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Geographical Dictionary of Medieval Africa. Yāqūt, Al-Qazwīnī and Al-Himyarī.
DUCÈNE Jean-Charles, PREVOST Virginie.

Geographical Dictionary of Medieval Africa. Yāqūt, Al-Qazwīnī and Al-Himyarī.

Editions of the Sorbonne
€37,00 €0,00
N° d'inventaire 26278
Format 16 x 24
Détails 608 p., illustrations, paperback.
Publication Paris, 2023
Etat Nine
ISBN 9791035108557
In the 13th and 14th centuries , three Arab geographers devoted part of their dictionaries to African territories. Cities, mountains, rivers, and seas are described to the reader in a very lively way, providing a wealth of historical, geographical, and economic details, a significant number of realia, surprising poems, and so many delightful anecdotes that broadened the horizons of contemporary readers just as they broaden ours today. These texts reveal a society open to distant worlds. The articles gathered here concern the Maghreb, Libya, and West and East Africa, but not Egypt, which has already been covered elsewhere. This vast corpus, comprising more than 800 articles, was once assembled by Jacques Thiry (Université libre de Bruxelles), who undertook to study it before his death in 2012. It has been revised and extensively commented on by two of his former students in a warm tribute to him.
This volume allows us to reread the major episodes in the history of the Maghreb and to discover numerous ethnographic details. The reader travels from Fez to the Niger River, from Algiers to the land of the Zang and to the famous island of Wāqwāq where gold is so abundant that the inhabitants use it to make chains for their dogs and collars for their monkeys.
This work is aimed at Africanists, specialists in the Muslim world, medieval historians and a wide, curious public.
In the 13th and 14th centuries , three Arab geographers devoted part of their dictionaries to African territories. Cities, mountains, rivers, and seas are described to the reader in a very lively way, providing a wealth of historical, geographical, and economic details, a significant number of realia, surprising poems, and so many delightful anecdotes that broadened the horizons of contemporary readers just as they broaden ours today. These texts reveal a society open to distant worlds. The articles gathered here concern the Maghreb, Libya, and West and East Africa, but not Egypt, which has already been covered elsewhere. This vast corpus, comprising more than 800 articles, was once assembled by Jacques Thiry (Université libre de Bruxelles), who undertook to study it before his death in 2012. It has been revised and extensively commented on by two of his former students in a warm tribute to him.
This volume allows us to reread the major episodes in the history of the Maghreb and to discover numerous ethnographic details. The reader travels from Fez to the Niger River, from Algiers to the land of the Zang and to the famous island of Wāqwāq where gold is so abundant that the inhabitants use it to make chains for their dogs and collars for their monkeys.
This work is aimed at Africanists, specialists in the Muslim world, medieval historians and a wide, curious public.