Editorial Policy
The present edition of the ʿUyūn represents Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah’s final Version 3, which he was apparently still adding to at the time of his death in 668/1270. MS A, which has Version 2 compared with Version 3 written in margins and on interleaves, was taken as our most important manuscript and formed the initial basis of our edition. Seven other manuscripts supplied additional important copies of Version 3 as well as complete copies of Version 1 and Version 2. The differences between particular readings in the three versions of the ʿUyūn can be found in the critical apparatus. One of the most obvious differences between the three versions is the deletion of the dedication to Amīn al-Dawlah which prefaced Version 1, following Amīn al-Dawlah’s execution in 648/1250–1251. For the two subsequent versions of the ʿUyūn there is no dedicatee. In our edition, however, we have left the dedication to Amīn al-Dawlah in the Preface but have italicized it and noted that it was omitted in the two subsequent versions. In Ch. 15, which included a biography of Amīn al-Dawlah in all three versions, we have presented the biography of Amīn al-Dawlah (Ch. 15.49) as it appeared in Versions 2 and 3 and placed the quite different text of Version 1 in an addendum. In exceptional instances we have preferred readings from Version 1 or 2 or a reading from the tradition of source texts quoted by Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah, which have been collated by us largely for the first time, and in these instances the choices are duly noted in the critical apparatus. We present the text in modern standard orthography, with minimal vowelling for the prose and some more vowelling in the poetry.
Detailed indexes to the edition and translation of the ʿUyūn – covering subjects, people, and places, as well as Qur’anic quotations, rhymes and weights and measures – are to be found at the end of Volume 1, following a general index to the essays and introductory material forming Volume 1.