A merchant-traveller's description of western and southern Arabia a generation after 1200: Mecca and the Hijaz ports, the Red Sea crossing, Zabid and the Tihama, Aden with its customs and tariffs, the Hadramawt coast, Dhofar and Oman, Socotra, and the opposite African shore at Zeila and the Dahlak islands. He records the Ayyubid conquest of Yemen (1173) and its governors, the Zaydi imams, the tribes and their roads, prices, weights and coins. The nearest thing to a survey of Arabia for the Atlas; it is anecdotal, often fanciful, and twenty-five years late.
About this source
- Title
- Tarikh al-mustabsir
- Author
- Ibn al-Mujawir (Jamal al-Din Yusuf ibn Ya'qub)
- Author's dates
- about 1205 to about 1291
- Written
- about 1226 to 1232
- Language
- Arabic
- Covers
- the 1220s, with retrospective notes on the 12th century
- Kind
- Geography
Rex Smith's English is in copyright. The attribution to Ibn al-Mujawir of Damascus is disputed; the text's own statements point to a Baghdadi or Nishapuri author.
Where to read it
Editions
- O. Lofgren (ed.), Descriptio Arabiae meridionalis (Tarikh al-mustabsir), 2 vols (Leiden, 1951 to 1954), Arabic (not freely online)
- Arabic text (Lofgren's edition) at al-Maktaba al-Shamila
Translations
- G. R. Smith, A Traveller in Thirteenth-Century Arabia: Ibn al-Mujawir's Tarikh al-mustabsir, Hakluyt Society III.19 (London, 2008), English (not freely online)
About the source
Realms this source covers in 1200
- Ayyubid Yemen under al-Mu'izz Isma'il
- The Zaydi imamate of al-Mansur Abd Allah ibn Hamza
- The Hamdanid sultans (Banu Hatim) of Kawkaban
- The Sulaymani sharifs of the Mikhlaf
- The emirate of Mecca under Mukthir ibn Isa
- The emirate of Medina under Salim ibn Qasim
- Qatada ibn Idris and the sharifs of Wadi Yanbu
- Hadramawt: the Al Rashid of Tarim and the tribes
- Dhofar: the lords of Mirbat and Zafar
- The Mahra
- Socotra, the Christian island
- Oman
- The Bedouin tribes
- Zeila
- The sultanate of Dahlak
- Kish: the island lords of the Gulf