Did al-Jawhari originate the arrangement of al-Sihah, or did others precede him?

Al-Jawhari's al-Sihah arranges Arabic words in chapters by the last radical of the root, then by the first, second and third letters, and al-Jawhari was long regarded as the pioneer of this method until researchers of the fourteenth Islamic century disputed it. ^{1 2} The editor of al-Sihah, Ahmad Abd al-Ghafur Attar, sets out the dispute in an essay, "al-Jawhari, Originator of the Method of al-Sihah", appended to his second edition. ³

In 1394 AH Dr Bakri Shaykh Amin published an article, "Al-Jasir and Attar Expose a Scholarly Error", reporting that Hamad al-Jasir had shown in his journal al-Arab that Abu Bishr al-Yaman ibn Abi al-Yaman al-Bandaniji, who died in 284 AH, preceded al-Jawhari in the rhyme arrangement by more than a hundred years, producing photographs of the manuscript of Kitab al-Taqfiya, and noting that the book was obscure and seldom mentioned. ^{1 4} Al-Jasir was followed by the editor of Kitab al-Taqfiya, Dr Khalil Ibrahim al-Atiyya of the University of Basra, who credited al-Bandaniji with the invention. ⁵

Attar notes that the German orientalist Fritz Krenkow had preceded al-Jasir in denying al-Jawhari's originality, claiming that he took into al-Sihah the material of his uncle al-Farabi's Diwan al-Adab — perhaps prompted by Yaqut's statement that he saw a copy of Diwan al-Adab in al-Jawhari's hand, read with Abu Ibrahim at Farab. ^{6 7} Another researcher, as Bakri Shaykh Amin reports, held that al-Farabi (d. 350 AH) preceded al-Jawhari in the system of chapter and section. ⁴

Attar holds al-Jawhari the originator of his method, arguing: al-Bandaniji wrote not a dictionary but a book on rhyming, ordering words by their spoken surface form rather than their roots and without regard to their first letters, whereas al-Jawhari used only the final radical and then ordered by the first, second and third letters. ^{8 9 2} Al-Bandaniji and his book were obscure, so neither al-Jawhari nor his contemporaries saw it, nor do later dictionaries mention it; priority in time does not cancel originality when the later author never saw the earlier work. ⁶ Arranging words by their endings, moreover, had been done before by the poets themselves through the single rhyme. ⁹ As for al-Farabi, Attar grants that he "laid some of the foundations of the method of al-Sihah", but holds that al-Jawhari far surpassed him and perfected the system, and that the two dictionaries differ so much in method, arrangement and number of entries that no charge of plagiarism stands. ^{6 7}