Tabula Rogeriana
1154 work by Muhammad al Idrisi
The Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq (Arabic: نزهة المشتاق في اختراق الآفاق, lit. "The Excursion of One Eager to Penetrate the Distant Horizons"), commonly known in the West as the Tabula Rogeriana (lit. "The Book of Roger" in Latin), is an atlas commissioned by the Norman King Roger II in 1138 and completed by the Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi in 1154. The atlas compiles 70 maps of the known world with associated descriptions and commentary of each specific location by Al-Idrisi.
Creation of the Atlas
Around 1138, the Norman King of Sicily, Roger II, invited Al-Idrisi, a Muslim geographer, to his court in Palermo, in search of help pursuing his political agenda. Sicily's vibrant multicultural environment led al-Idrisi to accept King Roger's invitation to his court. During the meeting, Al-Idrisi briefed Roger II on his familiarity and personal experiences traveling around North Africa and Western Europe, which prompted Roger II to commission an atlas from Al-Idrisi. To produce the work, Al-Idrisi started gathering information for the maps by interviewing experienced travelers on their knowledge of the world, keeping "only that part... on which there was complete agreement and seemed credible, excluding what was contradictory." King Roger II would occasionally participate in these interviews himself, reflecting his desire to compile information about his realm. Al-Idrisi drew inspiration from a number of sources, most of which are dated to the Golden Age of Islam during the Abbasid Caliphate, when scholarly work was flourishing in the Islamic world.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1089336. VIAF identifies the subject as 186682999. The Library of Congress control number is n00050418. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1138 and 1154.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tabula Rogeriana” 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.