Abu Amr Ishaq ibn Mirar al-Shaybani

Abū ‘Amr Isḥaq ibn Mirār ash-Shaybānī was a famous lexicographer-encyclopedist and collector-transmitter of Arabic poetry of the Kufan School of philology. Abu Amr was born in Kufa in the first quarter of the second/eighth century. A native of Ramādat al-Kūfah, who lived in Baghdad, he was a mawla (client) under the protection of the Banū Shaybān, hence his nisba. Descended from an Iranian landowning family (dehqān) on his paternal side, his mother was a 'Nabataean', and he reportedly knew a little of the 'Nabataean' language. The biographers al-Nadīm and Ibn Khallikān quote a claim by Ibn al-Sikkit's that he lived to the age of one hundred and eighteen and wrote in his own hand up to his death, in 213/828. However this is disputed by a claim that he died in 206/821 aged one hundred and ten, and this latter is deemed credible.