FĪRŪZĀBĀDĪ, Muhammad ibn Yaʻqūb

£37,500 · Offered by Sokol Books

A beautifully-preserved, finely decorated ms copy of Fīrūzābādī’s ground-breaking dictionary of the Arabic language. Muhammad ibn Yaʻqūb Fīrūzābādī (1329-1414) was a Persian Muslim polymath, and a major linguist. He trained in Islamic law, grammar, and the Qur’an, and travelled widely from Shiraz to Baghdad, Damascus, Jerusalem, Mecca, India, and Yemen. Meaning ‘The Surrounding Ocean’, ‘al-Qamus al-muhit’ was based on hundreds of sources, e.g., Ibn Sida’s ‘al-Mukham’ (458AH / 1065AD). Unlike today’s dictionaries, it was organized in ‘rhyme arrangement’, ordering words ‘first according to their final radical, […] then according to their first and intermediate radicals’ (Dictionnaires, p.2441). Through ‘brevity combined with copiousness and clarity, clear indication of vowelling, and the use of abbreviations’ (Haywood, p.88) – all much favoured by students – Fīrūzābādī managed to reach 60,000 entries whilst retaining compactness through a focus on lemmas only, without the traditional illustrative examples from the hadith or the Qur’an. ‘Qamus’ inspired numerous European dictionary of Arabic, including Lane’s ‘Lexicon’, still in use today, and his abbreviation ‘j’ for ‘jam’a’ (plural) is also still current. The marginal notes include references to important medieval grammarians such as Iraqi Ibn Duraīd. Dated 1650 in the colophon, the ms was copied by ‘Abd Allah bin Hussein ‘Abd al-Rahman on high-quality paper, with very spacious chainlines (here approx. 45mm), frequent in the C

• Binding: Hardcover

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