PhD
Korneli Kekelidze Georgian National Centre of Manuscripts
irinagogonaia@manuscript.ge
Georgian manuscript heritage, particularly medical and recipe texts, provides an important source for exploring how plant-related knowledge was integrated in everyday life, healing practices, and cultures of bodily care.
This paper draws on materials identified within research projects conducted at the Korneli Kekelidze Georgian National Centre of Manuscripts and examines the role of plants in Georgian manuscript culture from a cultural-historical perspective. The study aims to demonstrate how plants were embedded in everyday practices and how knowledge related to plant processing was reflected in seventeenth–eighteenth-century Georgian manuscripts.
Within this context, the paper examines the eighteenth-century Karabadin S 1122b, whose second part contains recipes for the preparation of plant-based oils derived from chamomile (babunaji), jasmine, violet, rose, sunflower (Helianthus annuus), and other plants. The analysis demonstrates that a unified technological scheme was applied across different plant materials: processing plant matter in almond oil, exposing the mixture to sunlight, and subsequent mechanical treatment, resulting in the production of aromatic oils.
These recipes reflect not only medical or domestic experience, but also a standardized, transmissible, and practice-based form of knowledge that may be understood as an expression of early chemical-technological knowledge. The existence of a unified extraction model indicates the deliberate organization of processes and the codification of knowledge. The study also draws attention to the cultural functions of aromatic oils and the contexts of their use.
The use of plants and plant-derived products provides an opportunity to better understand the relationship between different forms of knowledge, practice, and culture in late medieval Georgian society, including the cultural dimensions of chemical-technological knowledge.
Keywords: Georgian manuscripts; Karabadin; plant-based oils; everyday practices; chemical-technological knowledge; history of chemistry; cultural history.