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The chronography of al-Makīn Ibn al-ʿAmīd (1206–1293) is a major work in the Copto-Arabic historiographical tradition. Its importance is twofold: on the one hand, its author, a high-ranking official in the Ayyubid and Mamluk administration, drew from different sources, some of them still close to late antiquity, to present an orderly picture of the events from Creation to his own time. On the other hand, his summary of Biblical, Graeco-Roman, and Islamic history attracted the interest of various readerships. It enjoyed widespread popularity among Oriental Christians, in Arabic-speaking communities but also in Ethiopia. It was consulted and quoted by several Mamluk historians, including Ibn Ḫaldūn and his pupil al-Maqrīzī; and finally, it was translated into Latin as early as 1625 by the Dutch Arabist Erpenius, providing early modern Europe with the first clear exposé of Islamic history. Thus, Ibn al-ʿAmīd’s chronography proved influential upon different audiences in various epochs; at the same time, it also constituted a major instance of Christian-Muslim intellectual interaction in the pre-modern era. This critical edition covers the section from Adam to the end of the Achaemenids (ch. 1–91). The text was established on 25 of the 29 known manuscripts and is accompanied by an annotated English translation and an introduction covering the author’s life, the genre of late antique and medieval chronographies, the different recensions in which Ibn al-ʿAmīd’s work has been transmitted, its sources, and its afterlife.

The Risālat al-Malāʾika (‘Epistle of the Angels’) is a treatise that Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī composed in his old age, to answer some morphological questions raised by one of his disciples. It is preceded by a fictional introduction in which the author imagines embarking on a grammatical discussion with some angels in a last attempt to delay his fateful hour. In the part translated and commented in this article, al-Maʿarrī, together with some men of letters, tries to convince the Guardian of Paradise to grant them access to heavenly joys because of their linguistic skills. He discusses in particular the derivation and the morphological behaviour of some objects that can be found in Heaven, such as the Tūbā tree or the houris. The passage offers an interesting picture of the method followed in ‘ilm al-taṣrīf (‘morphology’), a field of scholarship which received considerable attention by the first generations of grammarians, but came later to be partially neglected in favour of other disciplines. At the same time, the introduction of the Risālat al-Malāʾika, whose chronological relation to the Risālat al-Ġufrān remains hard to define, is a deeply ironic text, targeting Islamic popular beliefs concerning the Afterword, grammar and grammarians and, most importantly, the author himself.