BECAUSE OF ITS FOCUS on Damascus and the volume of information it contains, Ibn ‘Asākir's Ta ‘rīkh madznat Dimashq has the potential to be an extraordinarily important source for the study of Umayyad history. However, before scholars of Umayyad history rush to extract material from this potential treasure trove, it is essential to understand more about the sources Ibn ‘Asākir utilized in his work and the methods he used to present materials he derived from these sources. It is also important to determine how reliably Ibn ‘Asākir preserved material from his sources. While such an exercise may be somewhat tedious at times, only after making such an inquiry can we fairly assess the value of Ibn ‘Asākir's TMD as. source for Umayyad history.

Unfortunately,. complete analysis of the sources Ibn ‘Asākir used is unfeasible for. number of reasons. First, the sheer number of biographies the TMD contains and the quantity of citations in each biography present formidable obstacles to such an effort. Second. as will be illustrated more fully below, many of Ibn ‘Asākir's sources are otherwise lost or unknown to us. Hence, it is impossible to verify Ibn ‘Asākir's citations of these sources or to determine with any certainty whether he reproduced them faithfully. This article therefore makes no claim to be. definitive study of each and every source Ibn ‘Asākir used for the. mayyad period. Instead, this will be. rather limited inquiry into the nature and reliability of Ibn ‘Asākir's sources. By examining. number of carefully chosen biographies of Umayyad figures, this article will analyze the sources Ibn ‘Asākir relied upon most heavily, illustrating how he manipulated these sources to fit the structure of his biographies, and determining how reliably he reproduced the informat ion his sources provided.