Ziya' al-Din Nakhshabi was a 14th-century
Persian
Persian may refer to:
* People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language
** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples
** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...
physician and
Sufi living in
India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
. He died in 1350.
According to a statement in a manuscript now at The
National Library of Medicine
The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), operated by the United States federal government, is the world's largest medical library.
Located in Bethesda, Maryland, the NLM is an institute within the National Institutes of Health. Its ...
, Nakhshabi himself transcribed and illustrated a Persian translation made of a Hindi version of a
Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...
treatise on sexual hygiene.
There are 5 full-page miniatures painted in a variety of opaque watercolors with gilt and two half or three-quarter miniatures, all of a provincial
Mughal style typical of north-west India, especially
Kashmir, in the 18th century.
No other particulars are known of Nakhshabi.
There are, however, a number of other Persian manuscripts which associate the name Ziya' Nakhshabi or Dhiya' al-Din Nakhshabi with versions of this ultimately
Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...
treatise on sexual hygiene. And he is also known to have edited and added his own verses to a Persian translation called ''
Tutinama'' of a Sanskrit collection of 52 tales narrated by a parrot (''tuti'' in Persian) and a nightingale (sharak) to a woman in order to keep her away from a lover while her husband, a traveling merchant, was absent.
See also
*
List of Iranian scientists
The following is a non-comprehensive list of Iranian scientists, engineers, and scholars who lived from antiquity up until the beginning of the modern age. For the modern era, see List of contemporary Iranian scientists, scholars, and engineer ...
References
Sources
For treatises attributed to him, see Fateme Keshavarz, A Descriptive and Analytical Catalogue of Persian Manuscripts in the Library of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine (London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1986), pp 377–378 no 211 and pp 633–634 no 450.
14th-century Iranian physicians
1350 deaths
Year of birth unknown
Iranian emigrants to India
Sanskrit–Persian translators
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