Translation through Praxis (1 of 2)

Decoding ancient handbooks in my kitchen

Sometime in the late 800’s or early 900’s, Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi, physician at the Baghdad court, wrote a short pamphlet gathering recipes and tricks for writers: various inks and how to erase them, paper sizing and other useful tips. It was the peak of the Abbasid period, and Baghdad was the radiating capital of the Islamic world; al-Razi himself was one of history’s great polymaths, a pioneer in both medicine and chemistry. It’s no surprise then that this pamphlet, Zīnat al-Kataba, circulated widely and went on to become the seminal work on the subject, quoted (with or without attribution) in scribes’ handbooks for centuries, until modernity overcame the craft. Two “descendants” of the Zīna are the eleventh century Umdat ul-Kuttāb, compiled by a ruler of the Zirid dynasty—Berber rulers allied to the Fatimids until they broke with them—and the thirteenth century Tuḥaf al-Khawāss, written by al-Qalalusi in Málaga when it was part of the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada.

For the past few years I have been researching and using art technology of the medieval Arabic-speaking world, based partially on the above texts which I translate myself. I have to, because they were written by practitioners for practitioners, and present a number of challenges to the non-practitioner, no matter how erudite. The result is that the scarce existing translations and even Arabic editions for this early period are so littered with errors as to render the text useless. Today I thought I’d share some of these challenges, and the way they can be overcome by simple practice when scholarship can only go around in circles. (This grew to be quite long so I divided the post into two parts.)

Note: When paragraph numbers are provided (e.g. Zina §24), they refer to my own translations. They’re not necessary for the enjoyment of this post, but for anyone interested in the topic, they’re available here. I’m still working on the Umda.

And now on to the first type of challenge.

1. I Don’t Think This Word Means What You Think It Means.

Unlike English, Arabic as a language has only changed a little in the past thousand years. This isn’t to say it’s completely unchanged, as we’ll see, but to a modern speaker it’s legible and familiar enough¹ to lead the unwary translator into a false sense of security: a word that has been around unchanged for centuries must have done so with its original meaning intact, right? Well.

Ink?

As anyone would tell you without hesitation, حبر ḥibr is the Arabic word for “ink”. Today it is used in the same way as the English word, to denote “a coloured fluid or paste used for writing, drawing, printing, or duplicating”. But in the early days of Arabic calligraphy, ḥibr was a highly specific technical term referring only to ferrotannic inks: An ideally black, but sometimes brown ink made by combining a decoction of plant matter rich in tannins (such as powdered gallnuts, pomegranate rind, sumac bark) with a vitriol or ferrous solution². Black ink made from soot was called مداد midād, and coloured inks were referred to as أصباغ “dyes” or by other names. By the thirteenth century, as scribal practices had changed and parchment was no longer common, the distinction between ḥibr and midād had all but vanished, and the two words were used interchangeably. Long before our time, the word midād vanished, and so did ferrotannic inks, leaving us with ḥibr to designate art fluids of all colours...

Gallnuts for making the original ḥibr

Paper?

Something similar happened to the word قرطاس qirṭās. We still use this word to refer to paper goods (school stationery are bought from a qirṭāsiyya), but it started life to denote sheets of papyrus³, while the proper word for paper was kāghid, of Soghdian origin—it was the Soghdans of Central Asia who introduced Chinese papermaking to Arab lands. Kāghid is still used in North Africa today, while it has vanished from memory in the rest of the Arab world. As for qirṭās, the word outlived the use of papyrus and gradually attached itself to paper: today’s waraq (“sheet”, used to mean “paper”) simply comes from waraq qirṭās (“sheet of qirṭās”). But at what point do medieval recipe writers stop using qirṭās to mean papyrus, and start using it to mean paper? Were they even aware, when copying older recipes, that the meaning of the word had changed? See for instance this recipe:

Ink for papyrus and paper: Take Persian charcoal of the best possible quality, hot gum arabic solution, two parts powdered gallnuts, and half a part ashes of burned qirtās. Combine, pestle together and sift. Bray thoroughly with egg glair and make hazelnut-sized balls. Put in the inkwell and you can use it on qirtās and kāghid. (Zina §3)

The Zina is old enough that we can be sure Al-Razi meant “papyrus” when he used qirṭās, and this is reinforced by the use of kāghid in the same sentence. But this recipe is repeated word-for-word in the much later Tuhaf, by which period papyrus was a thing of the past. Yet the recipe wasn’t adjusted, nor does it provide any clarification of the original intention. In fact the Tuhaf goes on to use the word qirṭās in its own original recipes, and who knows what the author meant by it. But from a practical point of view, at least, it makes very little difference: papyrus and paper are both cellulose-based, and their ashes are interchangeable…

Red??

The most startling example of language shift is one that wouldn’t have come to attention if it weren’t for the material fact of the recipes themselves demonstrating it. It’s the word أحمر aḥmar: “red”. Such an ancient and fundamental word, one would translate it on autopilot. And yet:

Red ink: Take green gallnuts and break them up into halves or thirds. For every measure of gallnut add nine measures of water. Leave seven days in the hot sun, then strain the liquid through a fine cloth. For every ten gallnuts, take ten dirhams of gum arabic and seven dirhams of good vitriol. Add the gum and dissolve it before adding the vitriol. (Umda)

Ink for writing in codices: Crush thirty gallnuts and cover them with three ratls of clear water. Cook on low heat until reduced by half, then strain. Stir in five dirhams good vitriol and ten dirhams gum arabic. Leave in the sun for a day then try it. If the black is not good enough but tends to redness, add more vitriol, and if it’s not glossy enough, add more gum. (Zina §7, Tuhaf §4)

These are ḥibr recipes, as described above, and none of the ingredients mentioned can produce red, alone or in combination. But the first recipe can easily produce the brown ink below, and in the second, the injunction “if it tends to redness” most certainly means “if it’s too brown”, because that’s what happens when there’s not enough vitriol to bring about a satisfying black.

Sample of “red” ink, before Arabic had words for brown.

The fact is, in that culture, brown was seen as a type of red, and only much later did it get categorised as a separate hue⁴.

Blue???

In the same vein, to anyone who speaks arabic, the word azraq means “blue”. It’s only through trying to make “blue ink” recipes, most of which yielded yellows, that I was forced to the conclusion this meaning stabilised later and that originally it simply expressed a degree of brightness, rather than a hue. Here’s one example:

مداد أزرق: تطبخ الصُفَيرة طبخاً بليغاً ويضاف الى صفوها شيء من ماء العفص الصافي والصمغ ويستعمل

“Azraq” ink: Thoroughly cook ṣufeyra. Decant and add a little clarified gallnut solution and gum. It's ready to use. (Tuhaf §33)

Identifying ṣufeyra was very difficult; my best guess, backed by testing the recipe, is that it may be neutral henna (Senna italica/Cassia obovata), though it could also be a long forgotten local name for something else. But whatever it is, the word itself means “yellow thing”, or possibly “yellow[-producing] thing”, so we can be fairly sure it was not known for yielding blue… In any case, there is already a word for blue in all these texts, one that is completely unambiguous: lāzawardī, meaning “the colour of lapis lazuli”.

Results of testing this recipe with neutral henna

Speaking in tongues

Language changes, as we’ve seen with some colour words above. In these texts there are old arabic words that are no longer understood. There are also dialectal words that can be very difficult to track down, and this can be especially difficult with names of local plants. But to make things really interesting, these texts belong to a multilingual age, entirely devoid of today’s obsession with the purity of the Arabic language, and much of the terminology is actually foreign. Much of the terminology came from Greek (the Islamic world was famously engaged in studying and translating classical texts) and Persian (so much stuff was imported from China and India via the Persianate world), and these are well established⁵. But some naturalised imports are not so well known and can leave you completely stumped, until you deploy lateral thinking. Here are a few from the Tuhaf, which one needs to remember was written in Andalusia. I’m putting the answers in the footnotes to give the linguistically-inclined among you a chance to guess, and am including enough of each recipe to point the way.

• Make a board out of maṭrūn مطرون …⁶ : This is Spanish madroño, the strawberry tree.

• Take the bark of the shawbarīy شوبريّ, which is used for tanning…⁷

• For a remarkable black, gallnut the cloth and dip it in warm firāṭ فِراط ⁸

• If oil has stained red or yellow cloth, take sābīla سابيلة and soak it in a cup then strain out the water and coat the stain with it⁹.

2. We’re Not in Kansas Anymore

The world has changed a great deal in the past millenium. Knowing this doesn’t necessarily help us reconstruct the way something used to be, and sometimes we still fall into the fallacy of assuming that

The headache of weight units

Some recipes helpfully provide us with accurate weights for the ingredients in a preparation.:

Take one uqiyya of gallnuts and pound them as described above. Cover with one raṭl water and cook until reduced by one-third. Cool and strain then add two uqiyyas gum solution, and enough vitriol to make a satisfactory colour. (Tuhaf §3)

Great, you think, I don’t need to guess. Until you look up what the metric value of a raṭl or an uqiyya is, and realise you’ve been had: Both of them change enormously across space and time. A raṭl in Abbasid Baghdad was 406.25g, but in Egypt during the same period, it could have one of several values on record, between 300g and 500g. In twelfth century Aleppo a raṭl was 1,500g. We can be fairly sure that al-Razi, based in Abbasid Baghdad, was writing his own recipes and a raṭl for him was around 400g. But when his recipes were copied into the Tunis-based Umda, or the Andalusia-based Tuhaf, the amounts were not adjusted, even though in thirteenth-century Andalusia the raṭl was probably around 1,050g. The recipe above is from the Tuhaf, but is it original to it or copied from an older book? As for the uqiyya, it’s still used today: in Lebanon it’s 213g while in Egypt it’s 34g...

In other words, these units mean nothing at all unless I can be sure the author of the book is the originator of the recipe (as opposed to copying it from an earlier book). Without knowing when and where a recipe was originally penned, which is often completely impossible because only some of the texts have survived, there’s no way to work out the absolute weights they dictate. I can only make the recipe successfully if I’m already familiar with the processes and have a shrew idea of what the result ought to be.

The gordian knot of vitriols

A series of substances called zājāt (singular zāj) play an important role in making mostly ḥibr, but occasionally other inks as well. These are the vitriols, an archaic term referring here to metallic sulphates. Ferrous sulphate is green vitriol or iron salt, copper sulphate is blue vitriol or copper salt.

They have very different effects on a preparation: green vitriol is responsible for the deep black of ḥibr, while blue vitriol can make a handsome brown but no more.

Except… this is true today, not so true several centuries ago. For the simple reason that the products pictured above are synthesised and totally pure. Back in the day, metallic sulphates were mined and full of impurities. Instead of two distinct products, there was a spectrum of vitriol that was more or less green or blue depending on which dominated in that particular deposit. To add to the confusion, all natural vitriol was associated with copper ores, and the fact they contain iron was not understood until the 16th century! So the Arabic texts speak of vitriols as copper salts, and it’s up to us today to know that when the end result is intended to be black, the operating substance is iron-based. The bewildering number of grades described (Iraqi, Byzantine, Kirmani, Egyptian…) can be safely ignored.

Other vitriol “colours” appear in recipes, but much more rarely, such as in this one:

To put secrets in documents: [You can] write with solution of white vitriol, and the recipient will then pass over it some gallnut [solution]. Or if you prefer, you can write in gallnut solution and pass the vitriol over it. (Zina §22)

If you simply try to look up white vitriol, you’ll find it means “zinc sulphate”, which is how a previous editor translated it. This seemed anachronistic to me, but I tested it as indicated above and it kind of worked, in that the text turned a pale grey (I don’t seem to have an image of this to share). As the writing supports of the time (parchment, papyrus or paper) were never bright white, however, this didn’t feel like a very effective trick. But then I made an accidental discovery: while gently heating up green vitriol in an attempt to make it less moist, I accidentally turned it completely white. It turns out the white vitriol of the medieval Arabs is actually most likely anhydrous ferrous sulphate: green vitriol that has lost all its water content, but not its properties.

Repeating the test confirmed my suspicions: here it is with green vitriol as a control.

The top words are written with the vitriols (to be then brushed with gallnut), the bottom one is written in gallnut solution (to be then brushed with white vitriol). Remember the original writing support would not be bright white, but something much closer to the text you see here, so it would be truly difficult to read before the “treatment” below:

The smudging is due to my applying the vitriols too thickly, but the result is more than convincing.

The pistachio conundrum

Here’s a recipe from the Umda, titled “A pistachio-coloured ink”:

Take pomegranate-red cinnabar and boil it then grind it into a paste. Take dissolved red lac and bray them together vigorously before use.

Even before trying it, no matter how you turn this, it's clear that red plus red are never going to make pistachio green. But that’s not the intended result: the title only says “pistachio”, not “pistachio green”. Today, most people who ever had pistachios have only seen them shelled and ready to eat. But back home, we still buy them fresh off the tree, from street carts piled high with red nuts, and this is what they look like before their outer skin is removed: a pinkish red that only gets deeper after picking.

The ink vs the fruit. Pistachio photo by Safa Daneshvar, used under CC BY-SA 3.0.

This ink is pistachio-coloured indeed, just not the pistachio you expected…

I experienced a similar bewilderment for another recipe, also in the Umda, that promised an apricot colour, but it involved orpiment (yellow) and indigo (blue) and so delivered the following hue.

I thought the title must have referred to unripe apricots, until chance eventually led me to find out that in Abbasid times, the apricots of Damascus were renowned – and their colour was green-grey¹⁰, not today’s golden yellow. In both these cases, our estrangement from the origins of fruits we think we know well is the cause of the misunderstanding.

The puzzle of pigeon poop

Will scholars hundreds of years from now have any idea what spotted dick is? Or will they stare at the words in blank disbelief? This was my case when I came across Tuhaf §119, a method for removing blood stains:

يغسل بخرو الحمام مغلي في الماء

It is removed with pigeon droppings boiled in water.

I felt quite sure “pigeon droppings”, also mentioned in Zina §64, was not to be taken literally. It must be the name of some plant or substance, but I couldn’t find anything by that name until I came across a note that it was a name for mangosteen. A bit strange, but didn’t seem so impossible. However, I eventually found that this author was wrong Weird, but it was something. But eventually I found¹¹ that author was confused, and “pigeon droppings” was in fact a name for “honey soil”, a handwashing preparation made of usnea (a type of lichen) mixed with clay. Whew…

To be continued in part 2!

1. Legible but maybe not always intelligible. I have friends who are native speakers and far more proficient than I am, but still rely on my translations to make sense of these texts, so what do I know.

2. This type of ink was known since antiquity and was preferred for writing on parchment, being waterproof and non-scrapable.

3. Not the plant itself, which is بردي bardī.

4. There is no original word for “brown” in Arabic: today we say bunnī, literally “coffee-coloured”. But there is no credible evidence of coffee being consumed as a drink before the 15th century, though in a nice twist, al-Razi himself was the first to describe the bean and its medical qualities.

5. This is no longer the case. Very few of these words still hang on, having either faded or been displaced by newer ones. One amusing case is the name of the orange. Orange comes from Persian narānj, brought to Europe via the Arab world which itself knew the fruit by that name. No longer: today the Arabic word for “orange” is burtuqāl. This is an import in the other direction, and is none other than the name of Portugal, because at some point this country became such an important producer of oranges it started providing the Arab world with them. A few years ago, when Morocco beat Portugal during the World Cup, this created one of the best headline puns MENA has ever seen: “MOROCCO SQUEEZES PORTUGAL” (المغرب يعصر البرتقال)

6. This is from Spanish madroño, the strawberry tree.

7. This is a purely Andalusian name, from Latin Suber, the cork oak (today Quercus suber).

8. Also Latin, ferrete is a rust or vitriol bath, just what you need to turn gallnut-soaked cloth black.

9. This is Spanish sábila, which is aloe vera.

10. The book where I found this fact is currently in storage until I’m able to move into my new home, so I don’t have the page number, but it’s one I highly recommend for its insightful overview of Islamic creative traditions: Islamic Art in Context by Robert Irwin.

11. Thanks to Nawal Nasrallah’s excellent translations of centuries-old cookbooks. The glossaries take up most of these volumes and ar worth their weight in gold.