In 1957, the Institute was named after the great medieval scholar and encyclopaedist Abu Rayhan al-Biruni. Nowadays, the depository keeps several collections.
The collection of books on medicine includes a small number of dictionaries (32 units) of medical terms in two (Arabic-Persian), three (Arabic-Persian-Indian) and more languages. Most of them are about names of drugs, while others are about the names of diseases. There are also combinations. These dictionaries were written in the 16th - the middle of the 20th centuries by the Central Asian, Khurasanian and Indian doctors.
The most famous of them are the Arabic-Persian dictionary titled “Bahr al-jawahir” (The Sea of Pearls) by Muhammad ibn Yusuf (16th century) copied in 1589. In several copies dating to the 18th – 19th centuries there are two poetic dictionaries with explanations of Indian names of medicines in Persian by Yusufi. “Hall al-asami” (Analysis of Names) by Isma’il ibn Muhammad (16th century) is a Persian translation of “Kitab al-tanwir fi al-istilahat al-tibbiyya” (The Book of Insight into Medical Terms), a famous explanatory lexicon of medical terms in the Arabic by the above-mentioned Abu Mansur al-Qumri. Qumri’s dictionary contains 800 terms. The Persian translation has an additional chapter “On Explaining Names of Compound Drugs in Greek.” The al-Biruni Institute houses three copies of this translation. Two autographs in Uzbek by Basitkhan and Hamidkhan Shashi brothers may be classified as unique.
You can learn more about this topic in the book-album “The Collection of the Al-Biruni Institute of Oriental studies, the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Uzbekistan” (part two, “Miniature and Calligraphy”) (Volume XXII) from the series "Cultural Legacy of Uzbekistan in the World Collections".
The main sponsor of the project is the oilfield services company Eriell-Group.
