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Two Arabic Travel Books: Accounts of China and India and Mission to the Volga (Library of Arabic Literature, 17) by Abu Zayd Al-Sirafi; Tim Mackintosh-Smith; Ahmad ibn Fadlān; James E. Montgomery is a travel available to read on EtoBox.

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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 c

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Author

Abu Zayd Al-Sirafi; Tim Mackintosh-Smith; Ahmad ibn Fadlān; James E. Montgomery

Publisher

New York University Press

Published

2014

Language

EN

ISBN

9781479803507

Category

travel

Subjects

Literary Collections, Fiction, Travel

Rating

4.21 / 5 (13 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14