and from him people heard—among them Abū Muslim al-Kajji, who listened to my grandfather. When he missed a portion, Abū Muslim obtained it from me, and my grandfather passed away while he was reciting to me (1).

What I heard from him were the Musnad of the Ten (2), the Musnad of al-ʿAbbās (3), and part of the mawālī section, all before I had reached ten years of age. I was born at the beginning of the year 254 AH (4).

Abū Saʿd al-Samʿānī states in al-Ansāb:

Abū Bakr al-Sadūsī said: “When I was born, my father came in to my mother and said, ‘The astrologers have taken this boy’s horoscope and calculated that he will live for such-and-such a span. I have converted that span into days and resolved to set aside one dinar for every day.’ So he brought me a ḥubb (a large earthenware jar) (5) and filled it. Then he said, ‘Prepare another ḥubb for me,’ which he also filled as a precaution; after that he filled a third and buried them.

“But none of that benefited me against the vicissitudes of time, and I have been reduced to the state you now see.”

Abū Bakr ibn al-Saqaṭī remarked: “We saw him destitute, coming to us without even a waist-wrapper; we would take dictation from him, and people would show him kindness with one small gift after another (6).”

I say: I possess from his transmission the first part of the Musnad of ʿAmmār. He died in Rabīʿ al-Ākhir of the year 331 AH, at the age of seventy-eight.