Eloquence, accuracy of meaning, beauty of simile, and excellence of metaphor, with complete simplicity and tenderness, are the height of eloquence. Therefore, they were easy to memorize and widespread, so they were more prevalent among people and circulated on tongues than other speech. And there is nothing in speech that is more impactful on hearing and more influential on souls than proverbs. Therefore, men of letters in every land and every age have paid attention to proverbs, and have made a special chapter for them in the literature of the language, in which they collected authoritative books. The first to collect proverbs was Solomon, son of David, who wrote them in Hebrew in the tenth century BC and attributed them to the books of the Torah, and found in them a book on its own. As for the last part of these proverbs, from the twenty-fifth chapter to the end of the book, scholars have narrated that it is not Solomon's, but was collected by Hezekiah, King of Judah, in the seventh century BC. In Egypt and Sudan, there were scholars who excelled in eloquence, so they wrote about proverbs and their literature, and collected many proverbs in books. Al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī said, "A proverb is a well-known saying that refers to a pleasant story." Ibn al-Athīr said, "A proverb is a concise expression of a long meaning in a small form." Aristotle said, "Proverbs are the remnants of ancient wisdom that were understood by the wise and lost among their descendants due to their brevity and the subtlety of their meaning." Aristotle also compiled a treatise on proverbs. Zenobius, in the second century AD, compiled a collection of proverbs, and Diogenes Laërtius, who lived in the same century, compiled a collection of proverbs. Then came the Roman era, and their men of letters engaged in proverbs, and Cicero used to cite Greek proverbs in his sayings and writings. Then came the Middle Ages in Europe, and the features of literature were studied. In the fifteenth century AD, Michael Apostolius appeared in Constantinople and collected two thousand ancient proverbs, which were printed in Venice. At that time, many collections of proverbs appeared in all lands. As for Arabic proverbs, we do not know of any book that collected them before the era of Harun al-Rashid in the second century of the Hijra. In this era, many scholars excelled, including Abu Ubaid, Abu Ubaidah, Al-Asma'i, Al-Mufaddal al-Dabbi, Al-Mufaddal bin Muhammad, and Al-Ma'muni, who wrote down the prominent Arabic proverbs and those from the early days of Islam, and attributed each proverb to its origin, and narrated their stories, which were known to them at that time. In the era of the Muladun, proverbs emerged that were not heard in the books of the ancients. The first to write about them was Ibn Abd Rabbih al-Andalusi in his book "Al-Aqd al-Farid" in the year 320 AH, and he included in it many of them.