Identifying the Plant Illustrated on Yerevan Dioscorides Greek Fragment. Some Remarks on the Illustrative Tradition of De materia medica

Abstract

In MS Armenian 141 from the Matenadaran Library, Yerevan, one flyleaf is a fragment of an antique Greek manuscript of Dioscorides in capital letters (6^th century?): it contains two chapters of De materia medica and an illustration. Highly stylised, the illustration does not lend itself easily to identification. The article argues that it illustrates not to the following chapter (koris) but the previous one (androsaimon). This arrangement, where the image comes after the chapter it exemplifies, is not attested in other Greek manuscripts of De materia medica. However, it occurs in a large number of manuscripts of Arabic translations and must also have been found in a (now lost) Syriac translation. The article argues that it can be traced back to a late antique Greek manuscript of Dioscorides, a distant ancestor of both our Greek fragment in Yerevan and the Arabic and Syriac tradition of Dioscorides.