Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 5.1. Two-thousand-year-old fragment of pottery tempered with the freshwater
sponge Eunapius nitens (Penny and Racek), Jebel Tomat, lower White Nile Valley,
central Sudan. (Photo: Don Adamson.)
The Arab geographer Muhammad Ibn Ibrahim Ibn Battutah (1304-1377) was
the greatest desert traveller of all time, covering 120,000 km (75,000 miles) during
nearly thirty years (1325-1354) of travel. After his return to Tangier in Morocco, he
dictated a lengthy account ( Rihlah ,or Travels ) of the history, geography and customs
of the places he had visited, including Mecca, Persia, Mesopotamia, Arabia, Asia
Minor, Bukhara, Afghanistan, India, China, Spain and Timbuktu (see the foreword
and commentary by TimMackintosh-Smith in the 2012 folio volume of TheTravelsof
Ibn Battutah and the abridged text). Another great Arab scholar 'Abd Ar-Rahman Ibn
Khaldun (1332-1406) wrote a monumental history of the Arabs and Berbers ( Kitab
al 'Ibar ) and a later account (the Maqaddimah ,or Introduction to History ) describing
what he saw as the cyclical progression of nomadic peoples to urban civilization
followed by a collapse and a return to less sedentary living. Hourani ( 2009 ) provides
further details about these two great scholar-travellers in his magisterial A History of
the Arab Peoples . These accounts of the medieval desert world were familiar to later
generations of Arabic-speaking European explorers of Arabia and the Sahara, such as
Heinrich Barth (1821-1865), Gerhard Rohlfs (1831-1896), Gustav Nachtigal (1834-
1885), Richard Burton (1821-1890) and Charles Montagu Doughty (1843-1926), all
of whom published vivid and scholarly accounts of the peoples among whom they
Search WWH ::




Custom Search