The Arabic word ta’rikh derives from the root ’-r-kh which literally denotes ‘to date’ and figuratively implies ‘record the events and their dates.’ The latter sense was intended in entitling history books as Ta’rikh from the early second/eighth centuries which included the records of events and their dates. The term khabar had been formerly applied to such collections, though it was later applied to monographs, e.g. Hisham al-Kalbi’s Akhbar al-‘Abbas, and the term ta’rikh referred to recording the accounts of general events and their dates.