Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Ma‘dan al-šifā’-i Sikandar-šāhī is an extensive Persian handbook of Ayurvedic medicine made for Miyān Bhuwa ibn Ḫawāṣṣ Ḫān, a vizir of Sultan Sikandar Lodī (r. 1489-1517) to whom the book was dedicated. Miyān Bhuwa allocated considerable resources to achieving this translation project and hired scholars to translate the many parts of Ayurvedic books used to compile the Persian text. This article explores the reasons behind the production of the Ma‘dan al-šifā’ and proposes a new reading of certain features of this book. It enquires into its authorship and suggests that Miyān Bhuwa most likely only assembled the translations made from Ayurvedic texts. It discusses the epistemic and the practical issues raised in the preface, which criticizes the adequacy of Greco-Arabic thought in the Indian environment and the style of Ayurvedic texts, as well as the parallels with the Ṭoḍarānanda, a Sanskrit encyclopedia written in the late 16th century. The last part of the article looks at the conceptual structure of the Ma‘dan al-šifā’ and how the Sanskrit sources and their models shaped the organization of the sections of the Persian book. Moreover, it suggests that the overall framework of the book relied on the overlap of models of presentation of medical knowledge, a device meant to negotiate between the models of the Sanskrit sources and those of the Muslim readers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".