al-Anwar wa Mahasin al-Ashar
- Author died
- 377 AH
- Editions
- al-Anwar wa Mahasin al-Ashar
al-Anwar wa Mahasin al-Ashar (The Lights and the Beauties of Poetry) is a fourth-century AH Arabic literary anthology compiled by the poet, grammarian, and scholar Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Muhammad al-Shamshati (d. 377 AH / c. 987 CE) . The work focuses on poetic descriptions (awsaf), similes (tashbihat), and selected literary witticisms and anecdotes (mulah) .
Author and Background
The compiler, al-Shamshati, was an Adawi scholar whose family originated from Shamshat (Samosata) in the frontier regions of Armenia, though he was also associated with Mosul and resided in Baghdad . Ibn al-Nadim noted that al-Shamshati served as tutor to the Hamdanid prince Abu Taghlib (the son of Nasir al-Dawla) and his brother, and later became their boon companion (nadim), describing him as a prolific author, poet, and transmitter possessing a vast memory . Different bibliographical sources record variant dates for his death, including 377 AH, 380 AH, and 453 AH .
Content and Structure
The work is titled in bibliographical sources with slight variations, including Kitab al-Anwar fi al-mulah wa-l-tashbihat wa-l-awsaf and Kitab al-Anwar wa-l-thimar fi al-awsaf wa-l-tashbihat wa-l-mulah . It gathers a broad range of Arabic verse classified thematically around specific descriptive motifs, such as nature, waterwheels (dawlab), ships and rivercraft (urub), millstones, wine, invitations, and elegies .
Among its citations are verses by third-century poets such as al-Husayn ibn Ali al-Antaki and verses transmitted from an unidentified poet from Aleppo (al-Halabi), including an elegy on Abu Tammam and poems describing the cold winter rains of Aleppo .
Transmission and Reception
The book was transmitted in Wasit through Abu Ghalib ibn Ahmad ibn Bushran al-Wasiti, who related it on the authority of Abu al-Hasan Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Jumhur al-Sha'bani from al-Shamshati .
Later historians and biographers relied heavily on the text for preserving otherwise unrecorded verse. In particular, Ibn al-Adim repeatedly quoted passages and poetic selections from the first volume and subsequent sections of the book in his biographical history Bughyat al-Talab fi Tarikh Halab . A number of excerpts and poems quoted by Ibn al-Adim from his manuscript of the book do not appear in the surviving printed text, indicating that the extant manuscript tradition represents an incomplete portion of the original work .
Manuscripts and Publication
A surviving manuscript of the work is preserved in the Ahmet III collection (MS 2392) at Istanbul, comprising 205 folios and copied in 639 AH . The text was published in Baghdad in 1976, and an edition edited by Dr. al-Sayyid Muhammad Yusuf was published in Kuwait by the Ministry of Information in two volumes (1397–1399 AH / 1977–1978 CE) .
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