Turkey / Greece: Solon (c. 638 – c. 558 BCE), Athenian statesman, lawmaker, and poet, represented with students in a miniature from al-Mubashshir ibn Fatik, Book of the Choicest Maxims and Best Sayings (Kitāb mukhtār al-ḥikam wa-maḥasin al-kalim), Istanbu

Al-Mubashshir ibn Fātik was a scholar and patron of the Fatimid court in Cairo in the middle of the eleventh century. He studied medicine, astronomy, and history, and composed a lost History of the Fatimid Caliph al-Mustanṣir (r. 1036–1094). His only book to have survived, The Choicest Maxims and Best Sayings (Kitāb mukhtār al-ḥikam wa-maḥasin al-kalim or al-kilam), gives 20 biographies of some of the main Semitic, Greek, and Egyptian figures of wisdom and prophecy.

An important part of the biographical and gnomological materials may be compared with similar fragments attested in Greek literature. The Choicest Maxims was a medieval success, translated in at least four European languages from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.

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Supplier: CPA Media Co. Ltd.

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Pictures From History