What is the Suda?
Q: What is the Suda?
A: The Suda is a massive 10th century Byzantine encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world. It is an encyclopedic dictionary, written in Greek, with 30,000 entries.
Q: What does the word 'Suda' mean?
A: The derivation of 'Suda' is probably from the Byzantine Greek word souda, meaning 'fortress' or 'stronghold'.
Q: What type of work is the Suda?
A: The Suda is somewhere between a grammatical dictionary and an encyclopedia in the modern sense. It explains the source, derivation, and meaning of words according to the philology of its period.
Q: What makes articles on literary history valuable in this work?
A: Articles on literary history are valuable because they supply details and quotations from authors whose works are otherwise lost.
Q: Who was likely responsible for writing this lexicon?
A: It is inferred that a Christian was responsible for writing this lexicon due to it dealing with both biblical and pagan subjects.
Q: How reliable are the articles within this work?
A: The articles within this work are not very reliable as they are uncritical and much added to; their value also varies greatly.
Q: Is there an Islamic parallel to the Souda?
A: Yes, there is a near-contemporaneous Islamic parallel called Kitab al-Fehrest by Ibn al-Nadim.
