Alison Flood in The Guardian:
Dealing with everything from “the Classification of Names of Dust and its Qualities” to “Poetic Descriptions of the Down on the Young Male Cheek”, via the ingredients of an omelette which increases sexual potency, a 14th-century Egyptian scholar’s attempt to catalogue all knowledge has been translated into English for the first time. Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri lived from 1279 and 1333. He was a civil servant in the Mamluk empire until he retired from government service in the 1310s and decided to catalogue everything known to exist, in an encyclopaedia which eventually spanned more than 9,000 pages and 33 volumes. Penguin Classics, which publishes the first ever English translation of The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition in October, said that the compendium of knowledge from the classical Islamic world was “as important a work to civilization as Pliny’s natural history”, and “an astonishing record of the knowledge of a civilization”.
…His goal, al-Nuwayri writes in a preface, was “securing the essential and banishing the incidental, adorning it with the necklace of my own sayings, and the pearls of my predecessors”. “My own words in it are like the night clouds leading the rain clouds, or the patrol followed by the squadron. They merely interpret the book’s contents and frame them like eyebrows over the eyes,” he writes, adding, warningly, “I have followed the traces of those excellent ones before me, pursuing their path and connecting my rope to theirs. So if there should be any complaint, the dishonour is upon them and not me.”
More here.
