Abu Hanifa Al-Dinaveri

(Ahmad ibn-Daud). Birth date unknown, Dinaver, Iran; died circa 895. Although Persian by descent, he was an Arabic philologist, naturalist, and historian. His interests also included geography, astronomy, mathematics, and botany. Abu Hanifa al-Dinaveri was the author of such literary and philological works as A Book on Poetry and Poets and A Book on Rhetoric. In his multivolume work A Book on Plants, he included poetry by Arab poets who either mentioned or described plant life. His historical work A Book of Lengthy Tidings (Kitâb al-ahbâr al-tiual), which has survived intact, is a model of Arabic classical prose. In addition to information on world history, it contains valuable material about the history of Iran from 637 to the middle of the ninth century. The text was published in Leiden (1888) by the Russian orientalist V. F. Girgas; subsequently, I. Iu. Krachkovsky provided an introduction and index for the text (1912).