ARAB GEOGRAPHERS 



intellectual refinement, which, with the dark Middle Ages 

 of Europe as a background, has an almost dazzling effect. 

 The Arab geographers have a special gift for collecting con- 

 crete information about countries and conditions, about peoples' 

 habits and customs, and in this they may serve as models; 

 on the other hand sober criticism is not their strong side, 

 and they had a pronounced taste for the marvelous; if classi- 

 cal writers, and still more the learned men of the Euro- 

 pean Middle Ages had blended together trustworthy informa- 

 tion and fabulous myth more or less uncritically, the Arabs 

 did so to an even greater degree, and we often find in them 

 a truly Oriental splendor in the mythical; thus it must not 

 surprise us to hear of whales two hundred fathoms long 

 and snakes that swallow elephants in the same author (Ibn 

 Khordadbah) who says that the earth is round like a sphere, 

 and that all bodies are stable on its surface because the air 

 attracts their lighter parts (thus we have the buoyancy of the 

 air), while the earth attracts towards its center their heavy 

 parts in the same way as the magnet influences iron (a perfectly 

 clear description of gravitation). 



Chiefly on account of the language the new fund of geo- 

 graphical knowledge, which together with much that is 

 mythical, is contained in the rich literature of the Arabs, did 

 not attain any great importance in mediaeval Europe; on the 

 other hand the Arabs exercised more influence through the 

 geographical myths and tales which they brought orally from 

 the East to Europe, and, as we have seen, the world of Irish 

 myth, among others, was influenced thereby. 



The ideas of the Arabs about the North are, in most cases, 

 very hazy. Putting aside the partly mythical conceptions 

 that they had derived from the Greeks (especially Ptolemy), 

 they obtained their information about it chiefly in two ways: 

 (i) by their commercial intercourse in the east with Russia — 

 chiefly over the Caspian Sea with the towns of Itil and Bulgar ^ 



1 Bulgar was the capital of the country of the Mohammedan Bulgarians. 

 These were a Finnish people. From Bulgar or Bolgar comes the name Volga. 



