Unanswered Questions about Book of Roads and Provinces
Steven Bernard Zwickel
December, 2018
I am not a historian. I teach technical communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
One of the basic tenets of good technical writing that I drill into my students is the importance of knowing your purpose. “Don’t write,” I tell them, “until you know why you are writing. Readers should have no trouble determining the purpose of a document after reading just the first few sentences”.
I was reading some articles related to my own family history when I first learned about the Radhanites. I was excited and I immediately arranged to borrow a copy of Rabbi Rabinowitz’ 1948 treatise, Jewish Merchant Adventurers, from the library. The Rabbi’s book discusses an 1100-year old Arabic text, called The Book of Roads and Provinces, that includes fifteen sentences describing Jewish merchants and the routes they followed. Rabinowitz argues that these about this small section on “Radhanites” should be taken seriously by modern-day historians.
I was enthralled by the way Rabinowitz developed his thesis and I spent a lot of time and energy looking up some of the references to people and places that are now unknown or spelled quite differently than they were in the 1940s. The Book of Roads is mostly a series of lists of the towns and sites a traveler would encounter in the ’Abbasid Caliphate in the 800s with a few stories about local customs and myths. As one of the earliest scholars to translate the work said, it is “dry and monotonous.”
During my second reading of Jewish Merchant Adventurers I was brought up short by the realization that I could not tell why The Book of Roads and Provinces was written. Rabinowitz parsed and dissected the text with minute precision, but never explained why the author had written the book. I tried some other sources—some 60 or so historians have written about the Book of Roads—and could not find a single one that defined the purpose of the book. Moreover, none of the historians who had written about the Book of Roads had an explanation for the presence of the section on the Radhanites (the only known use of the term in the early Middle Ages). Hard to believe, but it appears no one, in 1100 years, has questioned the author’s purpose in writing the Book of Roads.
In this paper, Unanswered Questions about Book of Roads and Provinces, I set out to answer to two questions: Why was the Book of Roads written and why was the section on Radhanites included?
About the Unanswered Questions
In 1948, the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregation of Johannesburg, South Africa, Louis Isaac Rabinowitz (1906–1984), wrote Jewish Merchant Adventurers: A Study of the Radhanites. Rabinowitz’ book was written to encourage other historians to reconsider the role played by Jewish merchants—called Radhanites—in international commerce in the centuries before the Crusades, based on a small section of a document called The Book of Roads and Provinces written around 847 CE by a Moslem bureaucrat living in what is now Iran.
The Book of Roads and Provinces is a dull, disorganized discourse full of place names that are no longer used and distracting asides about events that may or may not be true.
In the latter part of The Book of Roads and Provinces the author inserted a separate section—just fifteen sentences—on the Jewish merchants and the four routes they took from Western Europe to China.
In his book, Rabinowitz argued that the section on the Radhanites ought to be taken seriously and he offered evidence to support that idea. The first part of Jewish Merchant Adventurer describes the many Jewish communities along the routes, which would have made safe travel possible. Rabinowitz examines the viability of each of the four routes and concludes with a discussion of the goods the merchants carried and accounts written by contemporary travelers.
What neither Rabinowitz (nor do any of the other historians who have written about the book) does not explain is why he thinks the Book of Roads and Provinces was written nor does he examine why it contains a section on the Radhanites. I will try to answer these questions by exploring the background of the author, ibn Khordadbeh, the history of the Book of Roads and Provinces, and how the section on Radhanite Jewish merchants has been studied by many distinguished historians. {His full name was Abu'l-Qasim Ubaydallah ibn Abdallah ibn Khordadbeh (820/825 –913) See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Khordadbeh> and <https://iranicaonline.org/articles/ebn-kordadbeh>}
Unanswered Questions about Book of Roads and Provinces
This is the story of an 1100-year-old book, written by an unusual man named Ibn Khordadbeh, that contains an extraordinary section. Although it was known to Arabic writers for several centuries, the Book of Roads and Provinces was “lost” for hundreds of years and, when it was re-discovered and translated from the Arabic, it was attributed to the wrong author. When historians finally determined who the author was, they dismissed it as “dry and monotonous.” It wasn’t until the 1840s that European historians began reading and analyzing the text.
Most of the book consists of lists of towns and geographical features a traveler would pass when going from city to city, but one section is quite different. In fifteen sentences, Ibn Khordadbeh describes a group of Jewish merchants he calls Radhanites, who traveled from western Europe east to India and China and back.
It explains three routes the merchants took and the goods they carried to market. A brief paragraph follows, describing another group of traders, the Rus or Slavs, then there are four more sentences describing a fourth trade route from Europe across North Africa to the Silk Road in Asia.
This is the only known reference to Radhanites and it caused quite a stir among 19th Century historians, who believed it filled in a relatively unknown portion of Jewish history and explained part of early medieval economics. Books were written about the significance of Jews traveling (and perhaps migrating) along the trade routes to settle in central Asia, India, and China. Many speculated about where these Radhanites originated; were they Europeans or Asians? Some experts dismissed the Radhanite story as a fiction—a legend Ibn Khordadbeh had come across with no real basis in truth. Others expended gallons of ink debating the origins of the term Radhanite and what it might signify. The Second World War and the destruction of millions of European Jews, gave scholars new impetus to examine the Radhanite story as a way of taking a longer view of the history of the Jews.
Historians and other writers continue to be interested in Ibn Khordadbeh’s book and the story of the Radhanite merchants, but in 1100 years no one has ever (to the best of my knowledge) tried to answer two questions: Why did Ibn Khordadbeh write the book? Why did he interrupt the text to include the section on the Radhanites?
This is the story of the manuscript and how I think it came to be written.
The Manuscript of The Book of Roads
In 847, a public official named Ibn Khordadbeh (sometimes written Ibn Khordadbeg or Ibn Khordādh-beh) wrote a book in Arabic called Kitāb al Masālik w’al Mamālik (The Book of Roads and Provinces/Kingdoms). With it, Ibn Khordadbeh became the first person we know of to write a geography book in Arabic. Ibn Khordadbeh’s book was apparently popular because second edition was published in 885.
According to a 2016 article by Jan Romgard, Ibn Khordādh-beh’s original manuscript was lost and only three copies survive:
- One copy (dated May, 1232) was donated by Robert Huntington (1637-1701) to the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford in 1693. Huntington had served as Chaplain to the Levant Company, based in Aleppo, Syria, a position he held for 11 years. Huntington travelled all over the Near East and that’s how he acquired the manuscript. This copy is in the Bodleian Library in Middle Eastern Manuscripts & Rare Books: Bodleian Library’s Islamic manuscript collection.
- Another, undated copy, possibly compiled before the 12th century, is in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna. <http://data.onb.ac.at/rec/AC16238356> This copy may be one that came from Leiden.
- A third copy, from the 19th century, is in Paris. The one in Paris may be one copied by Adolf Neubauer and written in 1862 or a copy made in Istanbul for French historian and orientalist Charles Barbier de Meynard (1826–1908).
French scholar Barbier de Meynard described the copy he saw at Oxford in 1862 as an “in-8° volume of 64 folios, on tissue paper, with a large and spaced writing. A considerable gap is noticed towards the end.”
What is significant is the use of paper, rather than parchment or papyrus. According to the Silk Road Foundation, the Chinese closely guarded the secret of paper manufacture but at the Battle of Talas in 751, the Chinese T’ang army was defeated by the Ottoman Turks and Chinese soldiers and paper makers were taken prisoner and brought to Samarkand. There the Arabs learned paper making from the Chinese prisoners and later built a paper factory in Baghdad in 793.
European Historians Discover the Book of Roads
Arab scholars knew about the Book of Roads, but Europeans only became aware of it when people like Robert Huntington (1637-1701) and Abbé Eusèbe Renaudot (1646–1720) started bringing Arabic manuscripts to Europe.
Early attempts at translating and interpreting the text were not successful. Ibn Khordadbeh’s book was mistaken for a different book on geography by Muḥammad Abū’l-Qāsim ib Haukal called A Book of Roads and Kingdoms.
According to the entry under “Haukal” [Ḥawqal] in the National Encyclopædia: a dictionary of universal knowledge (1884):
Early attempts at translating and interpreting the text were not successful. Ibn Khordadbeh’s book was mistaken for a different book on geography by Muḥammad Abū’l-Qāsim ib Haukal called A Book of Roads and Kingdoms.
According to the entry under “Haukal” [Ḥawqal] in the National Encyclopædia: a dictionary of universal knowledge (1884):
“Manuscripts of Haukal’s work on geography are rarely met with even in the East. There is a copy in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and another at Leyden. From the latter MS. Pieter Johannes Uylenbroeck has given an interesting account of the work in his “Iracæ Persicæ Descriptio: præmissa est Dissertatio de Ibn Haukali Ge0graphi codice LugdunoBatavo,” 4to., Lugd. Bat., 1822.
“Sir William Ouseley published, from what he conceived to be a Persian translation of the Arabic of Haukal, a work entitled ‘The Oriental Geography of Ebn Haukal, a traveller of the tenth century,’ London, 1800; and Baron Silvestre De Sacy gave a further account of this work in the ‘Magasin Encyclopédique,’ vol. vi., pp. 32-76, 151-186, 307-333. But Uylenbroeck has shown that the Persian treatise translated by Ouse ley cannot be regarded as either a translation or an abridgment of the Arabic of Haukal. He considers it probable that the Persian work was one of those which Haukal made use of in compiling his Geo graphy, and that it was written by Ibn Khordadbeh.”
