In my estimation, two factors have led people (1) into this pitfall. The first is their failure to study the thirteenth volume carefully and to examine its biographical entries with a searching, investigative eye.

The second concerns the biography of Sultan al-Malik al-Manṣūr Nūr al-Dīn ʿAlī, son of Sultan al-Malik al-Muʿizz Aybak al-Turkumānī. Al-Dhahabī states that he lingered until almost 700 AH, yet researchers have overlooked the fact that al-Dhahabī mentioned him only because he assumed power after the murder of his father al-Muʿizz Aybak in 655 AH, and that he remained on the throne for merely two and a half years, for he was deposed late in 657 AH when Sayf al-Dīn Quṭuz became sultan. Whatever al-Dhahabī recorded about his later life was simply a digression, nothing more. It was also al-Dhahabī’s practice in this book to gather relatives in a single place, as will be explained below.

3 – We have already noted that al-Dhahabī composed the work in fourteen volumes and instructed the copyists to extract the first and second volumes from Tārīkh al-Islām, for these two contain the Prophetic biography and the lives of the Four Caliphs, as is confirmed in his own handwriting on the flyleaf of the third volume.

The endowment deed (waqfiyya) for the book, drawn up for the Maḥmūdiyya School in Cairo—and whose wording is recorded on every volume—states that twelve volumes were endowed. The deed inscribed on the third volume, the first of the volumes that have come down to us, reads: “The noble, exalted, illustrious Maḥmūd Aṣtādār has endowed, dedicated, and consecrated this entire volume and the volumes that follow it until the end of the book, the total being twelve consecutive volumes, from this volume through the end of the fourteenth….”