Page from a manuscript of al-Qazvini's Marvels of Things Created and Miraculous Aspects of Things Existing (Aja'ib al-makhluqat wa-ghara'ib al-mawjudat)

The illustrations and text on each side of this page indicate that it comes from a seventeenth-century copy of a famous thirteenth-century Arabic treatise on the many wonders of the world. The original author, Zakariya ibn Muhammad al-Qazwini (1203?–1283), was a Persian legal scholar. His treatise belongs to a popular genre of classical Arabic literature known generally as "wonders" (aja'ib) literature, which was concerned with documenting various awe-inspiring features of the known world.
The range of subjects treated in these texts includes astrology, geography, human anatomy, plants and animals, monuments, natural phenomena, and marvels recounted. While this page shows a leafy tree, the text discusses a type of pitch or tar that we today know as asphalt.