8vo. 432 pp., Arabic text, original cloth-backed printed boards, soiled and rubbed, worn at spine, previous owner’s inscription on title and last page, ink stamp on last page, small ink blotch to lower margin of title page not affecting text, small closed tear at top of half title page, otherwise copy inside in good condition, edited by one of the Jesuits fathers at St Joseph’s College, Jesuit Printing Press, Beirut, 1885.

Synopsis

Al-Tha’alabi (961-1039) was a prolific writer, born in Nishapur. Although he wrote prose and verse of his own, he was most famous for his anthologies and collections of epigrams. Like many other Arabic writers of his time, he does not always distinguish between his own and other people’s work. Of the twenty-nine works known to have been written by him, the most famous is his Kitab Yatimat Ad-Dahr fi Mahasen al-’Asr, on the poets of his own and earlier times, arranged according to the countries of the poets, and containing valuable extracts (published in Damascus, 4 vols., 1887). Another of his is this work, Kitab Fiqh ul-Lugha, which is lexicographical, a dictionary, where the words are arranged in semantic subject classes.