Biographical dictionary

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A biographical dictionary is a type of

biographical information. Many attempt to cover the major personalities of a country (with limitations, such as living persons only, in Who's Who, or deceased people only, in the Dictionary of National Biography
). Others are specialized, in that they cover important names in a subject field, such as architecture or engineering.

History in the Islamic civilization

Tarif Khalidi claimed the genre of biographical dictionaries is a "unique product of Arab Muslim culture".[1]

The earliest extant example of the biographical dictionary dates from 9th-century

Ibn Sa'd al-Baghdadi, and then began documenting the lives of many other historical figures (from rulers to scholars) who lived in the medieval Islamic world.[3] The largest known biographical dictionary ever produced is called History of Damascus authored by a Muslim historian Ibn Asakir.[4]

When it comes to the numbers of individuals, American scholar of Islam

Geschichte der Arabischen Litteratur is sufficient to convince anyone that the number of individual biographies extant must run into the hundreds of thousands and most likely into the millions."[5]

See also

References

Citations

  1. doi:10.1111/j.1478-1913.1973.tb03104.x
    .
  2. ISBN 978-1107622791
    .
  3. ISBN 0-415-96690-6
  4. ISBN 9789004242791
    .
  5. ^ Richard W. Bulliet, "A Quantitative Approach to Medieval Muslim Biographical Dictionaries" in Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Apr., 1970), p. 195

Sources

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