Ibn ʿAsākir and His History of Damascus (Data Set)

This release pertains to a series of seven blog posts that investigate the working methods of ʿAlī Ibn ʿAsākir (d. 571/1176) in his The History of Damascus (Tārīkh madīnat Dimashq, hereafter TMD). The data set is oriented to the following questions:

1. The TMD’s isnāds name individuals who, in one way or another, transferred information to Ibn ʿAsākir.  When we read the isnāds en masse, what can we learn about his reliance on the people he cites as his direct informants? From approximately how many people did Ibn ʿAsākir obtain information directly? How vast was his source base? What can we learn about his reliance on different people?

2. How does Ibn ʿAsākir cite his sources within isnāds? What vocabulary does he use and what might it mean? Did he acquire the information on his own, or as part of a group; through oral communication, in writing or via a mix of the two? 

3. Previous historians have written about a ‘library’ used by Ibn ʿAsākir and listed books and book titles that it might have contained. When author names appear within isnāds, what do the names signify for Ibn ʿAsākir? What can isnāds reveal about his reliance on books? How does Ibn ʿAsākir cite books themselves? 

4. Outside of isnāds, how does Ibn ʿAsākir cite books and other written materials

To generate our data, we relied on the version of Ibn ʿAsākir’s text contained in the 2022.1.6 release of the OpenITI corpus through Zenodo. This same release provided the basis for the text reuse alignments provided here.

We used the 2022.2.7 version of the corpus in just one case: the ‘IsnadFractions_ML’ data.