Al-Qalqashandi

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Shihāb al-Dīn Abū 'l-Abbās Aḥmad ibn ‘Alī ibn Aḥmad ‘Abd Allāh

magnum opus
is the voluminous administrative encyclopedia Ṣubḥ al-Aʿshá.

Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā

Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā, published 1193 AH

Ṣubḥ al-Aʿshá fī Ṣināʿat al-Inshāʾ ('The Dawn of the Blind' or 'Daybreak for the Night-Blind regarding the Composition of Chancery Documents'); a fourteen-volume encyclopedia completed in 1412, is an administrative manual on geography, political history, natural history, zoology, mineralogy, cosmography, and time measurement. Based on the Masālik al-abṣār fī mamālik al-amṣar of

Arabic administrative literature".[3] Selections on "Seats of Government " and "Regulations of the Kingdom " from Early Islam to the Mamluks' have been published separately.[4]

The Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā was cited by

letter frequencies
and sets of letters which cannot occur together in one word.
[5] Kahn therefore cited it as the first work in human history that described cryptology, because it described both cryptography and cryptanalysis. Al-Qalqashandi quoted the text relevant to cryptology from the work of Ibn al-Durayhim (1312–1361) that was once considered lost. Later discoveries in Istanbul‟s Sulaimaniyyah Ottoman Archives did not just find the work by Ibn Duraihim, but also works of al-Kindi in the 9th century that is now considered the oldest work on cryptology.[6]

References

  1. ^ Bosworth 1978, p. 509.
  2. ^ Meisami, Julie Scott; Starkey, Paul, eds. (1998). "al-Qalqashandi". Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature. Vol. 2. Routledge. p. 629.
  3. . Retrieved 30 March 2013.
  4. ^ Heba el-Toudy and Tarek Galal Abdelhamid (eds), Selections from Ṣubḥ al-A‘shā by al-Qalqashand ī, Clerk of the Mamluk Court: Egypt: “Seats of Government ” and “Regulations of the Kingdom ”, from Early Islam to the Mamluks', Al-Masāq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean (2017)
  5. .
  6. ^ Kathryn A. Schwartz (2009): Charting Arabic Cryptology's Evolution∗, Cryptologia,33:4, 297-304

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