Kitab al-Dhakhira: 1621 Arabic Manuscript on Medicine and Pharmacy

A 4.6 GB high-resolution digital copy of manuscript HC.MS.2016.0017 from the Qatar National Library Heritage Collection. The manuscript, titled 'Kitab al-Dhakhira fi 'ilm al-Tibb wa al-Saydalah', was authored by Thabit ibn Qurra. It was digitized and published under a CC0 1.0 license on figshare.

Use Cases

• Train optical character recognition (OCR) models based on high-resolution scans of historical Arabic script.
• Analyze the evolution of medical and pharmacological terminology based on the manuscript's textual content.
• Study the structure and composition of historical scientific manuscripts based on the digitized page images.
• Build a digital corpus of classical Arabic scientific literature based on the transcribed text.

Strengths

• High-resolution digital master copy, suitable for detailed visual analysis.
• Published under a permissive CC0 1.0 public domain license.
• Directly sourced from the Qatar National Library's Heritage Collection, providing authoritative provenance.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• The description metadata is limited; actual data quality and completeness require manual inspection.

Provenance

Source

Qatar National Library Heritage Collection (manuscript HC.MS.2016.0017).

Collection Method

Digitization of a physical manuscript.

Time Range

Manuscript dated 1621.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-02 10:29:01; freshness should be verified.