The year 922 saw a series of remarkable face-to-face encounters in the steppes between Bukhara and the Middle Volga. Ibn Fadlan was an intrepid member of a diplomatic and religious mission from the distant caliphate in Baghdad to the ruler of the Volga Bulgars. His account gives a vivid eyewitness description of the peoples he came upon (whose appearance, rituals and filthy habits both fascinate and appal) and a famous depiction of a Viking Rus ship burial. It is unique testimony to burgeoning exchanges between several different cultures, and to the emergence of new political structures on the steppes. Yet the account survives only as part of a later composite work, raising questions of meaning and historical interpretation. This pioneering interdisciplinary study of Ibn Fadlan’s text and the world he surveyed draws on a variety of specialists to give readers both ‘the bigger picture’ of cultural and economic change in Eurasia, Byzantium and the Muslim world, and hard facts, in the form of archaeological and numismatic data.
List of maps
List of illustrations
List of tables and appendices
Preface and acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
List of contributors
Maps
Plates
PART ONE: OVERVIEW
1. Editors' introduction
2. Ibn Fadlan’s Kitab: text and afterlife
Viacheslav S. Kuleshov with Jonathan Shepard
PART TWO: TEXT AND CONTEXT
3. Where is the real Ibn Fadlan? Editing and translating the Kitab
James E. Montgomery
4. From Kitab to Risala: the long shadow of Yaqut’s version of Ibn Fadlan’s account
Luke Treadwell
5. Other Arab geographers’ sources on the North: al-Jayhani and the ‘Anonymous Relation’
Jean-Charles Ducène
6. Other ethnographies of the steppe
Walter Pohl
7. Other travellers’ tales
Ian Wood
PART THREE: BACKGROUND TO THE JOURNEY
8. The Abbasid background
Hugh Kennedy
9. Ibn Fadlan and the Khazars: the hidden centre
Nick Evans
10. Beyond the Gate of the Turks: archaeology around the Aral Sea
Irina Arzhantseva and Heinrich Härke, with a contribution by Ekaterina A. Armarchuk
PART FOUR: VIKING-AGE RUS
11. Ibn Fadlan and the rituals of the Rus: Vikings on the Volga?
Neil Price
12. Viking-Age markets and emporia
Søren M. Sindbæk
13. Rus, routes and sites
Veronika Murasheva
14. Identities, ethnicities, cultures: Ibn Fadlan and the Rus on the Middle Volga
Þórir Jónsson Hraundal
15. Rus and other Northmen under non-Arabic eyes
Jonathan Shepard
PART FIVE: VOLGA BULGARIA
16. What was Volga Bulgaria?
Leonard Nedashkovsky
17. Ninth- and tenth-century Volga Bulgar trade
Evgeniy P. Kazakov
18. Volga Bulgar imitative coinage
Marek Jankowiak
PART SIX: CONCLUSION
19. ‘Failure of a mission’?
Jonathan Shepard
List of Reign Dates
List of Alternative Place Names
Glossary
Index
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