of a type not infrequent in the classical Arabo-Islamic tradition, one not designed
originally for general use but for exposure to a strictly circumscribed group of readers.
The al-Jayhani who began the book was vizier of the Samanid emirate in Bukhara and is
presumably the individual visited by Ibn Fadlan on the embassy to Volga Bulgharia.
Like the treatise of Ibn Rusta and the Hudud al-Alam, the Jayhani treatise was
probably an information-gathering exercise which included the tribes to the north and
west of the Samanid realm. Only a few snippets of this work have been recovered,
though scholars have been tempted to discern the Svengali-like influence of al-Jayhani
in many geographical writings. The passage on the Rus contained in the work of
al-Bakri is a conflation of the accounts of Ibn Rusta and al-Istakhri.
Bibliography: J.-C. Ducène, ‘Al-Gayhani: fragments (Extraits du K. al-masalik wa
l-mamalik d’al-Bakri)’, Der Islam 75 ( 1998 ): 259 – 82 ; H. Göckenjan and I. Zimonyi,
Orientalische Berichte über die Völker Osteuropas und Zentralasiens im Mittelalter. Die
Gayhani-Tradition, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001.[a] Yahya ibn al-Hakam al-Ghazal is said to have been the envoy of the Andalusian
caliph Abd al-Rahman the Second (r. 822 – 52 ) at the court of Theophilus of Byzantium
and the Norsemen of Jutland or Ireland. Al-Ghazal (the Gazelle) of Jaen was a renowned
poet. The story of his participation in the embassy to the emperor of Byzantium as told
by Ibn Hayyan (d. 1076 ) is inspired by a descriptive passage in one of his love poems
which describes the charms of a youth and his mother said to descend from Caesar. The
account of his diplomatic mission to the north recounted by Ibn Dihya (d. 1235 ) is but a
rehash of the embassy to Byzantium, fuelled by the fame of the Majus raids of the ninth
century and has nothing to commend it beyond the charms of its fancy.
Bibliography: S.M. Pons-Sanz, ‘Whom did al-Ghazal meet? An exchange of
embassies between the Arabs from al-Andalus and the Vikings’, Saga-Book 28
( 2004 ): 5 – 28.–– chapter 40 : Arabic sources on the Vikings––