Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Ibn Khordadbeh)
Arabic book on geography by Ibn Khordadbeh
The Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Arabic: كِتَاب ٱلْمَسَالِك وَٱلْمَمَالِك, romanized: Kitāb al-Masālik wa-l-Mamālik) is a 9th-century geography text written by the Persian geographer Ibn Khordadbeh. It maps and describes the major trade routes of the time within the Muslim world, and discusses distant trading regions such as Japan, Korea, and China. It was written around 870 CE, during the reign of Al-Muʿtamid of the Abbasid Caliphate, while its author was Director of Posts and Police for the Abbasid province of Jibal in modern-day Iran.
The work uses much of the Persian administrative terms, gives considerable attention to pre-Islamic Iranian history, and uses the "native Iranian cosmological division system of the world". These all show "the existence of Iranian sources at the core of the work".
The book is also referred to in English as The Book of Roads and Provinces.
Notes
External links
Ibn Khordadbeh (1865). Des routes et des Provinces (in French). Translator: Charles Barbier de Meynard. Paris: Journal Asiatique.
The public source identifies “Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Ibn Khordadbeh)” as arabic book on geography by Ibn Khordadbeh. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Book, Roads and Kingdoms.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 27, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q2590941. VIAF identifies the subject as 187309371. The Library of Congress control number is no2011161157. None of the 4 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1865.
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This entry incorporates text from “Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Ibn Khordadbeh)” 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.