EARLY ARAB GEOGRAPHERS.
The MS. from which Renaudot made his translation was found by him in the library formed by the minister Colbert. This collection descended to the Comte de Seignelay; and subsequently merged into the Bibliothéque Royale. Here in 1764 the celebrated scholar Deguignes found the MS., and wrote more than one article upon it.[1]
In the year 1811 M. Langlès printed the text, and promised a translation; but he had made no progress with the latter at the time of his death in 1824. The text so printed remained in the stores of the Imprimerie Royale until the year 1844, when M. Reinaud published it with a translation and notes, prefacing the whole with a Preliminary Discourse on the early Geography of the East, full of valuable information and criticism. The following observations upon the work are condensed from M. Reinaud's; the translation is also taken from his.[2]
The title which Renaudot gave to his book is not quite accurate. He speaks of two travellers, while there was only one who wrote an account of his own travels. The basis of the work and that which bears in the text the title of Book I, is the account written by a merchant named Sulaimán, who embarked on the Persian Gulf, and made several voyages to India and China. This bears the date 237 A.H. (851 A.D.). The second part of the work was written by Abú Zaidu-l Hasan, of Síráf, a connoisseur, who, although he never travelled in India and China, as he himself expressly states, made it his business to modify and complete the work of Sulaimán, by reading, and by questioning travellers to those countries. Mas’údí met this Abú Zaid at Basra, in 303 A.H. (916 A.D.), and acknowledges to have derived information from him, some of which he reproduced in
- ↑ Jour. des Sav., Novembre, 1764. Notices et Extraits des MSS., Tome i. See also Mem. de l’Acad, des Inscriptions, Tome xxxvii,; Jour. Asiatique, iv serie, T. viii., 161; Asiatic Journal, vol. xxxiii., p. 234.
- ↑ “Relations des Voyages faites par les Arabes et les Persans dans l’Inde et à la Chine.” 2 Tom., 24mo., Paris, 1845.
