Career
His family were natives of Basra in Iraq. Among the great Islamic scholars who were his pupils were Bukhari and Ahmad ibn Hanbal. He is known to have written at least four works, of which two have survived.
These are the Tabaqat (biographies) and Tarikh (history).
The latter is valuable as being one of three of the earliest Arabic histories, but the full text was not known until an 11th-century copy was found in Rabat, Morocco in 1966 (published in 1967).
