is absent in the late copy kept in Cambridge University Library (Suppl. 1006 ). The
question is important for understanding the nature of the information about the Rus
provided by Ibn Rusta: if his work is an encyclopedia, it is most likely to be a (partial)
compilation of earlier works, whence derives the notion that his report on the Rus is a
quotation of an anterior, anonymous account (as his account of the Khazar seems to be).
He was certainly aware of Ibn Khurradadhbih’s composition, whom he criticises for
his fanciful exaggerations, but the passage on the Rus should be connected with the
Samanid geographical (and ultimately cosmographical) enterprise coordinated from
the capital Bukhara. The account of the northern peoples in which it is set was certainly
in part garnered from personal observation; and his description of Rus funerary practices
are a better fit for the Middle Dnieper than the Volga Rus, i.e. the Rus’ who were
destined to transform Kiev from a trading outpost into an imperial capital.
Bibliography: Arabic text: Kitab al-Alaq al-Nafisa VII (Bibliotheca Geographorum
Arabicorum, vol. 7 ), M.J. de Goeje (ed.), Leiden: Brill, 1967 [ 1892 ]; French trans. by
Gaston Wiet, Les Atours Précieux, Cairo: La Société de Géographie d’Égypte, 1955 :
C.E. Bosworth, ‘Ebn Rosta’, EIr, vol. 8 : 49 – 50 ; J.E. Montgomery, ‘Ibn Rusta’s Lack
of “Eloquence”, the Rus and Samanid Cosmography’, Edebiyât 12 ( 2001 ): 73 – 93.[b] Ibn Fadlan was a member of the Caliphal embassy dispatched from Baghdad on 21
June 921 by the Caliph al-Muqtadir (r. 908 – 32 ) in response to an epistolary petition
requesting assistance from Almish ibn Yiltawar (Elteber), the king of the Volga Bulghar
and the self-styled king of the Slavs (Saqaliba), who had converted to Islam. Note that,
as with the phrase Khaqan of the Rus, the king of the Slavs need not himself be
ethnically consanguineous with his subjects. The embassy reached Bulghar on the
Volga–Kama confluence on 11 May 922. Little is known but much has been speculated
about Ahmad ibn Fadlan ibn al-Abbas ibn Rashid ibn Hammad. The Mashhad manu-
script discovered by Zeki Validi Togan in 1923 tells us (though the passage is not by Ibn
Fadlan himself) that he was the client of the commander and functionary Muhammad
ibn Sulayman, presumably the successful officer who died in the siege of the city of
al-Rayy in 919. In all probability Ibn Fadlan was himself a soldier of some sort, albeit a
reasonably educated one. His function in the embassy (the exact composition of which is
far from clear) was to read out the letters to the king of the Slavs in Volga Bulgharia and
to ensure that appropriate gifts were rendered to him and to supervise the religious
instructors, whose duties he was constrained to assume after they had abandoned the
embassy en route. This led the geographer and lexicographer Yaqut (d. 1229 ), prior
to 1923 our only source for Ibn Fadlan’s work, to refer to him as a jurisconsult (faqih).
I do not know what the authority is for identifying him as a Greek convert to Islam.
The manuscript itself is lacunose: it ends with the description of the king of the Rus
and a garbled section on the Khazar and there is no narrative of the return to Baghdad
(though it is by no means certain that the return would have featured as part of the
work). In the Arabic tradition, the work disappears without a trace, for about three
centuries until the Mashhad manuscript was compiled in the thirteenth century, where
it is juxtaposed with two epistolary travel accounts by Abu Dulaf al-Khazraji (fl.
mid-tenth century), and a version of the Kitab al-Masalik wa-al-Mamalik of Ibn
al-Faqih. Indeed, Yaqut, when travelling in the erstwhile Samanid domains, mentions a
number of copies in circulation. The two late Persian ‘translations’-cum-quotations
–– chapter 40 : Arabic sources on the Vikings––