Page:The chronology of ancient nations (IA chronologyofanci00biru).djvu/11

I have boldly attacked the sometimes rather enigmatic style of the author, and if I have missed the mark, if the bewildering variety and multiplicity of the subject-matter have prevented me reaching the very bottom of every question, I must do what more or less every Oriental author does at the end of his work,—humbly ask the gentle reader to pardon my error and to correct it.

The full name of the author is Abû-Raiḥân Muḥammad b. ʼAhmad Albîrûnî. He quotes himself as Abû-Raiḥân (vide p. 184, l. 29), and so he is generally called in Eastern literature, more rarely Albîrûnî.

The latter name means, literally, extraneous, being a derivative from the Persian بیرون which means the outside as a noun, and outside as a preposition. In our time the word is pronounced Bîrûn (or Beeroon), e.g. in Teheran, but the vowel of the first syllable is a yâi-majhûl, which means that in more ancient times it was pronounced Bêrûn (or Bayroon). This statement rests on the authority of the Persian lexicographers. That the name was pronounced in this way in Central Asia about the author's time, we learn from an indisputable statement regarding our author from the pen of Alsamʻânî, a philologist and biographer of high repute, who wrote only one hundred years after the author's death (vide Introduction to my edition of the text, p. xviii.).

He was a native of Khwârizm, or Chorasmia, the modern Khiva; to speak more accurately, a native either of a suburb (Bêrûn) of the capital of the country, both of which bore the same name Khwârizm, or of the country-district (also called Bêrûn) belonging to the capital.

Albûrûnî was born A.H. 362, 3. Dhû-alḥijja (A.D. 973,