The standard English collection of every Arabic passage on the western and central Sudan. For the decades around 1200 it has al-Idrisi (1154), al-Zuhri, the Kitab al-Istibsar (1191), Yaqut (1220s), Ibn Said (1250s to 1270s), Abu'l-Fida, Ibn Khaldun on the Sosso and the Mali kings, and the later Ibn Battuta and al-Umari, with notes on dates and place names. Together these show the belt from Takrur to Kanem as outsiders knew it: Ghana still a name, the Almoravid-era Islamisation of its kings, the Sosso ascendancy, Gao's Muslim kings, Kanem's expanding mai. Cuoq's French Recueil (1975) covers the same texts. Both are modern collections, not sources, and both are under copyright.
About this source
- Title
- Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History
- Author
- Various (edited by N. Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins)
- Author's dates
- Arabic authors of the ninth to the sixteenth centuries
- Written
- ninth to sixteenth centuries; the collection published 1981
- Language
- Arabic, translated into English
- Covers
- about 800 to 1600
- Kind
- Collection of sources
Not freely online. The Arabic originals are listed under their own entries here (al-Bakri, al-Idrisi, Yaqut, Ibn Said, Ibn Khaldun, the Istibsar, Ibn Battuta).
Where to read it
Editions
- N. Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins (eds), Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Cambridge, 1981; reprinted Princeton, 2000), English (not freely online)
- J. M. Cuoq (ed. and tr.), Recueil des sources arabes concernant l'Afrique occidentale du VIIIe au XVIe siècle (Bilad al-Sudan) (Paris, 1975; 2nd ed. 1985), French (not freely online)
About the source
Realms this source covers in 1200
- The kingdom of Takrur
- Ghana (Wagadu)
- The Sosso kingdom of the Kante
- Diara
- Mema
- The Mande chiefdoms (Manden)
- Jenne and the inland delta
- Gao (Kawkaw): the Songhay kingdom
- Kanem: the Sayfawa mai
- The veiled Sanhaja of the western Sahara
- The veiled Berbers of the central Sahara (the later Tuareg)
- The oases of the northern Sahara
- The Fezzan