584 



COSMOS. 



the amount of knowledge regarding India that may be 

 derived from Arabian sources. The incursion of the Moguls 

 into China certainly disturbed the intercourse with the nations 

 beyond the Oxus, but the Moguls soon served to extend the 

 international relations of the Arabs, from the light thrown on 

 geography by their observations and earef'il investigations, 

 from the coasts of the Dead Sea to those of Western Africa, 

 and from the Pyrenees to Scherif Edrisi's marsh lands of 

 Wangarah, in the interior of Africa.* According to the 

 testimony of Frahn, Ptolemy's geography was translated into 

 Arabic by order of the Caliph Mamun, between the years 

 813 and 833; and it is not improbable that several fragments 

 of Marinus Tyrius, which have not come down to us, were 

 employed in this translation.! 



Of the long series of remarkable geographers, presented to 

 us in the literature of the Arabs, it will be sufficient to name 

 the first and last, El Istachri and Alhassan, (Johannes 

 Leo Africanus).| Geography never acquired a greater 

 acquisition of facts, even from the discoveries of the Portu- 

 guese and Spaniards. Within fifty years after the death of the 



Oriental scholar is based on the incomplete treatise of the Abbe 

 Kenaudot, Andennes Relations des Indes, et de la Chine, de deux, 

 Voyageurs Mahometans" 1718. The soiabic manuscript contains 

 only one notice of a voyage, that of th, of i'chant Soleiman, who em- 

 barked on the Persian Gulf in the year ^ f ra To this notice is added, 

 what Abu-Zeyd-Hassan, of Syraf in Farsiu ^ who had never travelled 

 to India or China, had learnt from other we^ on formed merchants. 



* Reinaud et Fave Du Feu gregems, 1845, 1C . 200. 



f Ukert, Ueber Marinus Tyrius und Ptf ' nans die Geoffraphen, 

 in the Rheinische Museum fur Philologie, 1 e \ s. 329-332; Gilde- 

 meister, De rebus Indicis, pars 1, 1838, p. >. s ^ c ; Asie centrale, t. ii. 

 p. 191. h ',e 



t The "Oriental Geography of Ebn-HauH ' which Sir William 

 Ouseley published in London in 1800, is thatf e .Abu-Ishak el-Jstachri, 

 and, as Frahn has shown (Ibn Fozlan. p. ix. vitii. and 256-263), ia 

 half a century older than Ebn-Haukal. The.no'flps which accompany 

 the " Book of Climates" of the year 920, anJ e 'which there is a fine 

 manuscript copy in the library of Gotha, have au ,rded me much aid in 

 my observations on the Caspian Sea and the Sea of Aral (Asie. 

 centrale, t. ii. pp. 192-196). We have lately been put in possession of 

 an edition of Istachri, and a German translation ; (Liber Climatum, 

 ad similitudinem codids Gothani delineandum, cur. J. H. Moeller, 

 Goth. 1839 ; Das Buck dor Lander, translated from the Arabic by 

 A. D. Mordtmann, Hwnb. 1845>, 



