Accounts of China and India. Abu Zayd al-Sirafi

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      FOREWORD

      ZVI BEN-DOR BENITE

      The Indian Ocean has been the site of travel, trade, war, and above all, transregional human history for several millennia. Written and literary evidence for it can be found even in early biblical narratives about King Solomon bringing ivory from India. But only with the appearance of the Accounts of China and India (Akhbār al-Ṣīn wa-l-Hind) in the 9^th and 10^th centuries do we find a comprehensive account of the Indian Ocean. Accounts purports to be accounts about China and India, but in fact, it tells the story of the entire Indian Ocean—its shape, its geography, its shores, and the countries and cultures behind them. It is very evident that the compilers of this work conceived of it in this more expansive way since in several places the narrative presents thoughtful discussions about the different civilizations flourishing on the ocean’s shores. Readers will find these discussions in various places throughout the work. In this respect Accounts of China and India is not merely a travelogue describing the regions between the Arab lands of the Eastern Gulf and the kingdoms of China and India. It is, rather, a world history, recounting the story of a nexus of human cultures in the 10^th century.

      That Accounts of China and India is a world history should come as no surprise. It draws on the accounts and practical experiences of Arab merchants that sailed to China and back, and is therefore one of the best examples of medieval Arab geography. Indeed, in the three centuries that followed the Arabs’ inheritance and practical unification of most of the Mediterranean and West Asian worlds—from Andalusia in the west to the borders of China in the east—they engaged in many ambitious geographical projects. The aim was to write and map the geography (and the history, since the two were inseparable)—of the world as they knew it. Accounts can be seen as one the epitomes of this grand project. And China (al-Ṣīn in Arabic), located beyond the eastern boundaries of the world, occupied a special place in the geographical imagination of the Arabs. By virtue of being a place where different laws—natural, cultural, political—prevailed, narratives about travel to China challenged, almost by necessity, notions about the world the Arabs themselves inhabited and about the inhabited world generally.

      But Accounts of China and India is not only a geographically informed meditation about the world. Based on actual stories by real merchants and travelers, it gives us vivid detailed descriptions. Accounts is in fact one of the earliest foreign accounts of China during the Tang dynasty and indeed the fullest and the most detailed of its time. Its importance is invaluable, not only because it mentions events such as the Huang Chao rebellion (835–884), but also, and principally, because of its detailed description of daily life in Canton, the main port СКАЧАТЬ