Al-Iklil

Kitāb al-Iklīl (Arabic: كتاب الإكليل) fully known as the Kitāb al-Iklīl min akhbār al-Yaman wa-ansāb Ḥimyar (Crowns from the Accounts of the Yemen and the genealogies of Ḥimyar), is a book about the ancient history of Yemen and the Himyarite Kingdom written by the 10th-century grammarian, chemist and historian Abu Muhammad al-Hasan al-Hamdani. It was first written and published in the 10th century in ten volumes, only four of which exist to this day.

Of the ten volumes of Kitāb al-Iklīl published in the 10th century, only the first, second, eighth and tenth volumes survived intact to the present day.^[1][2]

In 1881, parts of the work were translated into German by David Heinrich Müller.^[3]

The historian Nabih Amin Faris compiled the four surviving volumes into an annotated work, al-Juz' al-Thamin, published in 1940 by Princeton University Press as part of the Princeton Oriental Texts collection.^[2]

In 2020, a portion of the lost sixth volume was found in the archives of the Bavarian State Library in Munich and was published by a researcher in the Arabia Felix Academy.^[1]

An abridged version of the texts has been made available under a Creative Commons license for reading in some online libraries.^[4][5]

The first two volumes record genealogies, especially that of the family of king Sheba son of Yashjoub.^[1][2][5]

The second volume contains a poem, al-Risala al-Damighah.^[6] This poem has sometimes been published separately with commentaries.^[6]

The eighth volume describes archaeological finds in Yemen and discusses the poetry of Dhu Jadan and Abu Karib.^[1][2]

The tenth volume concerns the history of the people of Hamdan, the hometown of the author.^[7]

• The Book of Crowns on the Kings of Himyar

• The full readable manuscript of the Kitāb al-Iklīl on the Al-Maktaba Al-Shamela library
• Digitized and PDF versions of the 1949 Cairo edition of the 10th volume of Kitab al-Iklīl, under a Creative Commons license