8vo. Volume I: 408 pp., / Volume II: 424 pp., Arabic text within borders, contemporary green cloth, soiled and rubbed, few ink comments on margins, few wormholes on front cover and endpapers not affecting text, al-Maktaba al-Tijariyya al-Kubra, Cairo, 1355 A. H. / 1936.

Synopsis

Al Mubarrad (826-898) was a native of Basrah, a great philologist, biographer and a leading grammarian of the School of Basra, rival to the School of Kufa. A prolific writer, perhaps the greatest of his school. His best known work is Al-Kamil (The Perfect One or The Complete). After studying grammar in Basra, al-Mubarrad was called to the court of the ʿAbbāsid Caliph al-Mutawakkil at Sāmarrāʾ in 860. When the Caliph was killed in 861, al-Mubarrad went to Baghdad, remaining there most of his life as a teacher.
He was a leading scholar of Sibawayh’s seminal treatise on grammar “al-Kitab” (The Book), he lectured on philology and wrote critical treatises on linguistics and Quranic exegesis (tafsir). He is said to be the source of the story of Shahrbanu or Shahr Banu — eldest daughter of Yazdegerd III.
This work is considered his major contribution to Arabic lexicography. It has been edited by W. Wright (Leipzig, 1864), and published in Constantinople (1869).