwān al-filāha (The Court of Agriculture).

Life and work

Arboriculture in a mediaeval Islamic manuscript

Abu Abdullah Muhamed Ibn Ibrahim Ibn Bassal worked in the court of Al-Mutamid, for whom he created the Hā’īṭ al-Sulṭān botanical garden in Seville. He travelled (on pilgrimage) to the Hejaz, visiting Egypt, Sicily, Syria and seemingly also countries from Abyssinia and Yemen to Iraq, Persia and India. He returned with knowledge of the cultivation of cotton, and he may well have brought seeds and plants with him for the Toledo botanical garden. He is best known for his book on agronomy, the Dīwān al-filāha. He also wrote the treatise The Classification of Soils which divided soil fertility into ten classifications.[2][3][4]

The Dīwān al-filāha

Ibn Bassal's practical and systematic book Dīwān al-filāha (The Court of Agriculture) lacks references to other agronomists, and appears to be a record of his own experience. In the book, he describes over 180 cultivated plants, including chickpeas, beans, rice, peas, flax, henbane, sesame, cotton, safflower, saffron, poppies, henna, artichoke; herbs and spices including cumin, caraway, fennel, anise, and coriander; vegetables requiring irrigation or plentiful watering such as cucumbers, melons, mandrake, watermelons, pumpkins and squash, eggplant, asparagus, caper, and colocynth; the root vegetables carrots, radish, garlic, onion, leek, parsnip, the Sudanese pepper, and the dye-yielding madder; leaf vegetables including cabbage, cauliflower, spinach, purslane, amaranth and chard. He also covers arboriculture, detailing the propagation of the palm, olive, pomegranate, quince, apple, fig, pear, cherry, apricot, plum, peach, almond, walnut, hazelnut, grape, citron, orange, pistachio, pine, cypress, chestnut, holm-oak, deciduous oak, tree of paradise, arbutus, elm and ash.[4] [5]

Legacy

Ibn Bassal's works were studied several centuries later by Abu Jafar Ahmad Ibn Luyūn al-Tujjbi (d.1349) of Almeria who based his treatise Kitāb Ibdā' al-malāha wa-inhā' al-rajāha fī usūl sinā'at al-filāha on Bassal's work.[6]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Donkin, R. A. (1999). Dragon's Brain Perfume: An Historical Geography of Camphor. BRILL. ISBN 9004109838.
  2. ↑ "Farming Manuals". MuslimHeritage.com. 2005-08-15. Retrieved 2010-06-19.
  3. ↑ John H. Harvey, "Gardening Books and Plant Lists of Moorish Spain", Garden History, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Spring, 1975), pp. 10-21
  4. 1 2 "Ibn Baṣṣāl: Dīwān al-filāḥa / Kitāb al-qaṣd wa'l-bayān". The Filaha Texts Project: The Arabic Books of Husbandry. Retrieved 11 April 2017.
  5. ↑ "Muslim Scholars > The Scholars of Seville – Artists, Architecture and Government". MuslimHeritage.com. 2005-08-15. Retrieved 2010-06-11.
  6. ↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2010-11-27. Retrieved 2010-11-21. "Agriculture in Muslim civilisation : A Green Revolution in Pre-Modern Times "], MuslimHeritage.com
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