Rhino-escape tips to omelette Viagra – 14th-century Arab encyclopaedia

Al-Nuwayri’s The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition, to be published in translation by Penguin in October, has been compressed down from 33 volumes

Dealing with everything from “the Classification of Names of Dust and its Qualities” to “Poetic Descriptions of the Down on the Young Male Cheek”, via the ingredients of an omelette which increases sexual potency, a 14th-century Egyptian scholar’s attempt to catalogue all knowledge has been translated into English for the first time.

Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri lived from 1272 to 1332. He was a civil servant in the Mamluk empire until he retired from government service in the 1310s and decided to catalogue everything known to exist, in an encyclopaedia which eventually spanned more than 9,000 pages and 33 volumes. Penguin Classics, which publishes the first ever English translation of The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition in October, said that the compendium of knowledge from the classical Islamic world was “as important a work to civilization as Pliny’s natural history”, and “an astonishing record of the knowledge of a civilization”.

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