The Nabataean Agriculture
- Date of account
- Arabic text known from medieval manuscripts; translated or compiled around the 9th–10th century
- Location
- Iraq, especially the Sawād in traditional attribution
- Source
- model_recalled_reference
- Record updated
- 2026-10-10
Record summary
The Nabataean Agriculture is an Arabic agrarian compendium attributed to ancient Babylonian or Nabataean sages and translated by Ibn Waḥshiyya. It includes farming, astrology, ritual practices, images, spirits, and accounts of ancient peoples, making it an important witness to medieval constructions of pre-Islamic knowledge. Its value for comparison lies in the way agricultural expertise, magical operations, and antiquarian ethnography are combined. The text’s chronology, sources, and translator’s role are contested, and scholars disagree over how much genuinely ancient material it preserves. It should be studied as a medieval textual artifact.
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