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Mapping India in West Asia during the 7th through 14th Centuries
Abstract
India, located at southern end of the historical network of major trade routes that connected the Mediterranean with China, marked the horizon of terra-cognita for societies in both eastern and western Eurasia. Travelers from both ends of the continent converged on the subcontinent for many reasons; after their return home, they documented the geographical information they had accumulated, and disseminated it among their countrymen; by doing so, they expanded geographic knowledge of the greater Afro-Eurasian world among their people. This paper focuses on West Asia and the mapmakers who developed the region’s knowledge of India between the seventh and fourteenth centuries, during which they drew the world’s most advanced map of Afro-Eurasia to include the Indian subcontinent. In the earliest geographic and cartographic works of ancient Greece and Rome, India generally remained on the eastern edge of their known world (except for Ptolemy’s monumental work). After the advance of Western Asian merchants into eastern Eurasia, India became a major hub of intra-Asian interaction and a route to China. Many scholars have examined Arabic and Persian sources including geographies, travel accounts, and maps to determine the extent of geographic knowledge about India in particular societies at different periods in history. However, this paper adopts a new and comparative approach, analyzing a set of major sources in different genres in order to identify the key changes in West Asian geographic knowledge of India between the ninth and fourteenth centuries. Its main focus is on four sources, written for different purposes in Iran and other West Asian regions, which exerted considerable influence on later accounts: the geographic and literary works of professional geographers, especially al-Khwarizmi (died c. 850) and al-Biruni (973–1048), travel literature like the Accounts of China and India, and several Iranian maps drawn during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Applying this comparative perspective, this paper demonstrates that, through geographic and cartographic works produced and circulated in their respective time periods and for different purposes, West Asian societies developed more extensive knowledge of India than of any other region outside West Asia itself.
Discipline
Geography
Geographic Area
India
Sub Area
7th-13th Centuries