Mir'at al-zaman is one of the most enormous chronicles among Arabic historical works; it was written by Sibt ibn al-Jawzi in the 13th century. This work has been regarded as one of the most important sources of history contemporary with the author and has the further value of containing other historical works which have already been lost. Nevertheless, Mir'at remains unedited except for some small parts and has scarcely been examined philologically yet.
Therefore, in this paper I examine Mir'at philologically and start on the classification of its manuscripts into groups.
The first fruit of this paper, is a table of the 111 known manuscripts of Mir'at, together with their bibliographical information, I was able to classify many of the manuscripts as belonging to one of two groups, though many I have been unable to classify yet.
I investigated the features of these two groups of manuscripts. As a result, it develops that one belongs to an abridged edition of Mir'at which was compiled by al-Yunini, the other belongs to an abstracted version which was compiled by an anonymous editor. Although the latter has been regarded as a copy of an original text of Mir'at in former research, I point out the error of this conclusion. I have been unable to discover any copy of the original text among the 111 manuscripts.
Thus, as I point out, the manuscripts of Mir'at which have been used for historical research on medieval western Asia are not those of Mir'at itself, but are historical works abridged from original in a later period. In other words, medieval western Asian history has never been examined using Mir'at itself.
