Al-Tabari’s History of the Prophets and Kings: Noah

Record summary

Al-Tabari’s universal history preserves an influential Arabic narrative of Noah, the flood, the ark and the dispersal of peoples. It gathers earlier exegetical and historical materials, often presenting variant reports through chains or attributions. This makes it useful for studying how late antique Near Eastern traditions were organized in medieval Islamic historiography and how biblical-era narratives acquired genealogical and geographical extensions. The work is a compilation with layered sources, so individual reports should not be treated as direct eyewitness testimony or as a single consistent tradition.