The Ssabians were a Middle Eastern community (or possibly two separate communities) mentioned in the Qur'an and early Islamic writings, and categorised variously as 'people of the book' or 'heathens'. They are documented almost exclusively in Arabic sources, and this rare 1856 book, published in German in St Petersburg, remains an invaluable reference work about them, and includes substantial extracts from the early sources. The book aroused the interest of the theosophists in the 1890s owing to its portrayal of a mysterious and secretive Syriac- or Aramaic-speaking pagan sect, accomplished in astronomy and medicine, that functioned as an intellectual intermediary between the Greek and Arabic worlds. Volume 1 discusses the Ssabians' history and culture and their relations with Islam, focusing especially on Ssabian cosmology and religion. Volume 2 contains a wide range of texts, with variant readings, German translations and detailed notes.
Daniel Chwolson (or Khvolson) was born in Vilna in 1819 and educated for the rabbinate. He attended universities in Breslau (Wroclaw) and Leipzig and became a professor of Oriental Studies in St Petersburg in 1855. This important monograph, originally published in German in 1859, was a milestone in the scholarly understanding of the ancient Near East. Chwolson argued, controversially, for the existence of a highly developed civilisation in Babylon long before the rise of the Greeks. His hypothesis was based on Arabic texts, preserved in several manuscripts, which the Muslim author (working in the early tenth century C.E.) claimed to have translated from ancient sources. In this volume Chwolson discusses three complete texts (a 1300-page treatise on agriculture, a medical work on poisons, and an astrological work) and a number of fragments. For each text, he considers the date and context of its composition, its authorship and its content.
