Peter Holt

Peter Malcolm Holt, FBA (28 November 1918 – 2 November 2006) was a historian of the Middle East and Sudan. He was generally known as P. M. Holt.

Biography The son of a Unitarian minister, Holt attended Lord Williams's School in Thame, Oxfordshire, and studied history at University College, Oxford. He then obtained a diploma of education and worked as a secondary school teacher in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan 1941–53 (initially at Gordon Memorial College, the country's leading school), and then as Government Archivist and part-time lecturer at the University College of Khartoum 1952–55. During these years he became proficient in Arabic. He taught at SOAS, the University of London as Lecturer from 1955 to 1982, then Reader, then Professor of Arab History, and finally Professor of the Near and Middle East from 1975 to 1982.

His work on Sudan was carried forward by one of his PhD students, Seán O'Fahey.

Works Holt, P.M., The Mahdist State in the Sudan 1881–1898. A Study of its Origins, Development, and Overthrow (Oxford, 1958). Holt, P.M., A modern history of the Sudan, from the Funj Sultanate to the present day (London, 1965). Holt, P. M., Egypt and the Fertile Crescent 1516-1922, A Political History (London, 1966). Holt, P. M., Studies in the History of the Near East (London, 1973). Holt, P. M., Cambridge History of Islam (Cambridge, 1978). Holt, P. M., The memoirs of a Syrian prince : Abu'l-Fidā, Sultan of Ḥamāh (672-732) (Wiesbaden, 1983) Holt, P. M., The Age of the Crusades, The Near East from the Eleventh Century to 1517 (London, 1986). Holt, P. M., Early Mamluk diplomacy (1260 - 1290): Treaties of Baybars and Qalāwūn with Christian rulers (Leiden 1995). Holt, P. M., The Crusader States and Their Neighbours, 1098-1291 (Pearson 2004). Holt, P. M., trans. and ed., The Sudan of the Three Niles: The Funj Chronicle, 910–1288/1504–1871 (Leiden: Brill, 1999). .