Tarikh Khalifa ibn Khayyat (The History of Khalifa ibn Khayyat)

The History is the book of Khalifa ibn Khayyat of Basra (d. 240 AH). Its editor, Akram Diya' al-Umari, calls it the oldest annalistic history to have reached us, since the books of annals written before it are lost. ¹ He sees its value in its accuracy and its careful choice of reports, each preceded by a chain of transmission in the manner of the hadith scholars, to whose school Khalifa belonged. ¹

The book moves year by year from the Hijra to the events of 232 AH. ² Khalifa takes care to give tables of the governors and officials at the end of each reign and to name the martyrs of the campaigns and civil wars, and he alone preserves certain reports on the battles of al-Harra and al-Zawiya. ¹

The book reached us in the transmission of Baqi ibn Makhlad of Cordoba from Khalifa. ³ It was found in the zawiya of Tamgrout in Morocco and later moved to the General Library in Rabat, no. 199: a unique copy of 336 pages in Maghribi script, copied by Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Ash'ari in 477 AH. ^{1 4} It was first printed in Iraq in 1386/1967, then in Damascus in 1397/1977. ⁵