gallnuts (hibr)

Ingredients

gallnuts, iron-gall, tannin, fresh water, gum rabic, vitriol, camphor (kāfūr), musk (misk), aloe (s abir), honey

Preparation Steps

Original Recipe Text

Scribes used iron-gall (tannin) ink, known as hibr, which was preferred for being more glistering than carbon soot (midād) (p. 78). Recipes for parchment-specific inks mentioned in literature include Western gallnuts mixed in fresh water, gum arabic, and vitriol (p. 78, Section 6). Inks were sometimes scented with camphor and musk, and ingredients like aloe were added as fly-deterrents (p. 78).

Evidence

"The manuscript scribe used a parchment as a writing material and an ink made of gallnuts (hibr)."

Remarks

The study notes that some letters feature black dots used for character differentiation, which may have been added to the original copy later; Multispectral (MS) imaging is proposed to identify the chemical composition and layer sequence of these inks (p. 79, Section 5). Histogram analysis was specifically used to evaluate the uniform distribution of written lines, indicating the scribe's precision (p. 79).