Week 1 The Arabian Seas and the Early World System

Ahmed Bin Majid's Description of the Oceans and Arabian Seas

Ahmed bin Majid was born in about 1421 in Ras Al-Khaimah (formerly known as Julfar) into a family of merchant seamen and navigators. In his Kitab al-Fawa'id fi usul al-bahr wa'l-qawa'id, Ahmad bin Majid, describes the known world and its oceans, lands and seas in about 1490.  We'll view the map below and read the excerpt below from Chapter 10 of his book to see how he describes what is an early form of global connections that extended by land over the silk routes and by sea across the Indian Ocean to link China with Abyssinia or Ethiopia in Africa. 

Map of the Indian Ocean System and Land Routes of the Silk Trade with China during the time of Ibn Majid.  The locations and names in Arabic on this map match well with Chapter 10 or the Tenth Fa'ida of Ibn Majid's 15th century description.

How does this compare with other travelers who moved across the Silk Routes from Africa to Asia?  Let's look at this map that shows the travels of Ibn Battuta in the 1300s with the voyages of the Chinese Muslim admiral Zheng He in the early 1400s.

Map by Patrick Kane based on Michael Rice, The Archaeology of the Arabian Gulf (1994) p. 267 

Photo of Iron Age Storage Pottery found at Muweilah Archaeology site in Sharjah.  Photo is distributed per Creative Commons license per Ãngel M. Felicasimo from Marinda, Espana [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]

The photo of the falaj canal at Al-Ain is granted under creative commons licenses via Bob McCaffrey [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)]