Al-Mubashshir ibn Fatik was a scholar and patron of the Fatimid court in Cairo in the middle of the eleventh century. He studied medicine; astronomy; and history; and composed a lost History of the Fatimid Caliph al-Mustan?ir (r. 1036-1094). His only book to have survived; The Choicest Maxims and Best Sayings (Kitab mukhtar al-?ikam wa-ma?asin al-kalim or al-kilam); gives 20 biographies of some of the main Semitic; Greek; and Egyptian figures of wisdom and prophecy.

An important part of the biographical and gnomological materials may be compared with similar fragments attested in Greek literature. The Choicest Maxims was a medieval success; translated in at least four European languages from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Pictures From History