A biographical dictionary is a type of
encyclopedic dictionary limited to
biographical
A biography, or simply bio, is a detailed description of a person's life. It involves more than just the basic facts like education, work, relationships, and death; it portrays a person's experience of these life events. Unlike a profile or c ...
information. Many attempt to cover the major personalities of a country (with limitations, such as living persons only, in ''
Who's Who'', or deceased people only, in the ''
Dictionary of National Biography''). Others are specialized, in that they cover important names in a subject field, such as architecture or engineering.
History in the Islamic civilization
Tarif Khalidi claimed the genre of biographical dictionaries is a "unique product of Arab Muslim culture".
The earliest extant example of the biographical dictionary dates from 9th-century
Iraq
Iraq,; ku, عێراق, translit=Êraq officially the Republic of Iraq, '; ku, کۆماری عێراق, translit=Komarî Êraq is a country in Western Asia. It is bordered by Turkey to the north, Iran to the east, the Persian Gulf and K ...
, and by the 16th-century it was a firmly established and well-respected form of historical writing. They contain more social data for a large segment of the population than that found in any other pre-industrial society. The earliest biographical dictionaries initially focused on the lives of the
prophets of Islam and
their companions, with one of the earliest examples being ''
The Book of The Major Classes'' by
Ibn Sa'd al-Baghdadi
Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Sa‘d ibn Manī‘ al-Baṣrī al-Hāshimī or simply Ibn Sa'd ( ar, ابن سعد) and nicknamed ''Scribe of Waqidi'' (''Katib al-Waqidi''), was a scholar and Arabian biographer. Ibn Sa'd was born in 784/785 C ...
, and then began documenting the lives of many other historical figures (from rulers to scholars) who lived in the medieval Islamic world.
When it comes to the numbers of individuals, American scholar of Islam
Richard Bulliet
Richard W. Bulliet (born 1940) is a professor of history at Columbia University who specializes in the history of Islamic society and institutions, the history of technology, and the history of the role of animals in human society.
Early life ...
argues that "a brief look at
Brockelmann
Carl Brockelmann (17 September 1868 – 6 May 1956) German Semiticist, was the foremost orientalist of his generation. He was a professor at the universities in Breslau, Berlin and, from 1903, Königsberg. He is best known for his multi-volume ...
's ''
Geschichte der Arabischen Litteratur'' is sufficient to convince anyone that the number of individual biographies extant must run into the hundreds of thousands and most likely into the millions."
[Richard W. Bulliet, "A Quantitative Approach to Medieval Muslim Biographical Dictionaries" in ''Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient'', Vol. 13, No. 2 (Apr., 1970), p. 195]
See also
*
List of biographical dictionaries
This is an incomplete list of biographical dictionaries.
International
* '' A Biographical Dictionary of Railway Engineers''
* ''Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right Since 1890''
* Akyeampong, Emmanuel and Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., eds ...
References
Citations
Sources
"Biographical dictionaries"University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
"Biographical dictionaries"Khabari Club Biography Topics.
{{Authority control
Encyclopedias
Arabic literature