Crocodile in a 13th-Century Manuscript (British Library)
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We’ll begin this episode with an Egyptian pie recipe from the opening years of the 13th century. I should warn you that it might be a bit of an ambitious one to pull off at home.
You should start with 30 measures of white flour and knead it with five and a half parts sesame oil. I am afraid I cannot be exact as to the measure of those measures, but as you’ll hear, the resultant dough is going to need to be substantial.
Divide that dough in two, and stretch half of it across the bottom of a copper platter of the kind used for this particular sort of pie. You would, I assume, know the kind I mean. Next add three whole roast lambs—that’s 3 whole lambs—and maybe think about pulling out an even larger copper platter than you’d started with because those lambs won’t be alone in there. Each one should be stuffed with an appealing mix of ground pistachios, ground meat fried in sesame oil, and a range of spices including, but not limited to, cumin, cardamom, ginger, and mastic. Scatter rose water infused with musk over the top, and then go in with the birds.
On top and among the gaps between the lambs, place 40 chickens, half full-sized, half young, and 50 squabs. Some of these should be roasted, stuffed with either eggs or meat, the others stewed in juice, something along the lines of a lemon or sour grape. Next, decorate this meaty pile with pastries, half of them triangular in shape, the others more like flasks or teardrops. Fill some with meat and the rest with sugar and sweets. As Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s translation concludes this section, “If at this stage you wish to add another lamb, carved into slices, and some fried cheese, it is not a bad idea.” In other words, do not hold yourself back because making this dish is no time for restraint.
What you should have at this point is a magnificent heaping dome of meats and aromatic flavours to which you’ll add more rose water, this infused with both musk and aloe wood. Then you’ll bring in that other half of the dough, enclosing the incredible meat mountain and pinching the edges so that “absolutely no breath of air can escape.” Transfer the copper platter, probably with assistance, to the top of a cylindrical oven if you have one at hand—if not, make do. When the pastry begins to firm up, lower it carefully down into that oven. Once browned, remove it, wipe the pastry with a sponge, and give it one last sprinkling of infused rosewater before serving.
You probably don’t need Abd al-Latif’s explanation that this was no commoners’ supper. Their diet, he said, tended more toward salt fish, clams, cheese, and “similar foods,” along with a kind of wheat beer. There were regional differences in cuisine, of course, with our writer noting Damietta’s great quantities of fresh fish, often served with “all the ingredients that accompany meat, such as rice, sumac, meatballs, and so on.”
This pie on the other hand was for “royalty and lovers of luxury” to take with them on hunts and picnics. It is, quote, “an entire feast of many courses all in one; it is easy to transport and hard to spoil; it is splendid in appearance and a pleasure to experience; and it retains its heat for a long time.”
Do let me know if you give it a try.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast that is all about those who travelled that world, or at least mostly about that. And it is of course a podcast with a Patreon, at patreon.com/humancircus, where you can sign up for as little as a dollar a month, and where you can avoid all the advertising and get straight to the good stuff, early and with extra bonus listening, all while immensely helping me out as you do so.
And now that I’ve told you all of that, let’s get back to the story, back to the story of Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi.
Last time out, we talked a little about our protagonist and his intellectual journey, how he’d come to eventually make a name for himself as a physician, an interest which I’ve read was sparked by successfully diagnosing treating himself with the help of a classic text. There was also his initial attachment and then vigorous opposition to both the art of alchemy—some examples of which I touched on in the most recent Patreon episode—and the work of ibn Sina.
In some ways Abd al-Latif was not so very unlike that 10th-century born philosopher, in that both quickly judged themselves to be beyond their teachers’ mastery, but where ibn Sina was then immediately content in his own, Abd al-Latif would long search for others, crisscrossing the Ayyubad world and making no shortage of enemies along the way. Of one of his contemporaries, Abd al-Latif would write that quote:
“He was a noisy and obtrusive windbag and a friend of the charlatan Yāsīn …; he was intellectually poorly developed: When I told him a true story, he did not believe me; when I told him a false story, he would accept it and kiss my hand. In fact, he would ask me to write it down for him, and would express his heartfelt gratitude to me. But when I gave him some real good advice and told him the truth, he would reprimand me and complain about me to others.”
Abd al-Latif tended to be open in his distaste, certainly in his writing, and his contemporaries weren’t always too complimentary toward him either.
“His writings are inadequate and radiate emotional coldness,” one, in translation, wrote of him. “When he met a person who was specialized in a particular kind of knowledge, he avoided discussing that branch of knowledge with him and changed the subject. He was uncertain about anything he claimed or proclaimed. I used to meet him on a regular basis and knew him well.”
So make of that what you will, but also know that this doesn’t seem to have been his lasting legacy.
As we talked about last time, Abd al-Latif left Baghdad, where he’d been born, writing that he did so because he had exhausted its intellectual resources, and he was not the only man of the period to express that sort of opinion of that renowned city. The traveller ibn Jubayr, visiting in 1184 while Abd al-Latif still studied there, wrote of it that, quote, “Of this ancient city, even if it remains the seat of the Abbasid Caliphate … most of the traces are gone, and nothing remains of it but its famous name.” Just over 30 years later, the Toledo born Judah al-Ḥarizi would say something similar.
“Today,” he wrote, “it stands bereft: its elders have departed; only raw youths are left. The wheat is gone, the chaff stays on, Virtue has vanished without a trace, Vileness has seized her place; the lions are all dead and foxes roam the hills instead, fouling the ruins of Giving's hall and tower. I sought but found no vower; no, not one endower.”
Maybe it’s because I have a Champion’s League game on in the background right now, but when I read this, I can only think of it as a particularly passionate eulogy for a once great football club, since fallen from glory. But we’ll move along from that thought.
Abd al-Latif did not only travel in search of knowledge and those who could provide it, or simply to disparage those who disappointed him in one way or another. Driven by the ugly necessities of his times, and indeed ours, he went looking for money, for supporters. Perhaps he had something of the sort in mind when he wrote the book we’re getting into today, as it’s termed on the first page “The Book of Edification and Admonition. An Eyewitness Account of the Land of Egypt and of Recent Events There, written in hope of the mercy of God, Mighty and Glorious is He, by Abd al-Latif ibn Yusuf ibn Muhammad al-Baghdadi, may God guide him to be His obedient servant.” Or as the translation I’m using has on its cover: A Physician on the Nile: a Description of Egypt and Journal of the Plague Years.
There on that first page, Abd al-Latif writes of how he had first written a history of Egypt and then thought to extract his own first-hand observations from it and gather them into this shorter work. This he intended to present to the quote, “ruling authority and leader of the age-the leader of mankind…—namely, our lord and master the caliph al-Nasir il-din Allah, Commander of the Faithful,” among other titles and terms of praise. His stated aim was to grant his caliph insights into this land, fairly distant from Baghdad, but he may have had a position for himself in mind too, as many think he had later in life, right before the end, when he visited Baghdad with books for that caliph, just as he had written and would write books for other patrons throughout his life.
So what of this book? What was this work on Egypt that he intended, to whatever ends, to present in Baghdad? It is divided in two parts. The first presents a description of Egypt, its flora, fauna, buildings, boats, and general characteristics. The second concerns the events of the years 1200 and 1201. We won’t, despite my luxury pie introduction, be talking about food today. Instead, we will speak of moisture and its medical consequences. We’ll cover plants and animals, often getting a new, though very old, look at things already familiar to us. Let’s start at the start.
“Egypt is a land of wondrous monuments and strange stories,” our author begins, and we see right away that in this section, he’ll pick out that which is striking, which stands out. “Another peculiarity,” he might start to say of one thing, or that another is “also unusual.” The lack of rainfall for one thing, the annual soil enrichment of sediment brought by the Nile and the fruitful crops it produced for another. The mixture of heat and humidity that made miasma and corruption of the air such a common problem there.
This, Abd al-Latif explained, in applying a humorist medical lens, was why the region’s endemic diseases were those of yellow bile and phlegm, not bilious ones, even in the young or those of heated humoral temperaments. Disease was common, but tended toward good outcomes, with fatal attacks from an excess of blood being blessedly rare. However, he said, moving into some pretty broad generalizations, the people though, quote, “in good health [were] generally flabby and languid, and sallow and sickly in colour … . Egyptian children are thin,” he ploughed on, “and generally have stunted bodies and dull countenances; it is usually only from the age of twenty and upwards that their frames fill out and their features become pleasing.” Clearly, his tendency toward rather spiky criticism was not at all limited to rival scholars but could be just as easily turned against entire populations.
It wasn’t all bad for the Egyptians though. In keeping with his climatic/humoral analysis, he credited the intrinsic heat of the country for their sharp intelligence. In dividing the people of the country by their climate, he found those in Upper Egypt to have “leaner frames and drier humoral temperaments,” while from Fustat to Damietta you tended to find those with a “greater amount of moistness in their bodies.”
Another interesting note here as to climate is how it was affected by exposure to the east wind. Those areas exposed to that wind tended to be healthier than those sheltered from it, where due to higher humidity, putrefaction was more common, as were fleas, scorpions, and rats and mice, which were, quote, “generated and formed from the mud,” spontaneously coming into being there, as they were often believed to do, spawning from nothing like video game monsters.
With those opening remarks on the people and place out of the way, Abd al-Latif turned to plants and trees, and his approach there was thorough. He would recount his own observations, this or that tidbit of information, gleaned from a merchant maybe, and passages drawn from other scholars, going back to Galen at times, or at others, a more recent writer. He might note, as he did of okra, that the Egyptians finely chopped it with the peel on and cooked it with meat, or, as he did of the aqāqiyā tree, that its leaves were used in the tanning of hides and their juices as a cure for diarrhea. He might remark, as he did of the black poppy opium, that it was sometimes adulterated with human excrement and, a presumably related issue, that the adulterated product would often become infested with maggots.
We’ll turn to more pleasant matters and spend some time with the humble banana after this quick break.
…
In this section of the book, Abd al-Latif writes of melons and citrons, broad beans and balsam. He writes of Egyptian pomegranates, how they were of the highest quality, and of the quinces, “small, tart, and expensive.” The star of the show here, however, is perhaps the banana. It represents the broad engagement he gives these plants, trees, fruits, and vegetables, and I want to include it here to give you a taste of the general tone and detail of the text.
When you read about bananas in this book, you read first that it is claimed that the banana is a peculiar hybrid produced by placing a date pit in the middle of a taro root. People claim this, Abd al-Latif, writes, and quote, “although hard to believe, [it] is based on demonstrable evidence, so the senses incline one to accept it.”
It was like the banana had its form from the date palm—for the leaves were those of the date palm, if you only imagined a little alteration—and its moisture from the taro. And moisture is important here, as you know from that humoral discussion of health issues. It’s the dryness of the palm’s temperament that determines the way its leaves segment, the banana’s moist nature that causes the segments of its leaves to not split apart, and there is more here on the similarity between the two, a comparison of the “fibrous grain” of the wood, but I won’t linger too long over that.
Turning to the banana’s fruit, the banana itself we would say, Abd al-Latif notes the number that may be produced in its date-like bunches, and the inedible “mother” at the base of each bunch that may be sliced open to reveal layers like an onion, the flowers that form within like orange-tree blossoms the size of pistachios, almost always eleven in number or else one more or one less.
The peel is thick, like that of a ripe date but thicker, that thickness thanks to the taro. “Its flesh is sweet, but with a blandness to it, so that it tastes like ripe dates with bread; the sweetness derives from dates, and the blandness from taro.” It has the form of the date but proportions of a large cucumber. It has yellowish-white colour, drawing the former from the date, the latter from the taro.
If you have not eaten a banana, then Abd al-Latif further informs you that “the fruit has a rather pleasing, fragrant odour, with a touch of sweet yeastiness to it.” It is inedible when first cut from the tree but soon yellows in storage. It forms a single portion of flesh with no stone to be discarded, but inspected closely contains seeds something like those of a fig, like the vestiges of date stones that have softened and mingled with the flesh.
In temperament, the banana is hot and moist, more the second than the first. In medical effect, it is diuretic, aphrodisiac, and causes wind in the stomach, very much like a ripe date but with the extra moisture from the taro. All told, Abd al-Latif, summed up, if it truly was produced from artificial hybridization, then that was born out by empirical observation. If that hybridization was natural, then, quote, “the banana is only one of a whole series of marvelous and beautifully contrived hybrids, both animal and vegetable, which the natural world contains.” No word on what it meant if it wasn’t a hybrid at all.
Abd al-Latif recounts meeting an Indian merchant who was selling woven rush mats of excellent quality, patterned and brilliantly dyed like silk. He mentioned to the merchant his surprise at the rushes’ length, but the merchant informed him that they weren’t rushes at all. They were Indian banana leaves, split, dried, dyed, and woven, the mats then sold on the southern coast of India.
And Abd al-Latif was not content with just his own rather thorough exploration of the fruit at hand, or what he learned from those around him, in this case that Indian merchant. He would also consult the sage words of writers who had done the work before him, sometimes more than one such expert. For bananas, he calls upon al-Dīnawarī, a 9th-century scholar who was, among a great many other things, a historian, mathematician, and botanist. I’ll read part of the quoted al-Dīnawarī passage here.
Quote:
“The banana tree grows to over and above the height of a man, and continually puts out suckers around itself, which diminish in size the younger they are. As soon as the mother tree has “borne her litter”—that is, when its fruit has reached full size—the tree is cut through at the base and felled, and the bunch is removed. The largest of its suckers now grows and becomes the next mother, while the rest remain as suckers to this new tree, and so on, ad infinitum. This explains the exchange that took place, according to al-Asma’ī, between Ash’ab and his son: when the father said, “Boy, why can’t you be like me?” the son retorted, “I’m like a banana tree. It’s no use until its parent dies.”
And on that rather spiky, amusing, and also somewhat sad note, we will move from bananas to the animals of Egypt.
Here in this section, Abd al-Latif does not tend to go into quite the same amount of detail as he does with the flora, but then I suppose he might have had more time to ponder the immobile banana firsthand than he would have had some bird or fish. However, he still has quite a bit to say for himself of what he saw and heard, starting with the chickens, or more accurately, the eggs.
The factory scale Egyptian egg incubation of the time was a topic remarkable enough to be covered by many other writers. It’s come up before on this podcast, though I can’t remember when or with which traveller, but perhaps no one has provided the level of detail that Abd al-Latif did.
I’m not going to trouble you with all of that detail here, but know that these facilities were constructed of wooden beams, reeds, clay, brick, straw, and papyrus matting, all carefully arranged into blocks of 10 or 20 chambers, each chamber holding 2,000 eggs. Know that you’d use cattle dung fires to warm the whole arrangement, and that you’d “taste” the egg every hour by holding it to your eye for temperature. If too hot, you’d give it three turns, like an hourglass, or more aptly like a hen would after testing it with her eye. It’s painstaking work, requiring frequent attention to the dung fires, the apertures, the eggs, and the culling of those that won’t produce chicks, until around the 20th day when some will finally “throw off” their shells.
To all of this, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, whose translation I’m reading, makes some excellent additions in the footnotes. He acknowledges that he hasn’t been able to confirm this business of hens testing eggs with their eyes. He points out the simile in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, where Thoreau writes of cooking hoe-cakes, “tending and turning them as carefully as an Egyptian his hatching eggs.” And he draws our attention to Edward Lane’s 1835 text, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, where the economics of this whole arrangement were explained. There was a lot of work involved in the whole process, but then the owners of the factories received the eggs from people who kept chickens in their yards and then only paid back one chick for every two eggs, allowing for an egg profit on their end, even accounting for failure to hatch, and meaning that the backyard hens continued laying. So it was, with not a great deal seeming to have changed, in Lane’s time, when 164 such factories accounted for more than 17 million chicks in 1830. It was a very substantial industry, and you can see how it caught the eye of writers like Abd al-Latif.
Besides chickens and their eggs, there are many other animals. There is the “jolter,” an electric fish, maybe the electric catfish of the Nile, though I don’t know that the description matches well, its shock, in any case, numbing the bodies of those whose swimming or fishing brought them into contact. There is a particular “water snake” or eel which apparently gave horrifying nightmares to those who ate it. He writes that “the funny anecdotes about these hallucinations are well known,” but sadly does not share these amusing stories, perhaps because they were also well known outside of Egypt. There is the Aristotle-reliant passage on the crocodile with its many aphrodisiac organs and its “constitution … patterned on the number sixty,” its 60 eggs, 60 teeth, and 60 blood vessels, its 60-year lifespan and its 60 ejaculations. There is the skink, “the offspring of the crocodile on dry land,” which, again, is touted for its aphrodisiac properties, and Abd al-Latif describes in detail the slaughtering, butchery, and salting required to obtain them, and how the product was “administered in honey water, reduced grape juice, or the yolk of a soft-boiled egg.”
There is a lengthy passage on the horrors of the sea horse, not the one you’re thinking of, but the formidable hippopotamus, “vast in form, mighty to behold, and highly aggressive. It goes after boats, sinks them and kills any of the passengers. … It attacks savagely and suddenly, charging with great force, and is terrifying in appearance and menacing in its destructiveness.” Abd al-Latif took the hippo seriously, as indeed he should. He mentions two of the creatures in particular, who were positively addicted to violent mayhem, the one to sinking boats, the other to “killing buffaloes, cattle, and humans, and to ruining crops and livestock.” Local efforts to trap or kill them were in vain, and expert hunters were needed, men “from the land of the Blacks,” Abd al-Latif wrote, who quickly brought down the offending hippos with their short spears and brought their bodies back to Cairo. There, Abd al-Latif was able to give the creatures his customary first-hand look.
For all that he was ready with the relevant passages from a Galen, an Aristotle, or, as you heard in this episode, an al-Dīnawarī, much of the book is that of which Abd al-Latif can say that he saw or perhaps spoke to a person who did. So we can see, as he did, the body of the hippo, something he says is in some ways more like a buffalo than a horse, or, perhaps most of all, more like a pig. We can read his detailed observations, and I’ll read them in full here to give you some idea of what it was like.
“I saw them with my own eyes. Their skin was black, hairless, and very thick. The animal’s length from head to tail is ten medium paces; its body is about three times broader than a buffalo’s, and so too are its neck and head. In the front part of its mouth it has twelve fangs, six above and six below, the outer ones measuring half a cubit and more, and those between them a little less. Behind these fangs are four rows of other teeth, running the length of the mouth in straight lines, ten in each row, and looking like hens’ eggs lined up; two of the row are in the upper jaw and two, opposite them, in the lower. Opened to its greatest extent, the mouth would be wide enough to take in a big sheep. The tail is half a cubit and more in length, broad at the base, but with a tip like a finger in size that is just skin and bone; it is similar to the tail of a varanus, [a large lizard]. The legs are short, about a cubit a third long; they end in something like a camel’s hoof, except that the edges are split into four sections. These legs are exceedingly stocky, and the body as a whole is so enormous that it seems like the hull of a capsized boat.”
Such was the closeness of Abd al-Latif’s observations, his eye for detail which he relayed to the reader and ultimately, he hoped, the caliph. Next time, we’ll continue with those observations, as we turn to the monuments and architecture of medieval Egypt.
I’ll be back soon on the Patreon feed with something extra. Last time out, it was on some unfortunate anecdotes about alchemy, not sure yet what this time will be. After that, I’ll be back with the next episode on Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, and I’ll talk to you then.