THE PRESERVATION OF

TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE

A Database for Middle Eastern Medicinal Plants

One of the most important aspects of The Middle Eastern Medicinal Plant Project (MEMP) is the preservation of traditional knowledge, ancient , historical uses of plants handed down from generation to generation in the region.

Plants in the Middle-East have been extensively described both in the Bible, as well as many later books of Jewish and Islamic origin, including the Talmud, Mishnah, the works of Maimonedes and the 11^th century Moslem doctor Avicenna. The folk use of medicinal plants, however, is also of great importance as it represents an uninterrupted flow of oral information and expertise that is still used today in many areas of the Middle East.

This information relayed within families is common to many ethnic communities in Israel, including Bedouin, Circassia, Druze, Arabs and Jews from the Middle-East.

The failure of healers, however, to pass this information onto the next generation, seriously threatens the continuation of an ancient oral tradition .

The MEMP Database

Since 1995 MEMP has documented ethno-botanical information of local medicinal plants in its Middle Eastern Medicinal Plant (MEMP) Database.

Contents of the MEMP Database

The MEMP database is constructed on an Access program, and contains a number of unique features which serve as important tools for utilizing and developing information;

a) Botanical Information

Internationally used, descriptions of plant species, together with their common names in English, Hebrew and Arabic and country specific names in Yemenite, Persian, Moroccan, etc.

Species identified from field studies include details of habitat, frequency origin and geographical location.

b) Photographs 

NMRU is in the process of photographing all the plants contained in the database, so that a full botanical and visual representation will be available.

c) Medicinal Information

A unique feature of the database is the construction of separate fields for traditional uses of plants, together with a modern clinical interpretation of each species.

Historical uses of a plant are therefore listed using the terminology and language of the traditional healer, while in a parallel field, the information is updated to provide a modern interpretation of the plant’s potential clinical significance. 

(d) Therapeutic activity

A comprehensive list of 70 classical pharmocopial terms, traditionally used in herbalism to describe plant activity eg. carminative, vulnerary, demulcent, emollient, etc.

(e) Herbal Mechanism

Modern pharmacological terms defining potential therapeutic activity eg. anti-spasmodic, anti-inflammatory, analgesic, sedative, wound healing, etc.

(f) Other relevant ethno-botanical information 

Details of how and when each plant is traditionally harvested, prepared, and administered its combinations with other plants/and or ingredients as well as cautions concerning its historical use, and any rituals that accompany it.

(g) Notes Section

Contains data on how a medicinal plant, or a closely related species is used in other herbal medicine traditions, eg. European, North American, Chinese, Indian, Tibetan, etc.

Ethno-Botanical Data

The information for the MEMP database is derived from a number of sources, including archival collections, local field surveys and published references.

(a) The Zaichek Collection

Much of the information in the database is derived from the previously untranslated and unpublished archival collection of the late Prof. David Zaichek, a scientist at the Hadassah Hebrew University School of Medicine. Prof. Zaichek  carried out over some 20 years extensive interviews with Jewish and Arab traditional healers on medicinal plant use.

Recorded on 1500 handwritten filing cards in Hebrew and German, the collection documents the traditional uses of over 500 medicinal plant species found in Israel.  In addition, the Zaichek archive also contained over 1000 dried medicinal plant-specimens, transferred in 1995 by NMRU to the permanent collections of the Hebrew University at Givat-Ram, Jerusalem.

In 2002, NMRU with the assistance of an anonymous donation (USA) completed the translation and data entry of all the information in the Zaichek cardex, with the whole collection of 505 species now contained in the MEMP database.

(b) Field studies

NMRU has also conducted recent field studies amongst local healers in the Bedoin community in the South of Israel, in the Sinai region of Egypt, and in several Arab villages in the Gallilee. All information collected is compared with data already used in the MEMP database, as well as other published sources.

(c) Information from other published sources

The use of local plants or closely related species has been compared by NMRU to their use in other traditional medicinal systems.

Work on the above data fields is currently ongoing with references from Chinese, Ayuvedic, Tibetan, Umani, European sources, etc. It also includes references from the Bible and post-Biblical literature.