Makrizi, TAKI-ED-DIN AHMED EL-, the most eminent of the Arabic historians of Egypt, was born 1364 A.D. at Cairo, but derives his surname from his family's residence at Makrîz, a suburb of Baalbek in Syria. He studied theology and jurisprudence under the best teachers; made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1385; and held various official posts, as secretary of state, inspector of the markets (1398), preacher, reader, and lecturer at several mosques and colleges at Cairo, and (1408) curator of the Kalânsiya and the Nuriya hospital at Damascus. Returning to Cairo, he devoted himself to the historical studies which have made him renowned, and after a second pilgrimage to Mecca (1430-35) he died at Cairo in 1442 at the age of seventy-eight.
He wrote sixteen works, besides smaller memoirs, of which the following are the most important: The Khitat, or History and Topography of Egypt and (especially) Cairo, printed at Bûlâk (2 vols. 1853), but never completely translated, a work of the highest importance to historians and archaeologists; a general history from 1181 to 1440, of which a part has been translated by Quatremère as Histoire des Sultans Mamlouks (2 vols. 1837-44); biographies of famous men who lived in Egypt, unfinished and unpublished; a treatise on Mohammedan coins, translated by De Sacy (1797), and another on Mohammedan weights and measures, edited by Tychsen (1800); History of Hadramaut, edited by Noskowij (1866); Arab migrations to Egypt, edited by Wüstenfeld (1847); the Mohammedan kings of Abyssinia, edited by Rink (1790). See De Sacy, Chrest. Arabe, i. 112; Wüstenfeld, Die Geschichtsschreiber der Araber.