Byzantine encyclopedia-Suda or Souda

Byzantine encyclopedia-Suda or Souda .................................................................. WIKIPEDIA...............................http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suda................................ Suda On Line: Byzantine Lexicography........................http://www.stoa.org/sol/................................ ...................................................................................................... The Suda or Souda (Greek: Σοῦδα) is a massive 10th century Byzantine encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world, formerly attributed to an author called Suidas. It is an encyclopedic lexicon, written in Greek, with 30,000 entries, many drawing from ancient sources that have since been lost, and often derived from medieval Christian compilers. The derivation is probably[1] from the Byzantine Greek word souda, meaning "fortress" or "stronghold," with the alternate name, Suidas, stemming from an error made by Eustathius, who mistook the title for the proper name of the author. ....................................................................................................... It includes numerous quotations from ancient writers; the scholiasts on Aristophanes, Homer, Sophocles and Thucydides are also much used. The biographical notices, the author avers, are condensed from the Onomatologion or Pinax of Hesychius of Miletus; other sources were the excerpts of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, the chronicle of Georgius Monachus, the biographies of Diogenes Laertius and the works of Athenaeus and Philostratus. Other principal sources include a lexicon by "Eudemus," perhaps derived from the work On Rhetorical Language by Eudemus of Argos.[2] ........................................................................................................... Suda On Line: Byzantine Lexicography............................. ...........................................http://www.stoa.org/sol/.................................. ................................................... The work deals with biblical as well as pagan subjects, from which it is inferred that the writer was a Christian. A prefatory note gives a list of dictionaries from which the lexical portion was compiled, together with the names of their authors. Although the work is uncritical and probably much interpolated, and the value of its articles is very unequal, the Suda contains much useful information on ancient history and life. ................................................................................................. The Suda has a near-contemporaneous Islamic parallel, the Kitab al-Fehrest of Ibn al-Nadim. ..................................................... Abu'l-Faraj Muhammad bin Is'hāq al-Nadim (Arabic: ابوالفرج محمد بن إسحاق النديم‎) (died September 17, 995 or 998) was a Shia Muslim scholar and bibliographer.[1] He is famous as the author of the Kitāb al-Fihrist. ..................................................................................... His great book, the Fihrist, gives ample testimony to the knowledge of pre-Islamic, Syriac, Greek, Sanskrit, Latin and Persian in classical Islamic civilization. Unfortunately of the Persian books listed by Ibn al-Nadim only a minute sample is extant. .............................................................................................................. ..........................................................................................