Vienna Dioscurides

The Vienna Dioscurides or Vienna Dioscorides is an early 6th-century Byzantine Greek illuminated manuscript of De Materia Medica (Περὶ ὕλης ἰατρικῆς in the original Greek) by Dioscorides in uncial script. It is an important and rare example of a late antique scientific text. The 491 vellum folios measure 37 by 30 cm and contain more than 400 pictures of animals and plants, most done in a naturalistic style. In addition to the text by Dioscorides, the manuscript has appended to it the Carmen de herbis attributed to Rufus, a paraphrase of an ornithological treatise by a certain Dionysius, usually identified with Dionysius of Philadelphia, and a paraphrase of Nicander's treatise on the treatment of snake bites.

The manuscript was created in about 515 AD in the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire's capital, Constantinople, for a resident byzantine imperial princess, Anicia Juliana, the daughter of Anicius Olybrius, who had been one of the last of the Western Roman Emperors. Although it was created as a luxury copy, in later centuries it was used daily as a textbook in the imperial hospital of Constantinople, and a medieval note records that a Greek nurse there, named Nathanael, had it rebound in 1406. After residing in Constantinople for just over a thousand years, the text passed to the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna in the 1500s, a century after the city fell to the Ottomans.

Throughout the Byzantine period the manuscript was used as the original for copies of the work that were gifted to foreign leaders, including the Arabic edition of Abd al-Rahman III of Spain for the creation of which the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII sent a Greek copy and a translator. A note recording the name of one Michael of the Varangian Guard is also found in the text.

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