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Two Arabic Travel Books - Accounts of China and India and Mission to the Volga (Hardcover)
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Two Arabic Travel Books - Accounts of China and India and Mission to the Volga (Hardcover)
Series: Library of Arabic Literature
Expected to ship within 12 - 19 working days
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Two Arabic Travel Books combines two exceptional exemplars of
Arabic travel writing, penned in the same era but chronicling
wildly divergent experiences. Accounts of China and India is a
compilation of reports and anecdotes on the lands and peoples of
the Indian Ocean, from the Somali headlands to China and Korea. The
early centuries of the Abbasid era witnessed a substantial network
of maritime trade-the real-life background to the Sindbad tales. In
this account, we first travel east to discover a vivid human
landscape, including descriptions of Chinese society and
government, Hindu religious practices, and natural life from flying
fish to Tibetan musk-deer and Sri Lankan gems. The juxtaposed
accounts create a jigsaw picture of a world not unlike our own, a
world on the road to globalization. In its ports, we find a
priceless cargo of information; here are the first foreign
descriptions of tea and porcelain, a panorama of unusual social
practices, cannibal islands, and Indian holy men-a marvelous,
mundane world, contained in the compass of a novella. In Mission to
the Volga, we move north on a diplomatic mission from Baghdad to
the upper reaches of the Volga River in what is now central Russia.
This colorful documentary by Ibn Fadlan relates the trials and
tribulations of an embassy of diplomats and missionaries sent by
caliph al-Muqtadir to deliver political and religious instruction
to the recently-converted King of the Bulghars. During eleven
months of grueling travel, Ibn Fadlan records the marvels he
witnesses on his journey, including an aurora borealis and the
white nights of the North. Crucially, he offers a description of
the Viking Rus, including their customs, clothing, tattoos, and a
striking account of a ship funeral. Mission to the Volga is also
the earliest surviving instance of sustained first-person travel
narrative in Arabic-a pioneering text of peerless historical and
literary value. Together, the stories in Two Arabic Travel Books
illuminate a vibrant world of diversity during the heyday of the
Abbasid empire, narrated with as much curiosity and zeal as they
were perceived by their observant beholders. A bilingual
Arabic-English edition.
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