Biographical dictionary

Others are specialized, in that they cover important names in a subject field, such as architecture or engineering.

Tarif Khalidi claimed the genre of biographical dictionaries is a "unique product of Arab Muslim culture".

[1] The earliest extant example of the biographical dictionary dates from 9th-century Iraq, and by the 16th-century it was a firmly established and well-respected form of historical writing.

[3] The largest known biographical dictionary ever produced is called History of Damascus authored by a Muslim historian Ibn Asakir.

[4] When it comes to the numbers of individuals, American scholar of Islam Richard Bulliet argues that "a brief look at Brockelmann's Geschichte der Arabischen Litteratur is sufficient to convince anyone that the number of individual biographies extant must run into the hundreds of thousands and most likely into the millions.