, early Arab historian and geographer, fl. in the second half of the 3rd/9th century. Life . Abu ’l-Abbās Aḥmad b. Abī Yaʿḳūb b. D̲j̲aʿfar b. Wahb b. Wāḍiḥ was born in Bag̲h̲dād in the 3rd/9th century. Trained as a member of the secretarial class, he went to Armenia as a young man and later served under the Ṭāhirids [ q.v.] in K̲h̲urāsān. After the fall of the Ṭāhirids there in 259/872-3, he settled in Egypt, and died there in the early 4th/10th century, but apparently not before 292/905. Works . Three of al-Yaʿḳūbī’s works have come down to us. The first in importance is the Taʾrīk̲h̲ …

(a.), vizier or chief minister. I. In the Arab World 1. The ʿAbbāsids. Etymology The term wazīr occurs in the Ḳurʾān (XXV, 35: “We gave Moses the book and made his brother Aaron a wazīr with him”), where it has the sense of “helper”, a meaning well attested in early Islamic poetry (for examples, see Goitein, The origin of the vizierate, 170-1). Though several scholars have proposed Persian origins for the term and for the institution, there is no compelling reason to doubt the Arabic provenance of the term or an Arab-Islamic origin and evolution of the institution of the wazīr (cf. Goitein, op. ci…