This paper looks into the relationship between Greek medicine and Egyptian culture in Tebtynis. Cultural interaction in this context has often been interpreted from a perspective that privileges the status of Greek culture: Hellenistic medical treatises (and other texts) were imported to Tebtynis to ‘improve’ the local community and local health-care. This paper looks at two aspects of Greek medical culture at the site: theoretical Hippokratic treatises and pharmaceutical recipes. These medical documents were associated with the Egyptian community in the village, especially the famous sanctuary of Soknebtynis. Analysis suggests that these documents were part of a medical culture that transcended cultural or ethnic divides; there is, this paper argues, considerable evidence for the co-existence of Greek medicine and Egyptian religious practice and ritual life.

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. — (Aristoteles Semitico-Latinus, ISSN 0927-4103 ; v. 21) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-18660-6 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Categories (Philosophy) I. King, Daniel, 1977- II. Title. B438.A5 C3813 160—dc22 2010039953 ISSN 0927-4103 ISBN 978 90 04 18660 6

Research into the historical and textual origins of the Qur'ān have blossomed over the last decade or so and, judging by the number of new "introductions" and "companions" aimed at the general reader, this interest has extended to the student and lay populations as well.Brill's Encyclopaedia of the Qur'ān is testimony to the strength of the new trend.Gabriel Said Reynolds has himself already edited an important new set of excellent essays on this and related questions by worldleading scholars, The Qur 'ān in Its Historical Context (Routledge, 2008).Radical reassessments of Qur'ānic origins have also not been slow in emerging, perhaps inspired by the furore over Hagarism, and (ps)Christoph Luxenberg's Syro-Aramaische Lesart des Koran (see the discussion in this journal, vol.3, 2009, pp.44-71) has brought the subject into the purview of a wider public.Reynolds' new monograph, however, should not be denigrated by being placed alongside Luxenberg's more controversial but much less tightly argued work.Reynolds is rather to be congratulated not only for producing a restrained, articulate, and thorough investigation, but also for avoiding the pitfalls into which Luxenberg fell and hence successfully locating his work within a more serious scholarly genealogy.Reynolds does not seek controversy and he restrains and controls the questions he asks -he seeks only to gauge the literary genre of the Qur'ānic suras and to pin down the nature of their appropriation of Biblical material.No far reaching consequences for the origins of either Islam or Qur'ān are drawn-in fact, this is explicitly eschewed by Reynolds although others will undoubtedly draw their own inferences.Reynolds locates his academic lineage among those who have rejected the "Nöldeke system", in which the meaning of individual suras, and even parts of suras, can be explained by deploying information derived from the biography (sira) of the prophet.A critique is presented (although not much elaborated) of scholars who continue to follow this approach and who continue to be optimistic about the reliability of the sira, a group that includes such disparate figures as Angelika Neuwirth, otherwise a sound proponent of an approach to the Qur'ān that uses only its own forms to explain itself, and Karen Armstrong, whose work is considered by Reynolds as rather shoddy and ill-conceived (she is singled out for her biography of Muḥammad, which is, we are told, entirely derivative from secondary sources).It is hardly surprising, therefore, that it is in the shadow of Wansbrough (Studies in the Qur'ān) that Reynolds conceives his own work.He is in line with Wansbrough insofar as his approach is to explain the Qur'ān not as "in conversation with what came after it (tafsir) but with what came before it (Biblical literature)".He is rightly at pains to point out that this is not a question of a pro or anti-Islamic attitude, for academics and commentators of all shades have readily adopted Nöldeke's system (including e.g.Lüling) and the voices against it have always been very few.The general burden and aim of Reynolds' argument is to break the chain that binds the Qur'ān to the works of the Islamic exegetes (mufassirun).This breakage is achieved through a number of detailed case studies, each of which takes a single verse or passage in which the Qur'ān makes use of a Biblical image or narrative