work by sound. It was thought that certain sounds under
certain circumstances could kill, and it may have been
this belief that heightened Aisha’s terror when she heard
the howling dogs at Hawab. Another section details the
use of various parts of snakes, scorpions, and tarantulas,
but even seemingly innocuous creatures could be
eʃectively used. If nothing else, the Twenty-third
Compound Poison, for instance, was sure to produce
death by botulism. It called for “the blood of a decrepit
camel” to be mixed with its gall, sprinkled with squill
and sal ammoniac, and then buried in donkey manure
for a month “until it is musty and covered with
something that resembles a spider’s web.” Two grams of
this in food or drink, and death was guaranteed within
three days.
If more rapid fatality was desired, it could be induced
by cyanide extracted from apricot pits, with the faint
almond odor masked in a drink of date juice or goat’s
milk thickened with honey. Or there were herbal poisons
like henbane and deadly nightshade. A particular
favorite was monkshood, speciɹcally recommended for
use on the blade of a sword or a dagger so that the
slightest nick would provide eʃective entry into the
bloodstream of the victim. And by the end of the seventh
century, the alchemists of Damascus had developed
“inheritance powder”—transparent arsenic, odorless and
tasteless, which could be slipped into a drink by anyone
seeking to speed up the process of inheritance.