The Style of illustrating manuscripts of Tashrīḥ-i badan-i insān (Mansur's Anatomy) and its effect on Western and Japanese anatomy manuscripts

The work he was most known for was his, Tashrīḥ-i badan-i insān (The Anatomy of the Human Body, also known as "Mansur's Anatomy" Tashrīḥi Manṣūri). Mansur's Anatomy is a medical treatise of about forty manuscript folios. It consists of seven sections: an introduction, five chapters covering the osseous, nervous, muscular, venous, and arterial systems, and an appendix on the formation of the fetus and compound organs, such as the heart. Instead of discussing interrelated functions of organs, he discussed organs based on their hierarchical ordering of functionality-related groups according to their importance to the life of the body. No anatomical illustrations of the entire human body are preserved from the Islamic world before those which accompany the Persian treatise composed by Mansur ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Yusuf ibn Ilyas. While Mansur's Anatomy was not the first notation of the human body, it is considered to be the first color atlas ever created. This document led to a great deal of change in the way the Islamic world viewed human anatomy at the time, as until this point a color atlas was considered to be against Islamic law. Mansur ibn Ilyas is also credited with one of the earliest anatomical sketches of a pregnant woman; while many believe his other illustrations to have been inspired by earlier Latin and Greek writings, the pregnant woman is considered an original work. Most of the illustrations that Manṣūr ibn Ilyās used to illustrate his treatise were not original with him. The origin of the anatomical series of full-length figures remains a puzzle, but it clearly predates the Persian treatise by Manṣūr ibn Ilyās written at the end of the 14th century. Historians have noted the similarity between the first five full-length illustrations and certain early Latin sets of anatomical diagrams. This similarity is particularly evident in the diagram of the skeleton which in both the Latin and Persian versions is viewed from behind, with the head hyper extended so that the face looks upward and with the palms of the hands facing towards the observer - a posture, some have noted, suggestive of a dissection table. All the figures are in a distinctive squatting posture. The question is: What are the features of illustrating the versions of Mansuri's body descriptions and how did they affect other books that describe the body? Though there are six body image illustrations in this version, it is remarkable for the body to be clearly visible in the body's internal components and in the way it depicts a specific state of the body. Although other illustrations of this edition of the Western versions are inspired before or in time, but unlike them, descriptions and writings are placed inside and outside the body and with the organs of the body, and this is how it manifested itself as a way of describing Mansuri on the western manuscripts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The research methodology is predominantly descriptive.