Book of Roads and Kingdoms
genre of medieval Arabic geographical literature
The Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Arabic: كتاب المسالك والممالك, Kitāb al-Masālik waʿl-Mamālik) is a group of Islamic manuscripts composed from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. They emerged from the administrative tradition of listing pilgrim and post stages. Their text covers the cities, roads, topography, and peoples of the Muslim world, interspersed with personal anecdotes. A theoretical explanation of the "Inhabited Quarter" of the world, comparable to the ecumene, frames the world with classical concepts like the seven climes.
The books include illustrations so geometric that they are barely recognizable as maps. These schematic maps do not attempt a mimetic depiction of physical boundaries. With little change in design, the treatises typically offer twenty regional maps and a disc-shaped map of the world surrounded by the Encircling Ocean. The maps have a flat quality, but the textual component implies a spherical Earth. An Andalusi scholar Abi Bakr Zuhri explained, "Their objective is the depiction of the earth, even if it does not correspond to reality. Because the earth is spherical but the [map] is simple".
“Book of Roads and Kingdoms” enters the record as genre of medieval Arabic geographical literature. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Book, Roads and Kingdoms can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q12227696. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Book of Roads and Kingdoms” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.