Ibn-Ḥawqal, The Cheque, and Awdaghost

Nehemia Levtzion

49 citations0/0 files storedThe Journal of African History

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

African Studies and Geopolitics Travel Writing and Literature Medieval History and Crusades

Abstract

It is generally accepted that Ibn-Ḥawqal crossed the Sahara and visited Awdaghost in 951/2 to be the first Arab geographer who reached the gates of bilād al-Sūdān. This is inferred from what he says about a cheque he saw in Awdaghost. A critical analysis of the references to this cheque suggests that it was a bill of debt owed by a trader from Sijilmāsa resident at Awdaghost to another trader from Sijilmāsa. The transactions between the two were part of the trans-Saharan trade, with one partner resident at Awdaghost and the other at Sijilmāsa. The bill must have been held by the creditor, whom Ibn-Ḥawqal could have met at Sijilmāsa. It was from this man that Ibn-Ḥawqal recorded the information about the ruler of the Ṣanhāja in the southern Sahara, and probably also about his relations with Ghana and other Sudanese polities. Another valuable piece of information, about the abandoned route from Ghana to Egypt, was collected in the oases of Egypt. Also, the detailed list of Berber tribes inhabiting the area between Tadmekka and Air could have been obtained in North Africa, rather than at Awdaghost, because communications in the Sahara were more frequent between north and south than between west and east. Ibn-Ḥawqal's description of the Sahara is stereotypic and adds nothing to what earlier geographers had to say, and the same applies to his words concerning Awdaghost itself. Towns and kingdoms in the Sudan mentioned by Ibn-Ḥawqal had already been recorded earlier by al-Yaʻqūbī, Ibn al-Faqīh and al-Masʻūdī. For a traveller who crossed the Sahara, Ibn-Ḥawqal's information is rather poor, but if he collected his information north of the Sahara, as this paper suggests, his labours as an inquisitive geographer are praiseworthy.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 49 citations exist upstream.

References

1963A History of Islam in West Africa 1957Description de l'Afrique 1955A History of Islam in West Africa 1993Description de l'Afrique septentrionale 1932Monumenta Cartographica Africae et Aegypti 1951Monumenta cartographica Africae et Aegypti

Cited by

2009Excavating Essouk-Tadmakka (Mali): new archaeological investigations of early Islamic trans-Saharan trade 1987The Trade of Medieval Europe: the North 1979The Arab conquest and the rise of Islam in North Africa 1987Mining and Metallurgy in Medieval Civilisation 2001Credit, Currencies, and Culture: African Financial Institutions in Historical Perspective 1976Calico Caravans: The Tripoli-Kano Trade after 1880 2006‘Trust in God, but tie your camel first.’ The economic organization of the trans-Saharan slave trade between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries 2011New light on the early Islamic West African gold trade: coin moulds from Tadmekka, Mali

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.