IN MORE THAN one publication, Lawrence Conrad has dealt with the symbolic use of numbers in various sources, including Arab-Islamic historiography. Among the issues he drew attention to is the symbolic use of 4, 7, 40 and 70 for the filling in of gaps when, for instance, factual numbers were lacking. Citing Ibn Khaldūn, Conrad has further- more noted that numbers should not necessarily be taken literally since they were sometimes used as qualifiers, meant to reflect magnitude; the number “70”, Ibn Khaldūn simply states, stands for “many“?

Doubts about the precision, if not outright reliability, of numbers have also been raised by Philip Fields and Gautier Juynboll. After listing some numbers found in the volume of al-Ṭabarī that he has translated, Fields states that “these figures may be subject to the cus- tomary exaggeration”. In the preface to the volume that Juynboll has translated, he similarly described the numbers used by Sayf ibn ʿUmar (died 180 AH /796 AD) as “inflated”, and suggested that, to make at least good reading, the numbers above 1000 constituting “nearly all Sayf's numbers”, should be divided by 100 and numbers below 100 be divided by 10.

These observations provoked my interest in learning about the use of numbers in all of al-Ṭabarī's Taʾrikh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk, and I reasoned as follows. When events occur in the real world, they simply do not come in neatly packaged sets of numbers. It is legitimate to assume that the more stereotypical a work is in the use of numbers, and the less varied and disparate these numbers are, the less reliable it is likely to be; suspect, then, should al-Ṭabarī's History be if, when its numbers are analyzed, they yield a pattern betraying indiscriminate repetition of, and selected preference for, particular numbers either in themselves or through multiplying these by 10, 100 or some other coefficient.

The statements above constitute generalizations about two important aspects of the use of numbers: (1) specific numbers as topoi, and (2) a tendency toward numerical exaggeration. In exploring these two themes in al-Tabarī's Taʾrīkh, this article will make use of the quantitative approach in the historical enterprise, which highlights what is typical, rather than the unique, which characterizes the qualitative approach-the twin sister of the quantitative method.