This paper will present and analyze evidence for slave trading in the Indian Ocean that stretched from Egypt, via Yemen and the Persian Gulf, all the way to India and China. While much is known about the Indian Ocean slave trade between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, there is far less scholarship about slaving activity before 1500. Despite this, it is possible to sketch the extent and limits of the medieval slave trade through the use of sources including geographies, chronicles, and documentary sources that are found in Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, Old Malayalam, and Chinese. In more recent decades, archaeologists and geneticists have also brought data to light that can be read alongside such texts. The goals of this paper are twofold. First, it will use the available sources to sketch the known geographic extent of slave trading across the medieval Indian Ocean. Second, the paper will discuss interpretive problems that scholars face in making sense of this evidence. Though enslaved people surface with some frequency in the record, these mentions are not necessarily indicative of a robust and perennial trade in slaves. My paper will show how the Indian Ocean slave trade was comprised of multiple strands that operated in distinct ways. Slave trading, for example, could take place as part of an isolated diplomatic exchange and, thus, not be representative of a perennial trade. In the quotidian economy, small numbers of slaves were shipped across the Indian Ocean as a composite part of a larger mixed cargo. Accordingly, when medieval sources report that "slaves" were traded in a given context, this usually signifies the transport of a very small number of slaves. This paper argues that scholars can better evaluate the overall medieval slave trade by parsing its multiple strands in order to avoid over-reading sources to posit a perennial and voluminous maritime slave trade in the Indian Ocean. While the slave trade did peak in specific times and places, I will suggest that such episodes were the exception and not the rule. Another frequently misconstrued historical event is the so-called Zanj (East African) slave revolt in ninth-century Iraq. This paper will illustrate why this was not, in fact, a slave revolt as it often depicted. Moreover, misconceptions about the Zanj presence in Iraq can also distort the overall portrait of slavery in East Africa, Iraq, and indeed in the greater Indian Ocean region.