The three volumes reviewed here are an English translation of the complete surviving works of the historian and geographer Yaʿqūbī who seems to have died in 897 ce. He was thus one of the last generation of intellectuals who witnessed the Abbasid caliphate in its glory before its tenth-century collapse, and he reflects the attitudes and intellectual vitality of that era. Yaʿqūbī was an intelligent writer with a wide range of interests but his work has been more used and admired since the publication of his History by Houtsma in 1883 and his Geography by De Goeje in 1892, (both published by Brill who have now completed the circle, so to speak, by publishing this English translation), than it ever was in the pre-modern Arab world. The manuscript tradition of both works amounts to only one or two late copies, and one of the important features of this translation is that it uses a Manchester MS of the History which is significantly older than the Cambridge one used by Houtsma. Researchers using the Arabic would thus be well advised to check with the English translation, which might offer better readings.

The first volume (pp. 1–257) contains the Geography and a short essay called The Adaptation of Men to Their Time. The manuscript of the Geography has a number of gaps and imperfections. De Goeje collected a number of excerpts from other sources and the translators have rendered these into English and added more fragments. The first volume also includes valuable essays on the life of the author and the history of the manuscripts, and concludes with a full scholarly bibliography.

The second volume (pp. 261–594) deals with the pre-Islamic past from Adam (where else would a serious general history begin?) to the birth of Muhammad. This is extremely interesting as a guide to what an intelligent Muslim of the ninth century knew of this past. The Bible, both Old and New Testaments, forms the backbone of his narrative account. He also has a long section on ancient Greek science and philosophy, though he knows nothing of ancient Greek history. I have often wondered how different Muslim views of the ancient world would have been if someone had translated Herodotus into Arabic, for even an intelligent and enquiring intellectual like Yaʿqūbī knows nothing of the Pharaohs or the Achaemenids. Sasanian history is well covered, Roman history much less so, though he is surprisingly well-informed about the major church councils of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries.

The third volume contains the section of Yaʿqūbī’s History dealing with the Islamic period (pp. 599–1293) from the birth of the Prophet to the year 873 ce, which has has long been known as a major source for the history of the early Islamic world. It is very much shorter than Ṭabarī’s History of the Prophets and Kings but it covers a lot of ground and supplies information which his younger contemporary did not. The two narratives are effectively independent. They may share some documentary material like the text of the succession agreements made by Harun al-Rashid for his two sons in 803 but apart from such well-known public writings there is little textual overlap. Yaʿqūbī certainly follows the same general outline of the story of the Muslim world down to the year 873 when he seems to have stopped writing but he adds material from outlying parts of the caliphate (North Africa, Armenia Yemen and Sind) which are not found in Tabari's much longer work – a view from the provinces if you like. He is often described as a Shiite historian, in contrast to the firmly Sunni Tabari, but this is in a way misleading. He wrote before the emergence of doctrinal Shiism in the tenth century and his Shiism amounts to little more than sympathetic accounts about the travails of the descendants of ʿAlī. At no point does he use his work to mount a sustained attack on legitimacy of Abbasid rule.

This volume finishes with excellent indices of personal and geographical names which will be of great help to researchers coming to this material for the first time.

The translators have done an excellent job. Their English version of these texts is clear and reflects the largely unadorned Arabic of the originals. They have, quite reasonably in the opinion of this reviewer, opted for notes rather than a full-blown historical commentary. They have diligently tried to identify the numerous individuals and places mentioned. They have also included perceptive judgements on textual problems and manuscript variations when these are appropriate. As the editors note at one point, the English translation of the Ta'rikh of Tabari has had a major impact, opening up the study of Arabic primary sources to a whole new readership. This translation of Yaʿqūbī’s work, though clearly on a smaller scale, will also have an important impact, making his work accessible to historians of Late Antiquity, Byzantium and wider intellectual history. And it would be a rash Arabist who asserted that they had nothing to learn from reading scholarly translations like the these alongside the Arabic original.