During the Mamluk sultanate (1250–1517) in Egypt and the Levant, the ruling military elite built monumental public works, gave patronage and endowments to support cultural production, and employed a wide-ranging bureaucracy, all while maintaining a near-constant power struggle amongst themselves. Their development of the area's cities also meant that the Mamluk bureaucracy employed a large number of scholars throughout the two and a half centuries of rule. These bureaucrats produced vast amounts of writing, much of which has survived in manuscript and is currently being studied with renewed interest. In addition to collections of poetry, letters, anecdotes, analyses, commentaries and religious works, there were also a number of significant compositions written that describe the people and structures of the time. These texts include histories, scribal manuals, analyses of state organization, and biographical dictionaries, among other works.

As a form, biographical dictionaries can themselves contain other genres. Histories, genealogies, annals, chronologies, all of these may fit into the umbrella form of biographical dictionary. If the work is arranged as a series of entries about individual people, then it is a biographical dictionary. The intersection of the social, cultural, and political is made manifest in this genre, since the authors can list everything in which a person has participated. Naturally, some authors are more anecdotal and conversational than others in this regard and include a wider range of reported experiences for each entry. By reading a biographical dictionary and tracing the connections among the subjects of the entries, a reader gains a fuller understanding of how the cultural, social, and political webs of subjects and rulers of the Mamluk period interconnected. If we take this a step further, and borrow from Nimrod Luz's book on the Mamluk city in which he argues that Mamluk “cities should be viewed, above all, as socio-cultural-political processes, rather than inert localities,” then we can view the biographical dictionary as a way to describe the city.