The events of the year 768 AH are mentioned only up to the month of Rabiʿ al-Akhir, and no heading is given for them. This astonished me, because I know that the manuscript copy of this chronicle kept in the Aḥmadiyya School Library in Aleppo—ten large volumes catalogued under no. 1217—ends, in its ninth volume (which contains the obituaries and events), with the year 738 AH. The last sentence in that volume reads:

“ My work of excerpting from his History was completed on Wednesday, the twentieth of Jumada al-Akhirah in the year 751 AH—may Allah grant it a good conclusion, amen. Thus ends what I have written, from the creation of Adam—upon him and upon our Prophet the best blessings and peace—up to our own time. All praise belongs to Allah, Lord of the worlds, and may He send prayers upon our master Muhammad, his family, his Companions, and those who follow them with excellence until the Day of Judgment. ”

Then, in a different hand, one finds: “The next part, Allah willing, will follow; it is al-Nihāyah on the matters of the Hereafter, the closing of al-Bidāyah concerning al-baʿth waʾl-nushūr (resurrection and rising). The tenth volume begins with the malāḥim and fitan that will occur at the end of time.”

After examining the end of the fourteenth volume, I discovered these words written at the conclusion of the events of the year 738 AH: “Written by Ismaʿil ibn Kathir al-Qurashi al-Shafiʿi—may Allah pardon him, amen.”

In the marginal note the proof-reader added: “So it appears in all the base manuscripts.”

Both statements show that the author brought his History only up to that year. Yet in the printed text we read: “Then the year 739 AH commenced,” after which he proceeds to list its events and deaths, continuing until he records some happenings of the year 768 AH, as mentioned earlier, and with that the book ends.

These intervening years—from 739 AH to 768 AH—are therefore, without doubt, the work of someone other than the ḥāfiẓ Ibn Kathir. The eminent scholar Shaykh ʿImad al-Din Ibn Kathir gave lessons in tafsīr up to the end, and

here the proof-reader notes: “So it is in the Istanbul copies, whereas the Egyptian copies have a half-page blank in the exemplar. This plainly shows that the words are not by Ibn Kathir, and some text at the beginning of the year has fallen out.”

Wanting to identify the author of the continuation, I began to investigate. I found, in my own handwriting on the margin of Kashf al-Ẓunūn under the entry for this History, a note that reads: “See what is written in the appendix to the Addenda of Tadhkirat al-Ḥuffāẓ, printed by Sayyid Ḥusām al-Dīn al-Qudsī on p. 250.”

I returned to that work and found, among the annotations of the distinguished scholar Shaykh Muḥammad Zāhid al-Kawtharī on the biography of the learned Aḥmad ibn Ḥajjī (d. 816 AH), the following words: “He composed a supplement to Ibn Kathir’s History, recording the events of each month and who died therein; it is extremely useful.”

Al-Ḥāfiẓ al-Sakhāwī says in his Ḍawʾ ⦗1/270⦘ that it begins with the year 741 AH and ends with the year 815 AH.

Ibn Qāḍī Shuhbah states: “He wrote six years beginning with 741 AH, then resumed from 769 AH and continued until shortly before his death. He had instructed me to complete the missing section, so I did.”

I next consulted Ḍawʾ al-Sakhāwī ⦗1/270⦘ and al-Shadharāt ⦗7/117⦘ and found the matter exactly as he had said. It thus becomes clear that this supplement, covering the period from 739 AH onward—not 741 AH—is partly by Aḥmad ibn Ḥajjī and partly by Ibn