Kamil al-Sina'a al-Tibbiyya: A 10th-11th Century Arabic Medical Manuscript

Qatar National Library provides a high-resolution digital master copy of manuscript HC.MS.2018.0013.02 from its Heritage Collection. The manuscript is titled 'Kamil al-Sina'a al-Tibbiyya' (The Complete Art of Medicine) by Ali ibn al-Abbas al-Majusi, dated to the 10th-11th centuries. The dataset is a 8.9 GB ZIP file released under a CC0 1.0 public domain dedication.

Use Cases

• Train optical character recognition (OCR) models for historical Arabic script based on high-resolution manuscript images.
• Analyze the layout and structure of medieval medical manuscripts for digital humanities research.
• Study the evolution of medical terminology and illustrations from the 10th-11th centuries.
• Create digital editions or annotated corpora of classical Arabic medical literature.

Strengths

• High-resolution digital master copy suitable for detailed analysis of text and illustrations.
• Clear provenance from the Qatar National Library Heritage Collection with a specific catalog record (HC.MS.2018.0013.02).
• Released under a permissive CC0 1.0 license, allowing maximum reuse.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data may reflect geographic and temporal bias inherent to a single historical manuscript.

Provenance

Source

Qatar National Library Heritage Collection.

Collection Method

Digitization of a physical manuscript.

Time Range

Manuscript dated to the 10th-11th centuries.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-04 09:27:24; freshness should be verified.