Book of Roads and Kingdoms (al-Bakrī)

Book of Roads and Kingdoms or Book of Highways and Kingdoms (Arabic: كتاب المسالك والممالك, Kitāb al-Masālik wa'l-Mamālik‎‎) is the name of an eleventh-century geography text by Abu Abdullah al-Bakri.

It was written in 1067-8 in Córdoba, al-Andalus (present day Spain). Al-Bakri based his work on the accounts of traders, the writings of Muhammad ibn Yusuf al-Warraq,^[1] (On the Topography of North Africa), and Abraham ben Jacob. Despite the fact that al-Bakri never left al-Andalus, his writings are regarded as objectively reporting the accounts of other travelers by contemporary historians, and much of what he wrote is substantiated in other sources.

He described a wide array of regions from the Atlantic Ocean, through the Sahara, to Central Africa, giving descriptions of the geography, people, culture and political situation in each region. The Book of Roads and Kingdoms exists today only in fragmentary form. It is sometimes confused with a work by the same name written in the ninth century by ibn Khordadbeh.

References

↑ Levtzion, Nehemia (1973). Ancient Ghana and Mali. New York: Methuen & Co Ltd. p. 22. ISBN 0841904316.

Islamic-spain.tv: Geography and al-Andalus - Website of a documentary on the rise, reign, and fall of Islamic Spain.

Geography and cartography in medieval Islam

Geographers

9th century	Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī Abū Ḥanīfa Dīnawarī Ya'qubi Sulaiman al-Tajir
10th century	Ibn Khordadbeh Ahmad ibn Rustah Ahmad ibn Fadlan Abu Zayd al-Balkhi Abū Muhammad al-Hasan al-Hamdānī Al-Masudi Istakhri Khashkhash Ibn Saeed Ibn Aswad Ibn Hawqal Ibn al-Faqih Al-Muqaddasi Al-Ramhormuzi
11th century	Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī Abu Saʿīd Gardēzī Al-Bakri Mahmud al-Kashgari Domiyat
12th century	Al-Zuhri Muhammad al-Idrisi Abu'l Abbas al-Hijazi
13th century	Ibn Jubayr Saadi Shirazi Yaqut al-Hamawi Ibn Said al-Maghribi Ibn al-Nafis
14th century	Al-Dimashqi Abu'l-Fida Ibn al-Wardi Hamdollah Mostowfi Ibn Battuta Lin Nu
15th century	Abd-al-Razzāq Samarqandī Ghiyāth al-dīn Naqqāsh Ahmad ibn Mājid Zheng He Ma Huan Fei Xin
16th century	Sulaiman Al Mahri Piri Reis Mir Ahmed Nasrallah Thattvi Amīn Rāzī
17th century	Evliya Çelebi

Works

Influences

Geography (Ptolemy)

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