Yaqut’s Dictionary of Countries

Captured as a boy in Byzantine lands, Yaqut was bought in Baghdad by a merchant, ‘Askar ibn Abi Nasr al-Hamawi, from whom he took his name; his master had him educated and sent him on trading journeys to the Persian Gulf. Once freed, he lived by copying and selling books and travelled through Iran, Syria and Egypt. He spent two or three years in the libraries of Merv, and when the Mongols invaded Khwarazm (1219–1220) he fled to Mosul; later he settled in Aleppo, where he died in August 1229.

The dictionary lists places in alphabetical order, giving the correct vocalisation of each name, its origin and location, and adds history, ethnography and legends, accounts of the Muslim conquests and notes on famous natives; an introduction discusses theories about the nature of the world. By different counts it has some 14,000–16,000 entries. Yaqut finished the first draft in Mosul in 1224 and the final version in Aleppo in 1228 (some accounts place the whole work in Aleppo). The book preserves much early literary, historical and geographical material; its standard edition, by Ferdinand Wüstenfeld, appeared in Leipzig in 1866–1873. Yaqut also compiled a dictionary of men of letters, the Mu‘jam al-udaba.