, often translated as " " or " ," is the most important Islamic history of the premodern world. Written by the great fourteenth-century Arab scholar (d. 1406), this monumental work established the foundations of several fields of knowledge, including the of , , and . The first complete English translation, by the eminent Islamicist and interpreter of Arabic literature , was published in three volumes in 1958 as part of the Bollingen Series and received immediate acclaim in the United States and abroad.