Avicenna: Life and Times

Table of Contents

1. Bukhara and the Samanid World
2. A Persian Family and a Disputed Birth Date
3. A Precocious Education
4. Court Physician at Seventeen
5. The Fall of the Samanids and Gurganj
6. Wandering West: Gorgan, Ray and Hamadan
7. Vizier, Fugitive and Prisoner
8. The Isfahan Years
9. Philosopher of the Book of Healing
10. Death in Hamadan and the Mausoleum
11. Key Research Papers
12. Connections
13. Featured Videos

1. Bukhara and the Samanid World

Avicenna grew up in Bukhara, the capital of the Samanids, a Persian dynasty that ruled Transoxiana — the lands beyond the Oxus river, the Amu Darya of today — and much of eastern Iran in the tenth century. Bukhara sat on the great trade routes between Iran, India, China and the steppe, and under the Samanids it was a court city of officials, lawyers, scholars and physicians. The Samanid rulers kept a palace library, and that library would matter enormously to the boy: Gutas describes Avicenna carrying out the most advanced stage of his studies “in the physicians’ library in the palace of the Samanid ruler.”

The ruler for most of Avicenna’s boyhood was Nūḥ ibn Manṣūr, Nūḥ II, who reigned from 976 to 997. Avicenna’s father served this king as an official on the royal estates, so the family lived inside the world of the Samanid administration. That closeness to the court explains much of what followed: a father able to hire private tutors, a son who could be summoned to the sick king’s bedside, and later, when the dynasty fell in 999, a young scholar whose fortunes fell with it.

It was also a world in which the medical and philosophical books of the Greeks were already available in Arabic. Two centuries of translation, much of it at Baghdad, had turned Galen, Hippocrates, Aristotle, Euclid and Ptolemy into Arabic texts, and Persian and Arab physicians such as al-Rāzī and ʿAlī ibn ʿAbbās al-Majūsī had already written large medical encyclopedias. Avicenna was not inventing medicine from nothing; he was inheriting a rich, organised tradition and setting out to master all of it.

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2. A Persian Family and a Disputed Birth Date

His father, ʿAbdallāh, was a native of Balkh, in what is now northern Afghanistan. Under Nūḥ II he governed a village belonging to the royal estate of Harmaytan near Bukhara. Avicenna’s mother came from Afshana, a nearby village, and it was there that he was born; a younger brother followed, and the family later settled in Bukhara itself. His native language was Persian. Like almost every scholar of his age in the eastern Islamic world, he wrote most of his scientific and philosophical work in Arabic, the shared learned language from Spain to Central Asia, though he also wrote some works in Persian and composed poetry in both languages.

Because of where he lived and what he wrote, more than one modern tradition claims him: he is honoured as a national figure in Iran, and also in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and Arabic-speaking writers often count him among the great Arab scholars. On this site he is described as a Persian physician, with the note that his books were written mostly in Arabic.

The year of his birth is less certain than the textbooks suggest. The traditional date is 980 (370 in the Islamic calendar), and it is the one used on most portraits, stamps and short biographies, including the “Avicenna (980–1037 AD)” of a 2012 biographical note in the Journal of Neurology. Gutas, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, considers that traditional date “rather untenable” and thinks he was born “most likely quite a few years earlier.” Every age given on this page — seventeen at the king’s bedside, eighteen when his schooling was complete — comes from the chronology of his own autobiography, and inherits the same uncertainty.

The Sources for His Life

Almost everything known about Avicenna’s early life comes from a single source: a short autobiography that he dictated or drafted for his pupil al-Jūzjānī. Al-Jūzjānī wrote it down and then added his own biography covering the rest of his master’s life, from the years of wandering to his death. Historians treat the pair with care. Gutas points out that the autobiography may bend the order of events so that Avicenna’s studies follow the accepted classification of the sciences, from logic and mathematics to physics and metaphysics — a portrait of an ideal education as much as a diary. What follows reports his account as his own account, and al-Jūzjānī’s as al-Jūzjānī’s.

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3. A Precocious Education

By his own account, Avicenna had memorised the Quran by about the age of ten. He learned arithmetic from an Indian greengrocer, and he studied Hanafi law with a jurist named Ismāʿīl al-Zāhid. His father then brought a physician-philosopher, Abū ʿAbdallāh al-Nātilī, to live with the family and teach the boy. With al-Nātilī he read Porphyry’s Isagoge, the standard introduction to logic, and began Aristotle’s logical works; he then went on to Euclid’s geometry and Ptolemy’s Almagest, the great astronomical handbook of antiquity. According to the autobiography, the pupil soon outran the teacher, and he continued on his own.

Gutas divides this education into three stages: study with al-Nātilī; independent reading of logic, mathematics, physics and metaphysics; and finally research-level work in the palace library of the Samanid ruler. By the time he was eighteen, Gutas writes, he was “perfectly schooled in the Greek sciences.” The autobiography makes it sound as though he taught himself almost everything, but historians think he had other teachers too, among them the physicians al-Qumrī and Abū Sahl al-Masīḥī. Al-Masīḥī (died about 1010), a Persian physician, is described in a 2020 Journal of Medical Biography paper as a teacher of both al-Bīrūnī and Avicenna and as the author of his own treatise on drugs.

Medicine as an “Easy” Science

Medicine came in the middle of all this. In his autobiography Avicenna says that he took up medicine as a teenager, that he did not find it one of the difficult sciences, and that he soon began to treat patients himself. The exact wording differs between translations, so it is paraphrased here rather than quoted. Whatever allowance is made for an old man’s memory of his own brilliance, the outcome is not in doubt: by his late teens he had a reputation as a physician strong enough to bring him to the bedside of a king.

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4. Court Physician at Seventeen

At about seventeen, by the autobiography’s chronology, Avicenna was called in to treat Nūḥ II, the Samanid ruler, during an illness of the king. The treatment succeeded well enough that the young man was enrolled among the court physicians. The appointment gave him access to the royal library. This was the “physicians’ library in the palace” in which Gutas places the final stage of his education.

The library gave him the raw material for the encyclopedic writing he would later do. A man who aimed to set down the whole of medicine, or the whole of philosophy, in one ordered system needed to have read the whole of it first, and the Samanid library let him read far beyond what a private household could have owned. He began writing in these years, while still in Bukhara.

After his father died — when Avicenna was, by Gutas’s reckoning, at least twenty-one — he took up an administrative post in the Samanid government, perhaps the governorship of a district. It was the first sign of a pattern that ran through his life: rulers valued him as a physician, but they also employed him as an administrator and, later, as a minister.

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5. The Fall of the Samanids and Gurganj

The world that had made him did not last. In 999 the Samanid state collapsed, overrun by Turkic powers from the north and east, and Bukhara changed hands. Avicenna’s own account says only that necessity led him to leave; Gutas reads the departure as probably political, tied to the fall of the dynasty he had served. He travelled north-west to Gurganj, the capital of Khwarazm on the lower Amu Darya, near the Aral Sea.

Gurganj was ruled by the Ma’munid shahs, and Avicenna entered the service of Abu’l-Ḥasan ʿAlī (reigned 997–1009). The city was then drawing a remarkable group of scholars: the physician al-Masīḥī, the mathematician Abū Naṣr Manṣūr, and the physician and philosopher Ibn al-Khammār among them. For some years Avicenna lived as one of these learned courtiers, paid by the ruler, practising medicine and writing.

It was in Gurganj, according to the usual account, that he began the work that would carry his name across the world, al-Qānūn fī al-ṭibb, The Canon of Medicine. He would go on working on it through the years of travel that followed; its structure and contents are described on the Canon of Medicine page.

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6. Wandering West: Gorgan, Ray and Hamadan

In about 1012 Avicenna left Khwarazm and moved west through Khurasan, the great north-eastern province of Iran. The political map of the region was being redrawn by the rising power of Maḥmūd of Ghazna, and a scholar who depended on a patron had to follow the patrons. Avicenna headed for Gorgan (Jurjan), near the south-eastern corner of the Caspian Sea, hoping to serve its Ziyarid ruler Qābūs. By the time he arrived, Qābūs was dead.

Gorgan nevertheless gave him something lasting. There he met Abū ʿUbayd al-Jūzjānī, who became his pupil and companion for the remaining twenty-five years of his life. It is to al-Jūzjānī that we owe the written autobiography and the biography of the later years; without him, the story of Avicenna’s life would be little more than a list of book titles.

Ray and the Buyid Courts

From Gorgan he moved on to Ray, near modern Tehran, in about 1014. Ray was held by the Buyids, a dynasty of Iranian rulers who controlled western Iran and Iraq, and Avicenna became physician to the young Buyid amir Majd al-Dawla, whom he treated for melancholia — described in the sources as a disease of black bile, in the four-humour medicine of the time. Melancholia was one of the long-recognised conditions of Greek and Arabic medicine, an ancestor of what is now called depression, and its treatment through diet, regimen and drugs runs through the medical writing of the period.

The courts of the Buyid family were rivals as much as relatives, and Ray was a dangerous place to settle. By 1015 Avicenna had moved again, to Hamadan, the old Median capital in the Zagros mountains, which would become the setting of both his greatest political success and his worst years.

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7. Vizier, Fugitive and Prisoner

At Hamadan the Buyid ruler Shams al-Dawla called on Avicenna to treat him, and once again medicine opened the door to power. Shams al-Dawla made him his vizier, the chief minister of the state. Avicenna held the post until the ruler’s death in 1021, combining the work of government with his practice of medicine and his writing.

When Shams al-Dawla died, Avicenna declined to stay on in the service of the court. Instead, he went into hiding in Hamadan at the house of Abū Ghālib al-ʿAṭṭār, and there, writing at great speed, he finished the long philosophical encyclopedia he had been working on for years, the Book of Healing (described in section 9).

Prison at Fardajan

His hiding place did not protect him for long. He was suspected of secret correspondence with ʿAlā’ al-Dawla, the Kakuyid ruler of Isfahan and a rival of the Hamadan court, and he was arrested and imprisoned for about four months in the fortress of Fardajan, outside Hamadan. Prison did not stop him writing. Among the works associated with this period is his famous thought experiment of the “floating man”: a person created fully formed, suspended in the air with his senses cut off from the world and even from his own body, who, Avicenna argued, would still be aware that he exists — a way of showing that the self is something more than the body. After about four months he was free again.

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8. The Isfahan Years

In about 1024 Avicenna left Hamadan for good and made his way to Isfahan, to the court of ʿAlā’ al-Dawla Muḥammad, the same ruler he had been accused of writing to. The philosopher Peter Adamson has called the years that followed “the most stable period of his life.” Al-Jūzjānī says that in Isfahan his master at last received the respect and esteem that a man like him deserved.

Isfahan, a large and prosperous city on the Iranian plateau, gave him what the earlier courts had not: a patron who kept him for the rest of his life. He also travelled with the prince on his military campaigns, as physician and companion, which meant that much of his writing in these years was still done on the move.

Writing on the Move

The scale of what he wrote is hard to grasp. By modern estimates he wrote about 450 works, of which around 240 survive; roughly 150 of the surviving works are on philosophy and about 40 on medicine. The Canon of Medicine, carried with him from Gurganj through Ray and Hamadan, was completed, by the usual dating, in 1025. Shorter medical works also came from these decades, among them a treatise on drugs for the heart, al-Adwiya al-qalbiyya, and a long teaching poem on medicine, the Urjūza fī al-ṭibb, a verse summary of the Canon in 1,326 lines. Both had later careers in Latin translation, described on the Opium, Saffron and the Long Life of the Canon page.

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9. Philosopher of the Book of Healing

To most of his contemporaries, and to many historians since, Avicenna was first a philosopher and only second a physician. His philosophical masterwork is Kitāb al-Shifā’, The Book of Healing — the “healing” meant is of the soul from ignorance, not of the body. Begun in about 1014 and completed in about 1020, during the turbulent Hamadan years, it is a vast encyclopedia covering logic, natural science (including psychology, botany and zoology), mathematics (geometry, astronomy, arithmetic and music) and metaphysics.

The Book of Healing rebuilt the philosophy of Aristotle, as it had come down through the Greek commentators and the earlier Arabic philosopher al-Fārābī, into a single system of Avicenna’s own. Its ideas — on the distinction between a thing’s essence and its existence, on the soul, on how the mind comes to know universal truths — were argued over by Muslim, Jewish and Christian thinkers for centuries; parts of it were translated into Latin in the twelfth century and read by scholastic philosophers in Europe.

Philosophy and medicine were closely tied in his thinking. The Canon places Galen’s medicine inside Aristotle’s natural philosophy, and the habits of a logician — defining terms, setting out conditions, separating what is essential from what is accidental — show up in the medical book too, most famously in the conditions he laid down for learning a drug’s powers by experiment. Those conditions are the subject of the Seven Rules for Testing Drugs page; the 2009 papers in the Annals of Internal Medicine and the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine listed below discuss them in detail.

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10. Death in Hamadan and the Mausoleum

Avicenna died in 1037 (428 in the Islamic calendar). He had suffered from colic for much of his life, and while accompanying ʿAlā’ al-Dawla on a campaign he fell seriously ill with it. Gutas describes his death as coming “after a protracted series of recoveries and relapses”; the date is often given as 22 June 1037. He died at Hamadan, at the age of about fifty-seven by the traditional birth date, or somewhat older if Gutas is right that he was born earlier, and he was buried there.

His tomb in Hamadan became a place of honour. The present Avicenna Mausoleum was designed by the Iranian architect Hooshang Seyhoun and built between 1945 and 1950; during its construction in 1950 a skull attributed to Avicenna was found. Nearly a thousand years after his death, his grave is still a monument his country chose to rebuild.

The Prince of Physicians

In the Islamic world he came to be called al-Shaykh al-Ra’īs, roughly “the chief master”, and in Europe the epithet most often attached to him is “Prince of Physicians” — a title used in the headings of papers in the Annals of Saudi Medicine (2007), the Mayo Clinic Proceedings (2020) and Clinical Anatomy (2024), the last a translation of a German physician’s 1530 “Defense of Avicenna.” His name today is carried by Bu-Ali Sina University in Hamadan and the Avicenna Tajik State Medical University in Dushanbe, by a crater on the Moon, and by his portrait on the banknotes of Tajikistan. The story of how his Canon was translated, taught, printed and finally retired in Europe is told on the legacy page.

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Key Research Papers

1. Zargaran A, Mehdizadeh A, Zarshenas MM, Mohagheghzadeh A. Avicenna (980-1037 AD). J Neurol. 2012;259(2):389-90. PubMed PMID: 21887514
2. Amr SS, Tbakhi A. Ibn Sina (Avicenna): the prince of physicians. Ann Saudi Med. 2007;27(2):134-5. PubMed PMID: 17420624
3. Afshar A, Steensma DP, Kyle RA. Ibn Sina (Avicenna): The "Prince of Physicians". Mayo Clin Proc. 2020;95(3):e31-e32. PubMed PMID: 32138896
4. Taghavi-Shirazi M, Ghods R, Hashem-Dabaghian F, Zargaran A. Abu-Sahl al-Masihi (died circa 1010 AD): The Persian physician in the early medieval era. J Med Biogr. 2020;28(3):132-135. PubMed PMID: 29372642
5. Sajadi MM, Mansouri D, Sajadi MR. Ibn Sina and the clinical trial. Ann Intern Med. 2009;150(9):640-3. PubMed PMID: 19414844
6. Nasser M, Tibi A, Savage-Smith E. Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine: 11th century rules for assessing the effects of drugs. J R Soc Med. 2009;102(2):78-80. PubMed PMID: 19208873
7. Moosavi J. The place of avicenna in the history of medicine. Avicenna J Med Biotechnol. 2009;1(1):3-8. PubMed PMID: 23407771
8. Sadeghi S, Ghaffari F, Heydarirad G, Alizadeh M. Galen's place in Avicenna's The Canon of Medicine: Respect, confirmation and criticism. J Integr Med. 2020;18(1):21-25. PubMed PMID: 31787564
9. Abdel-Halim RE. The role of Ibn Sina (Avicenna)'s medical poem in the transmission of medical knowledge to medieval Europe. Urol Ann. 2014;6(1):1-12. PubMed PMID: 24669114
10. Shoja MM, Tritsch T, Tubbs RS. Lorenz Fries on the defense of Avicenna, the prince of physicians: Addressed to the medics of Germany (1530). Clin Anat. 2024;37(6):649-660. PubMed PMID: 38630874

PubMed Topic Searches

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Avicenna+biography
2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Ibn+Sina+history+of+medicine
3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Avicenna+Canon+of+Medicine
4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=medieval+Persian+medicine+physicians

Further Reading

• Gohlman WE (ed. and tr.). The Life of Ibn Sina: A Critical Edition and Annotated Translation. Albany: State University of New York Press; 1974.
• Gutas D. Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition. 2nd ed. Leiden: Brill; 2014.
• McGinnis J. Avicenna. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2010.
• Gutas D. “Avicenna ii. Biography.” Encyclopaedia Iranica III/1, pp. 67–70. https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/avicenna-ii
• Musallam B. “Avicenna x. Medicine and Biology.” Encyclopaedia Iranica III/1, pp. 94–99. https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/avicenna-x
• Wikipedia. “Avicenna.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avicenna

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Connections

• Avicenna: The Canon of Medicine and the Rules for Testing Drugs
• The Canon of Medicine: Five Books of Medieval Medicine
• Avicenna’s Seven Rules for Testing Drugs
• Opium, Saffron and the Long Life of the Canon
• Pharmacology
• Dioscorides: De Materia Medica and the Roots of Pharmacology
• Paracelsus: The Dose Makes the Poison
• Depression: History and Discovery
• Kidney Stones: History and Discovery
• Saffron: History and Traditional Use
• Black Seed: History and Traditional Use
• Notable Medical Doctors

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