YAKUT, or YAKUT (Yaqut ibn 'Abdallah ur-Rumi) (1179-1229)

This article appears in Volume V28, Page 904 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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YAKUT, or YAKUT (Yaqut ibn 'Abdallah ur-Rumi) (1179-1229) , Arab geographer and biographer, was born in

Greece

GREECE

of Greek parentage, but in his boyhood became the slave of a merchant of Hamah (Hamath), who trained him for commercial travelling and sent him two or three times to

Kish

KISH, or KAIS (the first form is Persian and the second Arabic)

in the Persian Gulf (on his journeys, cf. F. Wustenfeld, " Jacut's Reisen " in the Zeitschr. d. dsntsch. morg. Gesellschaft, vol. xviii. pp. 397-493). In 1194 he quarrelled with his master and had to support himself by copying; he took advantage of the opportunity of studying under the grammarian al-'Ukbari. After five years he returned to his old master and again travelled for him to

Kish

KISH, or KAIS (the first form is Persian and the second Arabic)

, but on his return found his master dead, and set up for himself as a bookseller and began to write. During the next ten years he travelled in Persia, Syria,

Egypt

EGYPT

and visited Merv, Balkh, Mosul and Aleppo. About 1222 he settled in Mosul and worked on his geography, the first draft of which was ready in 1224. After a journey to

Alexandria

ALEXANDRIA
ALEXANDRIA (Arab. Iskenderia)

in 1227 he went to Aleppo, where he died in 1229. In his large geography, the Mu`jam ul-Bulddn (ed. F. Wustenfeld, 6 vols.,

Leipzig

LEIPZIG

, 1866-73), the places mentioned in the literature or the stories of the Arabs are given in alphabetical order, with the correct vocalization of the names, an indication whether they are Arabic or foreign and their locality. Their history is often sketched with a

special

SPECIAL

account of their conquest by the Moslems and the name of the

governor

GOVERNOR (from the Fr. gouverneur, from gouverner, O. Fr. governer, Lat. gubernare, to steer a ship, to direct, guide)

at the time is recorded. Attention is also given to the monuments they contain and the celebrities who were born inthem or had lived there. In this way a quantity of old literature, both

prose

PROSE

and poetry, is preserved by Yaqut.
The parts of this

work

WORK

relating to Persia have been extracted and translated by Barbier de Meynard under the title Dictionnaire geographique, historique et littiraire de la Terse (Paris, 1871). Some account of its sources is given in F. J. Heer's Die historischen and geographischen Quellen in Jacut's geographischem Worterbuch (Strassburg, 1898), and the material relating to the Crusades is treated by H. Derenbourg, " Les Croisades d'apres le dictionnaire geographique de Jacout " in the volume of the Cen;enaire de l'icole des langues orientales vivantes, 71-92. A digest of the whole

work

WORK

was made by Ibn 'Abdulhaqq (d. 1338) under the title Mara.id ul-Ittila (ed. T. G. J. Juynboli, Leiden, 1850-1864). Yaqui also wrote a dictionary of geographical homonyms, the Mushtarik (ed. F. Wustenfeld, Gottingen, 1846). Besides all this activity in geography Yaqut gave his attention to

biography

BIOGRAPHY (from the Gr. (3ios, life, and yp&4 , writing)

, and wrote an important dictionary of learned men, the Mu'am ul-Udaba'. Parts of this work exist in MS. in different libraries; vol. i. has been edited by
D. S. Margoliouth, Irshad al-A rib Il a Ma'rifat at Adib (London, 1908). (G. W. T.)

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