8vo. 16 pp., contents, 263 pp., Arabic text within borders, modern hard back binding, first & last few pages foxed & soiled, paper browned, few annotations in margins, al-Matba’a al-’Umumiyyah, Cairo, 1318 A. / 1900.

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, on the poets of his own and earlier times, arranged according to the countries of the poets, and containing valuable extracts (published at Damascus, 4 vols., 1887). Another of his works, the Kitāb Fiqh ul-Lugha, is lexicographical, a dictionary, where the words are arranged in semantic subject classes.
Al Thalabi’s classical dictionary – Secret of Arab Philology – an important dictionary and thesaurus, carefully researched and arranged with references to sources such as Quran, Hadith, Arab proverbs, and more.