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This paper discusses one paragraph of the Kitāb al-Barbariyya, a medieval Berber commentary on Abū Ġānim’s Mudawwana. The brief note examined is a comment on the answer to a legal question, which mentions the ancient Berber names of a constellation and of a plant, quoting two lines of Arabic poetry. The passage occupies seven lines (f. 126b, ll. 8-14) of the manuscript MS.ARA 1936 found at the Bibliothèque universitaire des langues et civilisations (BULAC) of Paris. The Berber words retrieved from this text are Amanar, the name of the constellation of Orion, and tabduɣt, the name of the cotton plant. Moreover, in this ancient text, the word (a)kermus, which in the contemporary Berber languages applies to some specific plants (figs, prickly pears, dates), and which, in this case, seems to mean simply ‘fruit’, which supports a possible etymology from the Greek karpós. A list of Arab authors quoted within the Kitāb al-Barbariyya is added at the end of the paper.
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Within the framework of studies concerning the importance of European manuscript collections for Ibadi history, this article aims at retracing the history of an archive put together by the French scholar Auguste Bossoutrot (1856–1937). This archive gathered a quantity of materials on the Arabic and Berber languages collected during his life. In particular, some of the manuscripts contain parts of a long religious work in Berber (<em>Kitāb al-Barbariyya</em>), discovered in the island of Djerba (Tunisia) among the Ibadi community of the island towards the end of the nineteenth century. This text was firstly discovered and reported to the scientific community by another French scholar, A. De Calassanti-Motylinski (1854–1907), but his untimely death prevented him from publishing it and the whereabouts of the manuscripts that contained it remained unknown until the discovery of Bossoutrot’s papers, which contained the longest extant copy of the work (about 900 pages).
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In historic times, two catastrophic fissure eruptions originated in the Eastern Volcanic Zone of Iceland, known as Eldgjá eruption (934–940 CE) and Laki eruption (1783–1784 CE). Eldgjá produced 19.7 km3 of lava flows and 1.3 km3 of tephra; Laki emitted 14.7 km3 of lavas and 0.4 km3 of tephra. They released 232 and 122 megatons of SO2 into the atmosphere, respectively. Abundant historic descriptions of the effects of the Laki eruption indicate that the SO2 release produced a sulphuric aerosol that spread across the northern hemisphere with devastating impacts on the population and the environment, especially in Europe. In this study, we present two new written sources that enable the effects of the Eldgjá and Laki eruptions to be fixed to an exact date and place of occurrence in North Africa. These are a medieval North African chronicle known as Rawḍ al-Qirṭās, written in 1326 CE and describing events in Morocco, and a chronicle of events in the island of Djerba (southern Tunisia), written by Muhammad b. Yusef al-Musabi in 1792–1793 CE. These previously unrecognized sources describe in detail the fading of sunlight coupled with the persistent presence of a thick fog made up of fine particles carried over from long distances. The chronicles report events in Morocco in the time period October 938–October 939 CE, and in Tunisia in the year 1783 CE. These data can be interpreted as the first detailed evidence of the consequences of the Eldgjá and Laki eruptions in North Africa. They also can be helpful in dating and determining the area of influence of the eruptions; this may be useful for several applications, such as the numerical simulation of these events, or hazard planning in case of possible future similar eruptions from the same Icelandic area.
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