Muslims on the Volga in the Viking Age
In the Footsteps of Ibn Fadlan

Edited by Jonathan Shepard,Luke Treadwell

ISBN13: 9781784539337

Imprint: I.B. Tauris

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Format:

Published: 21/09/2023

Availability: POD

Description
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
  • Islam
  • Medieval history
  • General (US: Trade)
  • Tertiary Education (US: College)
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List Price: £90.00