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XXIV.—An Account of the great Historical Work of the African Philosopher 
Inn Kuarvin. By the Chevalier Jacozn Graserc de Hemsd, M. A., 
F.M.R.A.S., late Swedish and Norwegian Consul for Morocco and Tri- 
poli, Knight of the Sardinian Order of St. Mauritius and Lazarus. 
Read the 21st January 1832. 
* ples) US danb jlecl fa Jedi 
Ibn Khaldan, pv. 1, B. 111., ch. 12. 
Few nations, either ancient or modern, have surpassed the Amazirgs, or 
lineal descendants of the primitive inhabitants of northern Africa, in 
power to produce a more ingenious and contemplative writer than the one 
now before us. And yet this writer, equally profound as an historian and 
as a statesman, has hitherto been so little known in Europe, that the 
majority of our Arabic scholars have but very confused notions of his 
scientific and literary merits, and to many, even his name is almost unknown. 
In the East, and in Africa, however, the great historical work he has com- 
posed, has given him a celebrity which no lapse of time, nor any vicissitude 
of events, will ever impair or lessen. 
His names and titles are in Arabic : Wali-ad-din Abu-Zaid Abd-ar-rahman 
Ben-Mohammed al Hadhrami al Ishbili; but he is better known by the 
single patronymic name of Inn Kuaxtptn, the etymology of which is most 
likely derived from the circumstance of his father having, in the full posses- 
sion of his health and faculties, attained an extreme oldage. This old man, 
surnamed Kuatptn, was a native Amazirg or Berber; but his wife, de- 
scending from a family of the Arabian province Hadhramat, made her son 
adopt the surname of Ar-Hapurami. The second surname, AL-Isusiti, 
he assumed because he had prosecuted and accomplished his studies at the 
university of Seville in Andalusia, in which city, it would also appear, that 
his mother was born. He came into the world at Tunis, in the year 1332 
of the Christian era, and passed his youth, and many years of his manhood, 
in Egypt. He then served a short time under Timtr, as chief justice at 
Damascus, and made a journey with that conqueror to Samarkand ; after 
* For the translation, see page 394, chap. 12. 
Vor. III. 3 E 
