Hisham Ibn Al-Kalbi also known as Ibn al-Kalbi was an Arab

Arab

Arab people, also known as Arabs , are a panethnicity primarily living in the Arab world, which is located in Western Asia and North Africa. They are identified as such on one or more of genealogical, linguistic, or cultural grounds, with tribal affiliations, and intra-tribal relationships playing...

 historian

Historian

A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

. His full name Abu al-Mundhir Hisham bin Muhammed bin al-Sa'ib bin Bishr al-Kalbi. Born in Kufa

Kufa

Kufa is a city in Iraq, about south of Baghdad, and northeast of Najaf. It is located on the banks of the Euphrates River. The estimated population in 2003 was 110,000....

, he spent much of his life in Baghdad

Baghdad

Baghdad is the capital of Iraq, as well as the coterminous Baghdad Governorate. The population of Baghdad in 2011 is approximately 7,216,040...

. Like his father, he collected information about the genealogies and history of the ancient Arabs. According to the Fihrist, he wrote 140 works. His account of the genealogies of the Arabs is continually quoted in the Kitab al-Aghani

Kitab al-Aghani

Kitab al-aghani , is an encyclopedic collection of poems and songs that runs to over 20 volumes in modern editions by the 8th/9th-century litterateur Abu l-Faraj al-Isfahani . Abu l-Faraj claimed to have taken 50 years in writing the work, which ran to over 10 000 pages...

.

Hisham established a genealogical link between Ishmael

Ishmael

Ishmael is a figure in the Hebrew Bible and the Qur'an, and was Abraham's first born child according to Jews, Christians and Muslims. Ishmael was born of Abraham's marriage to Sarah's handmaiden Hagar...

 and Mohammed and put forth the idea that all 'Arabs' were all descendants of Ishmael. He relied heavily on the ancient oral traditions of the Arabs, but also quoted writers who had access to Biblical and Palmyra

Palmyra

Palmyra was an ancient city in Syria. In the age of antiquity, it was an important city of central Syria, located in an oasis 215 km northeast of Damascus and 180 km southwest of the Euphrates at Deir ez-Zor. It had long been a vital caravan city for travellers crossing the Syrian desert...

n sources. His book Djamharat al Nasab ("The Abundance of Kinship") was translated into German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 by W. Caskel (Das genealogische Werk des Hisam Ibn Muhammad al Kalbi) in 1966.

Works

The Book of Idols

Book of Idols

The Book of Idols , written by the Arab scholar Hisham Ibn Al-Kalbi , describes gods and rites of Arab religion. The text is critical of pre-islamic religion and decries the state of religious corruption which the Arabs had supposedly descended to since the founding of the Kaaba...

(Kitab Al-Asnam)