ABSTRACT
Ilm al-Tarikh, or historiography, as a term of Arabic literature embraces both annalistic and biographical, but not as a rule literary, history. The development of Arabic and Persian historiography is summarized here in four sections: I. from the origins to the third century of the Hijra; II. from the third to the sixth centuries; III. from the end of the sixth to the beginning of the tenth century; IV. from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries.
