The Naples Dioscurides in the Biblioteca Nazionale

Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III

The Biblioteca nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III is a national library of Italy. It occupies the eastern wing of the 18th century Palazzo Reale in Naples, at 1 Piazza del Plebiscito, and has entrances from piazza Trieste e Trento...

, Naples

Naples

Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...

, is an early 7th-century Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

  herbal

Herbal

AThe use of a or an depends on whether or not herbal is pronounced with a silent h. herbal is "a collection of descriptions of plants put together for medicinal purposes." Expressed more elaborately — it is a book containing the names and descriptions of plants, usually with information on their...

. It is based on the De Materia Medica by the 1st century Greek military physician Dioscorides. The Naples Dioscurides contains the descriptions of plants and their medicinal uses. Unlike De Materia Medica, the text is arranged alphabetically by plant. The codex

Codex

A codex is a book in the format used for modern books, with multiple quires or gatherings typically bound together and given a cover.Developed by the Romans from wooden writing tablets, its gradual replacement...

 derives independently from the same model as the Vienna Dioscurides

Vienna Dioscurides

The Vienna Dioscurides or Vienna Dioscorides is an early 6th century illuminated manuscript of De Materia Medica by Dioscorides in Greek. It is an important and rare example of a late antique scientific text...

, composed ca. 512 for a Byzantine princess, but differs from it significantly: though the illustrations follow the same inferred model, they are rendered more naturalistically in the Naples Dioscurides. Additionally, in the Naples manuscript, the illustrations occupy the top half of each folio, rather than being full page miniatures as in the Vienna Dioscurides. The plant descriptions are recorded below the illustration in two or three columns. The style of Greek script used in the manuscript indicates that it was probably written in Byzantine-ruled southern Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

, where ancient Greek cultural traditions remained strong, although it is not known exactly where it was produced. Marginal notes indicate that the manuscript had contact with the medical school at Salerno

Schola Medica Salernitana

The Schola Medica Salernitana was the first medieval medical school in the cosmopolitan coastal south Italian city of Salerno, which provided the most important source of medical knowledge in Western Europe at the time...

in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

A luxurious facsimile has been published by Salerno Editrice, Rome, in collaboration with Akademische Druck of Graz, Austria, publishers of a comparable facsimile of the Vienna Dioscurides.