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Two Arabic Travel Books: Accounts of China and India and Mission to the Volga (Library of Arabic Literature, 17) by Abū Zayd al-Sīrāfī, Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, James E. Montgomery, Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, Abu Zayd al-Sirafi 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

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Author

Abū Zayd al-Sīrāfī, Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, James E. Montgomery, Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, Abu Zayd al-Sirafi

Publisher

NYU Press | LIbrary of Arabic Literature

Published

2015

Language

EN

ISBN

9781479844524

Category

travel

Subjects

Literary Collections, History, Travel

Rating

4.21 / 5 (13 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14