G. Rex Smith is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Manchester, UK. He was professor of Arabic there, 1990-97, after teaching also in the universities of Cambridge, 1970-75, and Durham, 1978-89. A large part of his research over the years has been in the field of Arabian history, particularly that of the south of the peninsula, the Yemen. He has published numerous articles on this subject, some of which are collected in Studies in the Medieval History of the Yemen and South Arabia (Variorum, Ashgate, Aldershot, 1997). He has also published (in two volumes) The Ayyubids and Early Rasulids in the Yemen, Gibb Memorial Series, London, 1974-78, the first volume of which is the edition of an Arabic chronicle which covers the period of the Ayyubids in the Yemen and the Rasulids down to the year 694/1295. He is the translator and annotator of a volume of The History of al-Tabari. The Conquest of Iran, vol. XIV of the Bibliotheca Persica, Albany NY, 1994. Recently he published A Medieval Administrative and Fisc
