| Author | Abu Muhammad al-Hasan al-Hamdani |
|---|---|
| Original title | Kitāb al-Iklīl min akhbār al-Yaman wa-ansāb Ḥimyar |
| Language | Arabic (translated into German in 1881) |
| Genre | History of Yemen |
| Publisher | Various (see below) |
| Publication place | Yemen |
Kitāb al-Iklīl (Arabic: كتاب الإكليل) fully known as the Kitāb al-Iklīl min akhbār al-Yaman wa-ansāb Ḥimyar (Crowns from the Accounts of the Yemen and the genealogies of Ḥimyar), is a book about the ancient history of Yemen and the Himyarite Kingdom written by the 10th-century grammarian, chemist and historian Abu Muhammad al-Hasan al-Hamdani. It was first written and published in the 10th century in ten volumes, only four of which exist to this day.
History
Kitāb al-Iklīl was composed in ten volumes by Abu Muhammad al-Hasan al-Hamdani. However, only the first, second, eighth and tenth volumes have survived to the present day. The historian Nabih Amin Faris compiled the surviving volumes into an annotated work, al-Juz' al-Thamin, published in 1940 by the Princeton University as part of the Princeton Oriental Texts collection. In 1881, parts of the Kitāb al-Iklīl were translated into the German language by David Heinrich Müller. In 2020, a portion of the sixth volume was found in the archives of the Bavarian State Library of Munich and was published by a researcher in the Arabia Felix Academy. An abridged version of the texts using a Creative Commons license have also been made for public reading in some online libraries.
Content
The first two volumes concern the genealogies of the ancient peoples and the family of Sheba son of Yashjoub. In the second volume, there is a poem, known as the al-Risala al-Damighah. This poem has sometimes been published separately with commentaries. The eighth volume concerns the archaeological finds in Yemen as well as an observation into the poetry of Dhu Jadan and Abu Karib. The tenth volume of al-Iklīl concerns the history of the people of Hamdan, which is also the hometown of the author.
See also
References
- ^ "Finding a missing part of the sixth volume of the book al-Iklil; A good news that restored faith". Al Masdar Online. 20 June 2020. Archived from the original on 5 December 2022.
- ^ al-Hamdani (1940). Faris, Nabih A. (ed.). Kitab al-Iklil al-Juz' al-Thamin. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
- Thatcher, G.W. "Hamdānī - Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911)". Encyclopaedia Britannica on Wikisource. Retrieved 2024-09-23.
- al-Hasan ibn Ahmad al-Hamdani (16 April 2016). "al-Iklil: This book is published under a Creative Commons license with credit to the author and source". Noor Library.
- ^ al-Hamdani, Abu Muhammad al-Hasan. al-Iklil [The Diadem]. Al-Maktaba Al-Shamela.
- ^ al-Kumait bin Zaid al-Asadi. "The poem of al-Damighah by al-Hassan bin Ahmed al-Hamdani; from the Ain Shams University Library (History, Archaeology and Geography)". Ain Shams University Library. Archived from the original on 3 February 2023.
- al-Hamdani, Hasan ibn Ahmad (1949). al-Iklil, Volume 10. Cairo, Egypt: Matba'at al-Salafiyyah wa Maktabatiha.
External links
- The full readable manuscript of the Kitāb al-Iklīl on the Al-Maktaba Al-Shamela library
- Digitized and PDF versions of the 1949 Cairo edition of the 10th volume of Kitab al-Iklīl, under a Creative Commons license