Deaths of Eminent Men and History of the Sons of the Epoch (Arabic: وفيات الأعيان وأنباء أبناء الزمان, romanized: wafayāt al-ʾaʿyān wa-ʾanbāʾ ʾabnāʾ al-zamān), is an eight-volume biographical reference dictionary of Islamic scholarship and literature authored by Ibn Khallikan and completed in 1274.
He documented the lives of notable cultural figures, the celebrated writers, aristocrats, scientists, religious and legal scholars, arranged in an alphabetic order.
The author selected authentic material for his biographies and with his intelligence and scholarship, he decided to write with an elegant language enriched with poetry and anecdotes of Muslim life.
His book served as a valuable reference for his contemporaries and carries fragments from earlier biographies that no longer exist.
[1][3] An English translation by William McGuckin de Slane, in four volumes, published between 1801 and 1878, runs to over 2,700 pages.