643 AH (1), along with many others.

He also cites material taken directly from the autographs of earlier scholars, as in his remark: “I have read this in the handwriting of Ibn Qudāmah” (2).

Beyond this, he appends his own chains of transmission—those he had recited before his teachers—to the relevant biographical entries. This is a genuine enrichment of each notice, for when he writes, for example, “Abu al-Maʿālī al-Abarquhī narrated to us from him in Egypt” (3), or “Abu al-ʿAbbās Ibn al-Zāhirī, Abu al-Ḥusayn al-Yūnīnī, ʿAlī ibn ʿAbd al-Dāʾim, and Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf al-Irbilī narrated to us from him, and so on” (4), this signals that those shaykhs had indeed received knowledge from the subject of the biography (5).

Among his other additions to these abridgements are the dates of death for figures whose passing the original author had left unrecorded. We know, for instance, that Ibn al-Dubaythī did not mention the death of anyone whose demise occurred after 621 AH—the year in which he delivered his Chronicle, representing its final edition (6). Yet several of those scholars actually died in the latter half of the seventh century AH. Al-Dhahabī sought out their dates of death and inserted them, so that his abridgement would be more complete and the information in the book more comprehensive (7).

In addition, he transmits some of the hadiths that appear in these abridgements