Looking for ancient texts in Arabic

It’s a bit of a treasure hunt, nosing around in some of the minor language groups of the ancient world. You’re always looking for some text that will tell you a bit more about antiquity, give a bit more primary data than you get from the standard texts.

And what does every treasure-hunter need?  A treasure map!!!  Ideally you get a list of ancient authors and what they wrote, written in antiquity before lots of it was lost.

According to Georg Graf’s modern route-map, the Geschichte der arabischen christlichen Literatur, such a thing does exist for Arabic Christian literature.  It’s by a chap called Abu’l-Barakat, and is a list of Arabic Christian literature, names and works.

It was published with a German translation by Wilhelm Riedel, Der Katalog der christlichen Schriften in arabischer Sprache von Abu’l-Barakat, in Nachrichten der K. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. Philologisch-Hist. Klasse, 1902 (Heft 5), pp. 636-706.

Interestingly volumes of this journal are online at Archive.org.  But not, of course, this one.

Wouldn’t it be nice if this was online, in English?

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