First and only early edition, in German, of an extraordinarily thorough documentation of scholarly academies in the early Islamic world, biographical dictionary of early Arabic scholars and lists of their writings. It is one of the earliest and most important publications of the Göttingen orientalist Ferdinand Wüstenfeld, who based much of it on the ancient biographical dictionaries compiled by Abu-Bakr Ibn Qadi Shuhba and Ibn Khallikan. It covers the 5th to the 9th centuries AH (11th to 15th centuries CE), with accounts of 37 academies in Bagdad, Nishabur, Damascus, Jerusalem and Cairo, and brief biographies of 254 scholars, 187 listed under the academies where they taught and 67 in a separate section at the end. For most he includes a list of their writings. A 22-page appendix gives the original Arabic text of an extract from Ibn Shuhba, Tabaqat al-shafi 'iyya, published here for the first time.
With minor foxing, mostly in the wrappers and the first and last leaf, but otherwise in very good condition, only slightly tattered at the edges and preserved in the original publisher's printed wrappers, nearly untrimmed and mostly unopened. Neue Jahrbücher für Philologie und Paedagogik VIII (1838), pp. 355-356; not in Blackmer; Gay.