of mercantile goods from all around the world: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Khurasan,
Khazaria and Burjan, brought there by the ‘merchants of the sea’, that is, presumably
the Jewish trading confederation of the Radhanites. To their merchandise is to be added
that of the ‘merchants of the Saqaliba’, presumably the Rus of Ibn Khurradadhbih, who
bring fox and beaver pelts from the furthermost reaches of Saqlaba to the Mediterranean
or who sail down the ‘river of the Khazar’, the Volga, to the Caspian (here: the
Khurasanian Sea). Their wares, having been sold in Jurjan, are then taken to al-Rayy. On
account of their similarities, this report is thought to be one of Ibn al-Faqih’s many
borrowings (both avowed and unavowed) from his predecessor or at least to share
a common source, though it is not clear whether the route used by these Saqaliba to
reach the Mediterranean is identical with the Rus merchants of the earlier text. Their
identification as Saqaliba may imply that Dnieper and Volga Rus, and not North Sea
Majus, are meant.
Bibliography: Ibn Khurradadhbih: Arabic text (with a French trans.): Kitab
al-Masalik wa-l-Mamalik (Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum, vol. 6 ), M.J. de
Goeje (ed.), Leiden: Brill, 1967 [ 1889 ]; C.E. Bosworth, Ebn Hordadbeh, Encyclo-
paedia Iranica (= EIr), vol. 8 : 37 – 8 ; J.E. Montgomery, ‘Serendipity, Resistance, and
Multivalency: Ibn Khurradadhbih and his Kitab al-Masalik wa-l-Mamalik’, in
P. Kennedy (ed.), On Fiction and Adab in Medieval Arabic Literature, Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz, 2005 : 177 – 230.
Ibn al-Faqih, Mukhtasar Kitab al-Buldan (Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum,
vol. 5 ), M.J. de Goeje (ed.), Leiden: Brill, 1967 [ 1885 ]; (Mashhad recension)
Kitab al-Buldan, Y. al-Hadi (ed.), Beirut: Alam al-Kutub, 1996 ; French trans.
by H. Massé, Abrégé du livre des pays, Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1973 ;
A.B. Khalidov, Ebn al-Faqih Hamadani, EIr, vol. 8 : 23 – 5.[a = b] Al-Yaqubi was a state bureaucrat who composed his Treatise on the Regions in
Egypt in ad 891 , a chorography in the Islamic administrative tradition. In his discus-
sion of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain), he notes that Seville, which is situated ‘on a mighty
river, the river of Cordoba’, was penetrated in the year 844 by ‘al-Majus who are called
al-Rus, who took captives, slaughtered, burnt and plundered’. This corroborates the
identification of Ibn Khurradadhbih’s first group of Rus as North-Sea Vikings.
Bibliography: Arabic text: Kitab al-Buldan (Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum,
vol. 7 ), M.J. de Goeje (ed.), Leiden: Brill, 1967 [ 1892 ]; French trans. by Gaston
Wiet, Les pays, Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1937 ; M.Q.
Zaman, Al-Yakubi, EI 2 , vol. 11 : 257 – 8 ; A. Melvinger, Les premières incursions
des Vikings en Occident d’après les sources arabes, Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1955.[b] Ibn Rusta was a native of Isfahan who performed the Pilgrimage to Mecca in 903 ,
the terminus post quem for his work The Treatise of Precious Objects. This work was thought
by its first editor M.J. de Goeje to represent the seventh volume of a multi-volume
work, variously identified as an encyclopedia in the tradition of the polythematic
compositional style known in Arabic as Adab (i.e. edifying and diverting instruction).
De Goeje based his conclusion on the phrase ‘the seventh part’ which is prominently
scored out on the first folio of the earliest extant manuscript (British Library Add
23 , 378 ). There is no internal evidence to support the restoration of the phrase and it
–– J.E. Montgomery––