Machine summary:
: DATE OF WRITING lbn Shaddad wrote his al-A'laq al-Khaiirab on the topography and history of Damascus, Aleppo, Lebanon, Jordon, Palestine and [azirah.
are full of grammatical and orthographical mistakes, errors and inac• curacies in the writing of names of persons and places; and the editor's method is that they have been reproduced in the foot-notes and corrected in the main bodv of the text with the help of medieval Arabic historical and geogra• phical works.
Commenting on the characteristic features of Ibn Shaddad's his· toriography, discussing both his merits and demerits, he attempts to bring out the value and importance of his text as a source mate• rial for the history of Syria in the 7th113th century.
His statement that most (akthar) of the source books on the basis of which this work of Ibn Shaddad was written at the end of the 7th/I3th century are not extant, is not correct { p.
Baghdad was attacked and devastated bv the Mongols only, descriptions of the same towns and villages given by lbn Shaddad and Ya. qiit in his Mu'jam al-Buldtin, this reviewer is inclined to believe that Ibn Shaddad did not use Ya. qiit's work.
6n/1:z14) thrice about the tombsSOURCE CRITICISM A remarkable feature of this work is that the author, unlike Ibn al-Athir, is particular in indicating his sources of information and he states that his sources are of two kinds-written and verbal.