QUANTIFYING INTERRELATIONSHIPS AMONG COGNITIVE DIALECTS OF MIDDLE EASTERN DRUG-PLANT PRESCRIPTION PATTERNS

This paper quantifies similarity in overall pattern of multiple drug-plant prescription in Islamic ethnopharmacological systems and their ancient precursors. Fourteen sets of prescriptions or descriptions of medicinal attributes of drug plants composed between 1534 B.C. and the present were examined. For each source, patterns of grouping were identified by applying a hierarchical clustering program to a data matrix reflecting the source’s drug plant prescription/attribute correlations. Resulting clusters were treated as pile sort results, shared groupings across sources were tallied, various means and functions of inter-source similarity were calculated, and degrees of overall similarity were modeled using various techniques. The resulting numerical taxonomy shows a clear relationship between proximity and shared history of contemporaneous localities and overall degree of similarity in practice. It also shows that degree of similarity between sources from different time periods correlates with relative strength of presumed relationships of descent and influence.