al-Ṣiqillī or al-Ṣaqalī/Sicily or Tunisia? Ink Recipes from the Western Regions of Islamic Lands

What is it about?

This article reconsiders the text and the authorship of an anonymous Arabic manuscript containing ink recipes. The text was first published by Eugenio Griffini in 1910, but the ink recipes have only recently attracted scholarly attention. Though the latest contributions on the manuscript consider it lost, it is in fact preserved at the Ambrosiana Library. Attributed to “the Sicilian”, an anonymous author, it is possible that it is the work of a 15th-century physician from Tunis. Griffini edited the text, but images of the manuscript are published here for the first time, as well as an English translation and a new edition. For comparison, other ink recipes, from a sixteenth-century manuscript in maghribī script are edited and translated as well.

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