The closest description of the Horn's ports to 1200, written about twenty-five years later by a trader and official who worked the Aden trade: Zeila and its traffic in slaves, ivory and the goods of the Ethiopian interior; the Barbar (Somali) coast with Berbera and Mogadishu, and the sea route from Aden to Mogadishu and on to Kilwa with its sailing seasons; the Dahlak islands with their own sultan and his dues; Socotra; and the customs and prices of Aden under the Ayyubids of Yemen. Full of anecdote and sailors' lore but exact on routes, winds and customs, and the only text of its generation that treats the East African coast as part of one trading system.
About this source
- Title
- Tarikh al-mustabsir (the passages on the Horn of Africa and the Dahlak islands)
- Author
- Ibn al-Mujawir (Yusuf ibn Yaqub ibn al-Mujawir)
- Author's dates
- about 1204 to 1291
- Written
- about 1221 to 1230
- Language
- Arabic
- Covers
- Arabia from the Hijaz round to Oman in the 1220s, with the African shore of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden as seen from Aden and Yemen
- Kind
- Travel account
Rex Smith's translation is under copyright. Another entry in this library covers Ibn al-Mujawir for Arabia. The author's own dates and origin (Khurasan or Damascus) are uncertain.
Where to read it
Editions
- O. Löfgren (ed.), Descriptio Arabiae meridionalis: Sifat bilad al-Yaman wa-Makka wa-ba'd al-Hijaz al-musammat Tarikh al-mustabsir, 2 vols (Leiden, 1951 to 1954), Arabic (not freely online)
Translations
- G. Rex Smith (tr.), A Traveller in Thirteenth-Century Arabia: Ibn al-Mujawir's Tarikh al-Mustabsir (Hakluyt Society, London, 2008), English (not freely online)