In any case, the work is ultimately based on Greek and Latin agricultural writings, heavily supplemented with local material.

The work consists of some 1500 manuscript pages, principally concerned with agriculture but also containing lengthy digressions on religion, philosophy, magic, astrology, and folklore.

Some of this non-agricultural material was cited by the Andalusian magician and alchemist Maslama al-Qurtubi (died 964) in his Ghayat al-Hakim ("The Goal of the Wise", Latin: Picatrix), while other parts were discussed by the Jewish philosopher Maimonides in his Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190).

Rather, 'Nabataean' is a term used by Arabic authors of the early Islamic period to designate the non-Arabic speaking, rural population of various conquered territories.

[3] Generally speaking, the term 'Nabataean' was strongly associated with a rural, sedentary way of life, which was perceived as backwards and as thoroughly opposed to the noble, nomadic lifestyle of the Arabs.

[7] Written at a time when ancient Mesopotamian culture was in danger of disappearing due to the Arab conquests, his work can be interpreted as part of the shuʽubiyya, a movement by non-Arab Muslims to reassert their local identities.

[11] The work purports to have been compiled by a man named Ibn Wahshiyya from Qussīn, a village near Kufa in present-day Iraq.

[12] Ibn Wahshiyya said that the book was the product of three "ancient wise Kasdanian[c] men", of whom "one of them began it, the second added other things to that, and the third made it complete.

[12] While it certainly does not date back to the Babylonian era as Ibn Wahshiyya himself claimed, scholars now believe that the work may actually have been an authentic translation from a pre-Islamic Syriac original.

"[33] The ecologist Karl Butzer described the organization of the work as "perplexing", even "baffling", as when a treatise on corpses washed out of a cemetery interrupts the section on soils.

[36] For example, the work provides limited coverage of sugar, rice, and cotton, which were the most important local crops in the 9th and 10th centuries.

[36] Nevertheless, the geographic references and detailed information about weather, planting schedules, soil salinity, and other topics show that the author had firsthand knowledge of local conditions in the central Iraqi lowlands near Kufa.

[37] The book describes 106 plants, compared to 70 in the contemporary Geoponica, and offers thorough information on their taxonomic characteristics and medicinal uses.

[38] The section on the cultivation of the date palm was an important contribution and wholly original, and the extremely detailed treatment of vineyards goes on for 141 pages.

[36] The list of exotic plants, some of which are native only to India or Arabia, may have been based on the botany portions of Pliny's 1st-century Natural History.

[40]In various passages the book describes the religious practices of rural Iraq, where paganism persisted long after the Islamic conquest.

[41] Some of the book's descriptions suggest links between these Iraqi pagans, whom Ibn Wahshiyya called 'Sabians', and ancient Mesopotamian religion.

[42][43] The cult recognized seven primary astral deities: the Sun, the Moon, and the five known planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, Venus, and Mars).

[52] One of the key philosophical passages is a treatise on the soul, in the section on vineyards, in which the author expresses doctrines very similar to those of Neoplatonism.

[33] These special properties depend on the configuration of the astral bodies and can produce effects such as making someone invisible or attracting goats and pigs to someone.

[56] The effects are specific to certain items, so broad beans are capable of curing "agonizing love," while ten dirhams of ground saffron mixed with wine will cause anyone who drinks it to laugh until they die.

[58] The most spectacular instance of magic is the case of a Nabataean magician who succeeded in creating an artificial man, in a story similar to the golem traditions of Kabbalistic Judaism.

[68] It was the first agronomical work to reach al-Andalus (modern Spain and Portugal), and became an important reference for the writers of the Andalusi agricultural corpus.

[73][74] Later translations of Maimonides into Latin mistranslated the name of the work as De agricultura Aegyptiorum ("On Egyptian Agriculture"), which caused readers such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Samuel Purchas to refer to the book by this erroneous title.

[81][82] In an article published in 1875, the eminent German scholar Theodor Nöldeke agreed with Gutschmid that the work was originally written in Arabic, going as far as to argue that Ibn Wahshiyya himself was a fiction, and that the true author was Abu Talib al-Zayyat.

[85][86] Toufic Fahd began studying the work in the late 1960s, and wrote many articles on it in which he defended the idea that the text was not a forgery by Ibn Wahshiyya, but was rather based on a pre-Islamic original.

[87][89] Mohammad El-Faïz supported Fahd's views and studied the work from the standpoint of Mesopotamian agriculture, publishing a monograph on the subject in 1995.

[92] This changed when Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, in his monograph published in 2006, extensively argued that the work may well have been an authentic translation from the Syriac.