Hisham ibn al-Kalbi

Abu al-Mundhir Hisham ibn Muhammad ibn al-Sa'ib ibn Bishr al-Kalbi (; 737–819 CE / 204 AH), more commonly known as Hishām ibn al-Kalbī and as Ibn al-Kalbi , was an early 8th-century Arab Muslim historian. Born in Kufa, he spent much of his life in Baghdad. Like his father, he collected information about the genealogies and history of the ancient Arabs. His genealogies are well-cited among Arabs, but Sunni scholars considered his hadith to be unreliable since he was Shia. Much of his work was preserved by al-Tabari.

Ibn al-Kalbi's most famous work is the Book of Idols (Kitab al-Asnam), which aims to document the veneration of idols and pagan sanctuaries in different regions and among different tribes in pre-Islamic Arabia. He also wrote the Strain of Horses (Ansab al-Khayl), which tries to document the history of the Arabian horse from 3000 BC to his own time.

Scholarship In 1966, Werner Caskel compiled a two volume study of Ibn al-Kalbi's ("The Abundance of Kinship") entitled Das genealogische Werk des Hisam Ibn Muhammad al Kalbi ("The Genealogical Works of Hisham ibn Muhammad al-Kalbi"). It contains a prosopographic register of every individual mentioned in the genealogy in addition to more than three hundred genealogical tables based on the contents of the text.

Works

The Book of Idols (Kitab Al-Asnam) The Abundance of Genealogy/Kinship (Jamharat Al-Ansab) The Strain of Horses (Ansab al-Khayl) Three lost writings about the city of Al-Hira, the former Lakhmid capital