Observations of a Medieval Quantitative Historian?
A comparison of the results of the computational analysis of the Taʾrīkh al-islām, al-Dhahabī’s 50-volume biographical collection, with brief statements that describe the rise and decline of cities and provinces of the Islamic world with the al-Amṣār dhawāt al-āthār, al-Dhahabī’s 4-folio epistle, su...
| Published in: | Der Islam |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
De Gruyter
2017
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| In: |
Der Islam
Year: 2017, Volume: 94, Issue: 2, Pages: 462-495 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Verlag) |
| Summary: | A comparison of the results of the computational analysis of the Taʾrīkh al-islām, al-Dhahabī’s 50-volume biographical collection, with brief statements that describe the rise and decline of cities and provinces of the Islamic world with the al-Amṣār dhawāt al-āthār, al-Dhahabī’s 4-folio epistle, suggests that al-Dhahabī had a solid grasp of the tremendous amount of biographical and historical data that he collected, and that his short epistle may be regarded as a missing analytical summary of the most ambitious historical project in the pre-modern Islamic world. In light of these results, we perhaps may think of al-Dhahabī as one of the earliest quantitative historians. Although we do not have conclusive evidence about how exactly al-Dhahabī worked with his data, the paper argues that all necessary mathematical, visual and ‘mechanical’ techniques that would facilitate data analysis already existed, and that al-Dhahabī and other premodern Islamic historians could have used them. |
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| ISSN: | 1613-0928 |
| Contains: | In: Der Islam
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1515/islam-2017-0028 |