De Materia Medica

Dioscorides, a Greek physician born at Anazarbus in Cilicia who served with the Roman army and traveled extensively across the eastern Mediterranean gathering firsthand botanical knowledge, compiled De Materia Medica around AD 65 as a five-book catalogue of roughly six hundred plants along with minerals and animal-derived substances, describing each substance's appearance, habitat, and specific medicinal use. Where exactly he assembled and wrote the finished text during or after his travels is unknown; Anazarbus marks only his origin, not his workshop. Unlike earlier herbal compilers who relied on secondhand report, Dioscorides emphasizes direct observation and organizes material by pharmacological action, and his preface names and criticizes earlier pharmacological writers, Crateuas, Andreas, and Sextius Niger among them, as the tradition he set out to improve on. The work's authority proved extraordinarily durable, remaining the standard pharmacological reference across the Byzantine, Islamic, and European traditions for some fifteen centuries.