Book of Histories (world chronicle)

Kitāb al-Tawārīkh · Abu Shakir Butrus ibn al-Muhadhdhab, known as Ibn al-Rahib, d. c. 1290s · mid-13th century (author active 1249-1282); chronicle runs to 1260s · chronicle

Coptic · domain: copto-arabic · researched 2026-11-13

Why this is in the register

There is a modern Arabic critical edition (Abu Shakir ibn al-Rahib, Kitāb al-Tawārīkh, ed. Samuʾil Quzman Muʿawwad [Samuel Moawad], 2 vols., Cairo: Madrasat al-Iskandariyya, 2016 and 2022) but no translation of it in any European language. The only renderings are early modern and indirect: the Latin Chronicon Orientale of Abraham Ecchellensis (Paris 1651), which the Coptic Encyclopedia treats as a separate, wrongly attributed compilation (CE:548a-548b, https://ccdl.claremont.edu/digital/collection/cce/id/472), and the German monograph/study of Adel Sidarus, Ibn ar-Rahibs Leben und Werk (Freiburg 1975). HOLLIS query 'Ibn al-Rahib' returns 27 records: the Cairo Arabic editions, the 1651 Latin Chronicon, Sidarus' German study, and Wellnhofer's German edition of the Kitāb al-Burhān — no English version of any work by this author: https://hollis.harvard.edu/discovery/search?query=any,contains,Ibn%20al-Rahib&tab=Everything&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&vid=01HVD_INST:HVD2&offset=0 . Diez's 2025 CCE update cites only the Arabic edition (Moawad 2016-2022) in its bibliography: https://ccdl.claremont.edu/digital/collection/cce/id/2195 .

Encyclopedist-historian of the Coptic golden age: his chronicle overlaps al-Makin's and preserves patriarchal and chronological material, and his Kitāb al-Burhān is a major kalām-style summa. CCE entry CE:33a-34a (Abu Shakir ibn al-Rahib) lists the historical, theological and linguistic works without recording any translation: https://ccdl.claremont.edu/digital/collection/cce/id/53 .

Existing translations recorded

None recorded in English. Non-English versions, where they exist, are named in the evidence above.

Electronic text

No open electronic text was verified for this work. The Greek/Coptic/Geʿez may exist only in a print or subscription edition (Migne, CSCO, TLG, CMCL).

Scanned witnesses

Scan search: open scan — 2 candidate(s). The Arabic editio princeps of the work is CSCO Scriptores Arabici III.1 (Cheikho, Beirut 1903) and it is on the Internet Archive as an openly readable page-image scan: 164 leaves, 8.9 MB PDF, 40-90 MB-class images. This is the scan to ingest. Its shipped Arabic text layer is poor (broken words, no reliable names/dates) so plan a re-OCR with tesseract -l ara on 300 dpi renders, or transcribe from the page images; do not ingest the djvu.txt as-is. No manuscript witness was located or verified: DigiVatLib author/title searches ('ibn al-rah') return 0 records (https://digi.vatlib.it/mss/search?k_f=2&k_v=ibn+al-rah&sm=&rt[]=1 -> HTTP 200, 0 rows), and HMML's reading-room search is Cloudflare-protected (403 'Turnstile validation failed'). The 1651 Latin version is a second, rights-clean scan but its textual relationship to the Arabic is disputed, so it is not an edition of this work.

Harvard Hollis

Hollis query: "Book of Histories" — 4 record(s); match basis title_only.

Sources checked

• https://ccdl.claremont.edu/digital/collection/cce/id/2195
• https://ccdl.claremont.edu/digital/collection/cce/id/472
• https://ccdl.claremont.edu/digital/collection/cce/id/53
• HOLLIS search — Ibn al-Rahib

Cite: Tergwame, “Book of Histories (world chronicle)” (coptic gap dossier), 2026. https://naxiai.com/christian/gaps/copto-arabic-ibn-al-rahim-kitab-al-tawarikh