How 11th-century Cairo saw the world

Fitzroy Morrissey on the recent discovery of an Arabic manuscript that transforms how we think about history

LOST MAPS OF THE CALIPHS

This was a text that no one knew about, featuring several unusual and colourful maps, which, on closer examination, would force us to re-examine the history of Muslim geography and science. And so Savage-Smith went in search of the £400,000 needed to buy it for the Bodleian. By 2002 the money had been raised, a fitting present for the university library on its 400th birthday.

As tales of scholarly finds go, this is up there with the best. In Lost Maps of the Caliphs, which recounts the manuscript’s discovery and deciphering, Savage-Smith and her co-author Yossef Rapoport are almost embarrassed at the wealth of “firsts” that they’ve uncovered: the first stand-alone world map, the first world map to record the names of cities (395 of them) and, my personal favourite, the earliest recorded use of the name Angleterre. We also find the earliest surviving maps of Sicily and Cyprus, unique depictions of the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the rivers Tigris, Euphrates, Oxus, and Indus, and the only surviving map of the lost city of Tinnis in the Nile Delta – a major centre of medieval Mediterranean trade.

With nothing to go on beyond the text itself, Rapoport and Savage-Smith had to work out everything themselves. When was it written? At first, guided by what appeared to be a reference to the Norman advance on western Sicily between 1068 and 1071, they dated it to the late 11th century. Only after they had played around with the dots on one of the Arabic words (the Arabic of the manuscript is undotted) did they realise that it in fact it must predate the Norman conquest. Such are the challenges of writing the first draft of history.

Then there’s the identity of the author. Egypt at that time was controlled by the Fatimids, Ismaili Shia caliph imams who ruled North Africa and Syria from their new capital of Cairo. Our author was most likely a loyal court official. This would explain his decision to present the Mediterranean from a sailor’s viewpoint (another “first”), for the Fatimids, more than any previous Muslim dynasty, were a maritime power, and their fabled Ismaili missionaries divided up the

THINK BIGMap of the world, with south at the top, showing the source of the Nile in the Mountains of the Moon, from the Book of Curiosities

MIND-BENDINGMap of the Indus-Ganges