1Writing
of the Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel (1990: 253) has remarked, "It
isn't water that links its shores," but "seafaring peoples." From a very
early date, the Indian Ocean, too, was traversed by sailors, traders,
religious men, and migrants moving in search of goods, new lands, or the
great unknown. Their movements were shaped by numerous factors, both
geographic and social in origin. Exchanges are not solely shaped by
geographic and economic factors, but also by systems of ideas and by the
balance of power. Over centuries, these exchanges transformed the
Indian Ocean into a unified space. The cartographic presentation of the
Indian Ocean in the Middle Ages is a special case in the history of
cartography, still puzzling the historians of geography (more on that
below). The present contribution offers some remarks on probabilities
and patterns of knowledge transmission across time and massive diversity
of Islamic societies of the region and to assess its place in the
history of Islamic science and civilization. The source base is the
corpus of medieval Arabic compositions having to do with geography,
travel, and sailing on the Indian Ocean. Two vectors of knowledge
transfer are explored: (1) between formal and informal geographical
records and (2) between academic geography and the practical knowledge
of the ocean and its coasts by Indian Ocean mariners.
2The
earliest extant Arabic sources dealing with the Indian Ocean date to
the ninth century A.D. It has been long established that the founders of
Islamic world geography relied significantly on Greek sources, in
particular on the Geography of Claudius Ptolemy (c.
90 - 168 A.D.). The following discussion will first touch on a few
early examples illustrating the transmission of Antique geographical
information about the Indian Ocean in very general terms. One of the
early Arabic interpreters of Ptolemy (both in astronomy and geography)
was Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khorezmi, or Khuwarizmi (d. c.
A.H. 232/846-847 A.D.). In the desription of African coastal locations
of the First Climate and those south of the Equator, he transribes a
number of port cities with their geographical coordinates (see Mžik,
1926). There is, however, no narrative describing the ocean in the
imperfectly preserved unique manuscript, although it probably existed
because we can find a brief sketch in Kitab al-Zij al-Sabi` of al-Battani (c. A.H. 244-317/858-929), a later translator of Ptolemy’s tables than al-Khorezmi, who provides the ocean’s dimensions:
3They had measured the Sea of India and say that its length, counting from the west to the east, from the limits of Ethiopia (al-Habash) to the borders of India (al-Hind)
is 8 000 miles, while the width is 2 700 miles. It extends 1 900 miles
south of the island of the Equinox. Near the land of Ethiopia the sea
forms a gulf in the direction of the Barbara, called al-Khalij al-Barbari (that is, Sinus Barbaricus – M.T.); its length is five hundred miles and the width of its seabed is one hundred miles… (Kubbel’ and Matveev, 1960: 298).
4Within
a century from the first translation of Ptolemy, his data were adopted
and transmitted further: The same numbers are quoted a few decades later
in Kitab al-`Unwan
(“Book of Chapter Titles”) by the Christian historian Agapius of Manbij
(mid-to late 10th centyr A.D.), who omits the tables of geographical
coordinates, but preserves narrative sections about the Earth and its
regional divisions and includes the chapter “On the Seas, Gulfs, and
Islands” (Kubbel and Matveev, 1960:129-130).
- 1 For a case study of Greek influence on Islamic geography as it relates to the Indian Ocean region, (...)
The monsoon climate of the Indian Ocean was known to the Hellenistic Greeks: Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (c.
70 A.D.) ascribes its discovery to the Greek navigator Hippalus (1st
century B.C.). The same source credits Arab seamen with plying the
searoutes of the Indian Ocean, at least of its western part, as far as
Ceylon, or the Greek Taprobane, now Sri Lanka. (Huntingford, 1980, 119 et passim)1
5The earliest Arabic reference to the regularity of Indian Ocean monsoons is to be found in the Kitab al-Buldan, “Book of Countries” (c. A.H. 289-290/902-903 A.D.), by Ibn al-Faqih al-Hamadani, one of the founders of Islamic descriptive geography:
Know that the Seas of Persia (Fars)
and India are in fact one sea because they join one another, except
that they are unlike each other [for navigation]. . . As to the Sea of
India, shortly before the Spring Equinox, when the Sun is the
constellation of Pisces, it becomes dark and hard. Many waves appear,
and nobody sails it because of the dark clouds and storms while the Sun
is in the Gemini. When the Sun moves to the constellation of Virgo, the
darkness of teh sea dissolves and navigation becomes easy, until the Sun
again reaches Pisces. The Sea of Persia is navigable in all seasons,
but people refrain from sailing the Sea of India during its stormy
period due to the darkness and difficulties. (Kubbel’ and Matveev,
1960:72)
6In
the tenth century, to the formal and general descriptions of the known
parts of the world are added travel accounts. Of these, The Marvels of India (`Adja’ib al-Hind, c. 953 A.D.), are full of mirabilia
stories and sailor adventures in ships, ports, and islands of the
ocean. In the case of the historian al-Mas`udi (d. A.H. 345-346/965
A.D.), to his awareness of formal geographies of the world and the
region is added his personal travel experience. We benefit from his
first-hand knowledge of Arabia, India, Ceylon and China as well as the
East African coast. Mas`udi is familiar with Classical geographical
placenames: he calls the western Indian Ocean the “Habashi
Sea”, that is “Ethiopian”, in the tradition of Greek usage of
“Ethiopia” for not strictly Abyssinia (the toponym derived from the
Arabic “Habasha for
Ethiopians, their neighbors across the Red Sea), but also for
sub-Saharan Africa as a whole. On the other hand, Mas`udi also indicates
a degree of familiarity with Arabic maps of the region. In his Muruj adh-Dhahab (“Gold Meadows”) he says: “The Sea of the Zanj and the Ahabish
is to the right of the Sea of India, even though their waters adjoin”
(Kubbel and Matveev, 1960: 239). The words “to the right” indicate that
Mas`udi visualizes a cartographic representation of the ocean according
to the dominant in Islamic cartography orientation to the south (some
maps show orientation to the east).
- 2 For map examples, see Harley and Woodward, 1987: Plates 15, 19, 29, 21.
7Al-Mas`udi also knows of al-Khalij al-Barbari, or the Barbari Gulf of the Ethiopian Sea, originating in Ptolemy’s Geography. The Arabic ethnonym “Barbara,” in the context of northeast Africa (as opposed to Barbar
in North Africa), refers to Kushitic populations of Somali and the Red
Sea coast in its southern part on the African side. Thus, “Sinus
Barbaricus” or the “Barbari Gulf” of the Indian Sea is the Red Sea, and
especially its souther part; the western part of the Indian Sea is also
called the “Habashi” (that is, Abyssianian, or Ethiopian) Sea in earlier Arab geographies. The northern part of the Red Sea is usually called Bahr al-Qulzum,
so named after the port village of Clysma at the northern point of the
Guf of Suez; this name eventually drives out the use of the term “al-Khalij al-Barbari,”
except in old-fashioned retellings of the globe’s major geographical
features. On Ptolemy’s extant Latin maps, the Red Sea is named “Sinus Arabicus”, but a Greek manuscript map of Ptolemaic “Aithiopia below Egypt,” produced around 1400, shows the name “Barbarikios” off the eastern seaboard (Berggren and Jones, 2000: Plate 5). It should be noted that the red coloring, used in European mappaemundi for the Red Sea,2
was never applied in Islamic maps. The 1482 print world map of Ptolemy
shows the red tint applied not to the Red Sea itself, but to the part of
the Arabian Sea that later became known as the Gulf of Aden (Berggren
and Jones, 2000, Plate 6).
8Thus,
beginning with late-Hellenistic and early-Roman period and reaching
into the Islamic “Golden Age,” written evidence registers the Arab
presence in the western Indian Ocean; it confirms Arab knowledge of the
sea and the use of Arabic as both a source of information and medium of
international communication and transmission of knowledge. By the tenth
century Arabic scholarship had produced a synthesis of received,
preserved older and newly-developed knowledge. This body of classical
Islamic geography combined or absorbed, in varying degrees, these three
recognizable, if not independent, streams: (1) Greek ecumenic geography
(largely, but not exclusively, Ptolemy), (2) Arabic-Islamic travel
narratives, and (3) Islamic cartography. It will be noticed that the
list does not include Persian geography or a separate mention of Greek
cartography; this latter will be discussed below. The former remains a
lacuna, a question mark. Despite the evident, and recognized, impact of
pre-Islamic Persian geography on Islamic regional geography and despite
Persian participation in Indian-ocean trade and other maritime
activities, well illustrated in the Marvels of India,
since at least the Sassanid period, we lack tangible narrative evidence
of specific and identifiable Persian elements in the mainstream
representation of the Indian ocean in early Islamic scholarship as a
maritime entity beyond a simple enumeration of the traditional “Seven
Seas” (in parallel with the Seven Climates, the Persian kishvar-ha regions, as distinct from the latitudinal Greek κλἰματα).
- 3 For cartographical analysis see Ahmad, 1992.
9For
the best example of Greek influence on Islamic geography – and
cartography – we first return to Ptolemy and then leap forward to the
12th century, when Muhammad al-Idrisi (A.H. 493-560/1100-1165 A.D.)
produced a world geography and a related series of maps considered the
pinnacle of Arabo-Islamic geography.3
Idrisi worked at the Norman court of Sicily where, under patronage of
Roger II (1098-1154), he had access to both Arabic and European sources,
some of which he names. Born in Morocco, Idirisi traveled at least as
far east as Asia Minor, but much of his book is data compiled from
earlier works. The projection of Idrisi maps is uniquely original and
has not yet been explained. The undisputed and strongest systemic
influence, however, came from Ptolemy. The narrative follows the maps,
observing the Greek system of the Seven Climates that start from the
Equator and rise to the Northern Polar Circle. Idrisi adds a section
south of the Equator and instead of degrees of latitude and longitude he
breaks the map up into ten
sections per clime. In each section, major cities and geographical
features (sea, lakes, rivers, mountains) are named and described, with
added ethnographic and cultural information, sometimes contemporary and
sometimes long since outdated.
10In
medieval maps of Ptolemy the Indian Ocean is enclosed. It is not
enclosed on Islamic maps. An aberrant and as yet unexplained exception
is the schematic map of the Indian Ocean in the recently discovered Book of Curiosities,
thought to be produced in the late eleventh century (Johns and
Savage-Smith, 2003: 8); it therefore predates al-Idrisi. Islamic world
geographies consider the Indian Ocean an offshoot of the Surrounding
Ocean (al-Bahr al-Muhit). The encyclopedist al-Biruni (c. A.H. 362-440/973-1048 A.D.) explained this in Kitab al-Tafhim (“Book of Instruction in the Elements of the Art of Astrology”):
From
the Eastern side, beyond the fathest limits of the land of China, the
Surrounding Sea is likewise impassable. From it branches out a gulf that
forms a sea that is named in each location by the name of the country
it washes, so that at firist it is the Sea of China, then the Sea of
India. From the sea, in turn, branch our great gulfs that are separately
named seas, such as the Sea of Persia and Basra… (Matveev and Kubbel,
1965: 113)
11Biruni is the only Islamic autor who specifically articulates the undividsibility of the world’s oceans. In his other book, al-Qanun al-Mas`udi (“Mas`ud’s Canon for Astronomy and Stars”) he wrote about the Indian Ocean past southeast Africa:
Regardless of such (great difficulties) there is no absolute obstacle for reaching the Ocean Sea (Bahr Uqiyanus)
through these narrows or from the south behind these mountains. I have
found indications that the two (seas) join together even though I have
not seen this with my own eyes. (Matveev and Kubbel, 1965: 125)
12Idrisi’s
Indian Ocean is open in the east, but in his sectional maps the eastern
coast of Africa turns east above the Equator and forms the ocean’s
south coast extending to Indonesia. Idrisi’s Geography (Kitab Nuzhat al-Mushtaq)
in general had a strong impact on Islamic world cartography and
descriptive geography, especially in the western Islamic lands. While
Ptolemy was not yet lost to Idrisi, the latter’s overall influence in
some ways reduced the felt need for ancient authorities. References to
“Sharif al-Idrisi” made citing Ptolemy less necessary for later
compilators, at least in geographical matters.
- 4 The composite sectional world map was copied or imitated in A.H.1233/1818 A.D. See Ahmad, 1992, Fig (...)
- 5 About this line of knowledge transmission see Tolmacheva, 2006.
- 6 For cartographic detail, see Fig. 1.
13Idrisi’s
superiority in both descritive geography and cartography is unarguable,
yet on the subsequent situation is somewhat paradoxical. Many later
authors drew on al-Idrisi, but, considering the expansion of travel and
production of new astronomical data that might reasonbly be expected to
lead to growth of geography as a discipline, there appears to be a lack
of systemic originality and loss of precision in world geography and
cosmographical genre. The Idrisi sectional map system was not used at
all, nor further developed by later authors, although it was not lost.4 In terms of geographical data, the closest Idrisi follower is Ibn Sa`id al-Maghribi (c. A.H. 610-685/1214-1286 A.D.).5 His Geography of the Seven Climates
(Ibn Sa`id, 1970) follows the Idrisi narrative according to the map
sections, repeating much of his information, but for locations Ibn Said
adds the coordinates. The round world map ascribed to Ibn Sa`id
al-Maghribi opens the Indian ocean wider toward the south than any
Islamic world map previously. He fills the ocean space with islands and,
unable to accommodate all the placenames provided by Idrisi on the East
African coast, divides the southern African continent by a deep gulf,
with double the coastline looking east (Harley and Woodward, 1992: Plate
10).6
- 7 See a sample in Harley and Woodward, 1992, Plate 11.
14By contrast with sectional maps, the so-called round world map of Idrisi,7 lacking many if not most sectional details, became quite popular, and a version of it appears in manuscripts of Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddima.
Thus, with al-Idrisi, a comprehensive picture of the Indian Ocean is
created, from Africa to China, but certain lines of knowledge
transmission wither away or become dormant.
- 8 For a complete English translation of the Rihla see Ibn Battuta, 1958-2000. For a chronologically-s (...)
15Should
we seek the reason for such lack of vitality in the nature of academic
instuitutions of the age or elsewhere? We know that expansion of Islam
continued along the coasts of the Indian Ocean, whether in Eastern
Africa or Indonesia, as it did on the Indian subcontinent. New Islamic
states arose and maritime commerce prospered. The famous 14th century
traveler Ibn Battuta (1304-1369) performed several voyages on the Indian
Ocean and left a record of them in the Rihla, or “Book of Travels”.8
His experience in southeast Asia and somewhat hazy report of reaching
China provide, at the very least, a personal confirmation, if not a case
study of the widely reaching shipping and trade networks emanating from
or converging on certain vital points of destination – Red Sea ports
for the annual Muslim pilgrimage, Kilwa for the gold trade of the
interior, Ceylon as the crossroads of the oceanic routes and a
waiting-haven for the change of monsoon. While in India, he aspired to
reach China and discovered that the voyage could be made only on Chinese
ships. Indeed, in the early 15th century China was to make the
exploration of the Indian Ocean an imperial project, though Arabic
sources are silent about this.
16No
other Arab traveler left as comprehensive a record of personal voyages
on the Indian Ocean, but a 13th-century traveler in South Arabia related
an extraordinary story about the far and early reaches of the monsoon
sailing routes. Writing about A.H. 624-627/1226-1230 A.D., Ibn
al-Mujawir describes maritime contacts between Madagascar, East African
coast, Aden, and eventually Siraf (the Persian Gulf port destroyed by an
earthquake about 970):
- 9 Al-Qumr may mean both Madagascar and the Comoros. I have made a few minor changes to the cited tran (...)
The
building of Aden. When the dynasty of the pharaohs came to an end, the
place fell into ruins as their dynasty disappeared. A group of fishermen
settled the island, fishing there. They remained a long time thus,
provided with God’s sustenance and a livelihood, until some Madagscans (Ahl al-Qumr)9
arrived in ships with lots of peopleand took control of the island
after chasing out the fishermen by force. They settled the Summit of
al-Jabal al-Ahmar, Huqqat and Jabal a-Manzar, a mountain overlooking the
boatyards. Traces of them still exist and their building remains in
Stone and gypsum, brought from these wadis and mountains. (Smith, 2008:
137-138)
17This
passage is quite rare in Arabic travel literature in providing a
glimpse of oceanic migration history that connects Malay and East
African immigrants to South Arabia and makes clear the northward
direction of the movement, as distinct from the relatively frequent
mentions of southern Arabians (especially Omanis) sailing to East
Africa. Continuing the story of Aden, the author also describes the
migrants’vessels and the sailing regime:
- 10 The year A.H. 626 began 30 November 1228 (Smith, 2008: 138, not 3).
They
used to come up from Madagascar, taking in Aden in one go in one
monsoon […] From Aden to Mogadishu is one monsoon, from Mogadishu to
Kilwah a second and from Kilwah to Madagascar a third. But [some] people
would turn the three monsoons into one: in 62610
a ship sailed from Madagascar to Aden in this way, setting sail from
Madagascar, making for Kilwah, but dropping anchor in Aden. Their ships
have outriggers on account of the narrowness, rockiness and shallowness
of their seas. When these people became weak and the East Africans got
the better of them, they forced them out and took over their land and
settled the wadi, a place which is now inhabited
[by people] in reed huts. They were the first to build reed huts in
Aden.When they had gone, the place fell into ruin and remained thus
until the inhabitants of Siraf moved out [and settled there]. (Smith,
2008: 138)
18Ibn al-Mujawir’s Tarikh al-Mustabsir
“History of the Observer” is a local history, a traveler’s itinerary,
and a catalog of comercial articles and prices rolled into one. It is
original and unique in the type and amount of detail for the period and
the region, describing the cities and towns of Southern Arabia, local
dynasties, and social mores. There are even some city maps, but the book
does not easily fit the established genres either in history or
geography. While it draws on some literary resources, the book does not
appear either to build on prior geographical treatises or to be widely
cited in later works. In tracing the lines of transmission of knowledge,
Ibn al-Mujawir stands somewhat isolated, egardless of the original and
valuable information he presents. In that regard, there is a smilarity
between his book and Ibn Battuta’s Rihla.
Although extensive, Ibn Battuta’s record is neither formal nor learned:
he was not a geographer and apparently not much of a reader, though he
had a prodigious memory. On occasion he cites a verse or a foreign word,
repeats a story of a saint or relates the information told him in the
many audiences he attended at various courts. He started his journeys
with a pilgrimage to Mecca and then never ceased to miove from place to
place, eventually returning to his homeland of Morocco. His
secretary-editor may have added to his stories excerpts from the records
of an earlier pilgrim and traveler such as Ibn Jubayr (12th century),
but there are no quotes from learned treatises or encyclopedic
disctionaries. The stories of his voyages, shipwrecks, and wanderings
around the islands are memoirs of his personal experience in and of the
very interconnected universe of the Indian Ocean (that he only refers to
as the “sea,” with no learned comments on its gulfs or divisions). Ibn
Battuta was a passenger on ships piloted by someone else, and his
concerns were about his safety, comfort, secruity for his belongings and
his entourage, and getting to the destination. He names quite a few
types of ship and survives more than one storm, but he knows nothing
about navigation or shipping except for the dictate of the monsoon and
the danger of piracy. For first-hand, profesional information about
navigating the Indian Ocean, we need to turn to the late-15th century
sources, particularly to the works of the outstanding pilot and now
patron-saint of the mariners Shihab al-Din Ahmad ibn Majid al-Sa`di
al-Najdi (c. 1421-1500).
- 11 For Ibn Majid’s full name and list of compositions see Encyclopaedia of Islam (EI₂), vol. 3, pp. 85 (...)
19Ahmad
ibn Majid (or simply Ibn Majid) was an expert navigator whose career
took place apparently entirely in the Indian Ocean, on the very eve of
the arrival there of the Portuguese in the late 15th century. His
reputation for knowledge, skill and expertise rests on his role as a
teacher of naval arts for he has left an exceptionally rich heritage of
written works, including a nautical encyclopedia and a number of
didactic compositions and sailing instructions for certain oceanic
routes. He authored a total of about forty works in prose and verse, of
which more than 20 have survived.11
Among the reasons we greatly admire Ibn Majid’s encyclopedic knowledge
of the sea and his nautical expertise is that no earlier sailing manuals
or treatises on naval arts have reached us. His work looks all the more
original that there is nothing to compare it with among the earlier
known works.
20This
is not to deny the use by Ibn Majid of previously developed knowledge.
The training of pilots and ship masters was a matter of oral instruction
and constant practice. The orality is confirmed by the choice of verse
form, in the easy rajaz metre for easier memorization, for the sailing instructions. Ibn Majid’s own father is acknowledged by him as mu`allim al-bahrayn, “the Pilot of Two Seas” (Tibbets, 1971, 8). He also respectfully refers to three of his predecessors − Arabian pilots awarded the honorary title of "Lions of the Sea" (luyūth al-biḥār), numbering himself the fourth (Tibbets, 1971, 5).
All other contemporary writers on navigation (for such existed and he
was aware of them) he believed to be not authors, but compilers; he
boldly claimed that his own knowledge was the most correct, complete,
and accurate. In his case, transmission of nautical knowledge was a
constant teaching task to which he was dedicated, often reminding the
intended student-captains of the superiority of his store of information
over what might be found elsewhere (Shumovskii, 1957, 81).
- 12 For more on Ibn Majid and Ptolemy see Tolmacheva, 2015.
- 13 For more on the Mountain of the Moon in Ptolemy see Huntingford, 1980, App. 6.
21It
is important to emphasize that Ibn Majid’s sailing instructions are not
general descriptions of sailing routes between the points of departure
and destination, such as can be reconstructed from the stories of the Marvels of India, al-Mas`udi’s travels, or Ibn Battuta’s Rihla.
They are detailed guidelines for key points of each route, with
guidelines for the use of stars and constellations expected to be seen
in the monsoon season appropriate for the location. Ahmad ibn Majid is
not unaware of Ptolemy12 and some prominent geographical concepts derived from Antique geography (such as the Mountains of the Moon13
as the source of the Nile) but, if we saw above very little cross-over
between academic geography and travel literature, here we find no
overlap between the works on navigation and either formal geography or
travel literature. Tibbets has identified in Ibn Majid’s nautical
encyclopedia Kitab al-Fawa’id (“The Book of Useful Information
about the Seas and Principles of Navigation”) a number of earlier
sources and possible influences, but they are mostly astronomical works,
including Ptolemy’s Almagest (see Tibbets, 1971: 40, 158).
There is no evidence of borrowing from learned treatises of descriptive
geography, and even in regard to the works of astronomy or mathematical
geography there is a degree of skepticism. “All the other works quoted
in the Fawa’id either by name or anonymously,” says Tibbets,
“are really used for literary embellishment, for their poetry or for a
story only remotely connected with the text, and not for navigational
purposes” (Тibbets, 1971: 41).
- 14 For nautical charts, see: Tibbets, 1992 and Schwartzberg, 1992.
- 15 For an early European description see Prinsep, 1928.
22Against
the current background of our limited knowledge of past nautical
activities, methods, and routes, Ahmad Ibn Majid’s legacy does not
suffer from comparison with other authors, whether contemporaries or
predecessors. His compositions are not compilations of earlier works,
even if he sometimes repeats himself. Rather, they are rooted in
personal experience and had been tested over decades of sailing over
various parts of the Indian Ocean. Tibbets suggests that Arab sailing
manuals may have existed since the 11th century A.D., but he is hesitant
as to whether Ahmad ibn Majid had access to such (Tibbets, 1971, 4−6).14 In the 13th century Marco Polo claimed that Arab pilots had good nautical maps and used the Pole Star for guidance (Tibbets, 1971: 4).
Furthermore, in the early Portuguese records there are indications that
Arab (or Muslim) navigators on the Indian Ocean, in addition to the
traditional compass and instruments for astronomical observations,15 also used nautical charts or written sailing directions, but none have been found (Tibbets, 1971: 272). It is as though academic cartography, too, remained irrelevant to mariners’ practical activity.
- 16 For these two authors see Ferrand, 1921-1928, vol. 2 and Sidi Ҫelebi 1834-39.
- 17 For Muslim Mediterranean charts see Soucek, 1992.
23Some of Ahmad ibn Majid’s data may be recognized in 16th-century Arabic and Ottoman by Sulayman al-Mahri (c. 1511) and Sidi Ali Ҫelebi (wrote 1554), who uses both his Arabic precursors.16 However,
the indigenous line of written transmission subsequently appears to
lapse under the newly-present European shipping. The Ottomans did not
participate in Indian-Ocean navigation before their conquest of the Arab
countries in 1516-1517, but they were previously engaged in
Mediterranean sailing and early adopted European charts and practice,17
inluding those relating to the Atlantic Ocean and the New World. There
was, however, no overlap between major nautical traditions of these two
water bodies due to differences of geography, hydrography and climate.
In this case, as previously with classical geography, travel literature,
and cartography, we observe that certain lines of communication prove
very lasting, while others are overlooked or abandoned; some streams of
information come together while others remain separate. There is common
sense and expedience in abandoning Greek toponyms for Arabic ones, or
substituting more recent authorities for ancient ones. On the other hand
there is no clear reason why certain outdated information or concepts
persist in the face of newer data continuously provided by new
narratives and scholarship. Sea voyages were very different in execution
from land travel, and on the eve of the Portuguese era on the Indian
Ocean, Arabic seafaring expertise was being recorded and shaped into
formal encyclopedias and manuals. Naturally and necessarily, more than
Arabs took part in the seafaring enterprise. Tradition and experience
took centuries to produce an effective, though diffuse body of
knowledge, but in the 16th century the new global reality
dramatically changed the dynamics of oceanic activity and signaled an
end to the Arab chapter in the Indian Ocean story.
Idrisi’s sectional map of the Indian Ocean
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