2019 No More War Games

2019, Steven B. Zwickel

I was  watching a boy playing with an action figure and it got me thinking about my toys when I was a child.

I never played with action figures, mostly because there weren’t any, but also because they would have been considered dolls, and no self-respecting boy in the 1950s would ever think of playing with dolls. (Not entirely true, now that I think about it. From time to time my sister would take out her dolls to play with them and I would either make fun of them, tip over the tea party to make my sister angry, or grab one and play keep-away to make her even angrier. So, in that sense, I did “play” with dolls.)

I find modern-day action figures for boys troubling for a couple of reasons. First, there’s way the figures look—enormous shoulders and bulging muscles on their arms and legs. If they were female, there’d be a huge outcry over “body shaming”—the modern term for making girls feel inadequate. The musclebound action figures seem like an ad aimed at boys to encourage them to start taking steroids.

The other reason the action figures concern me is that they always seem to be fighting the bad guys (in whatever fantasy world  they may be) all by themselves. In fact, boys seem to play with the figures alone, by themselves, in combat against some imaginary enemy. The action figures always seem to come equipped with an impressive arsenal of weapons that can stab, slash, shoot, or impale their enemies. But they do it all alone; they are not part of a platoon, much less an army, of other muscular action figures. And boys who play with these toys also seem to play by themselves.

I don’t know how this affects the boys, but the contrast to the way my friends and I played when we were young is striking.

We played war games. We were a dozen years removed from the end of World War II and our parents had fought the “Japs” (Yes, we called them that. And we called them “Nips” and a lot worse.) and Nazis (We saw no difference between Germans and Nazis—to us they were the same evil bad guys.) and won. Our folks may have been pacifists before the attack on Pearl Harbor, but I never heard of a parent who objected to our playing war in the 1950s.

Our war games were never about a single soldier; we played with entire armies. Toy stores sold plastic bags with 144 soldiers in fighting stances. Inside the comic books we hid from our parents were ads for even larger bags with more soldiers. I think I had 288 Civil War soldiers, both Union and Confederate, a large collection of WWII GIs (with tanks!), and several groups of Indians and cowboys.

Our armies were kept in cigar boxes and we’d carry them from our house to our friends when we wanted to play war. The battlefields were made up of whatever was handy—often wooden blocks stood in for houses and forests, but the phone book always made a good hill and a rolled up sheet of newspaper could be a river (when flattened) or a fence soldiers could hide behind.

When the centennial of the Civil War came around in 1960 and 1961 dozens of articles about the battles, the battlefields, the soldiers, and the meaning of the war to both north and south appeared in all the major papers and magazines. I remember a particular issue of Life (March 17, 1961 if you want to look it up) that contained all the parts and instructions for a game called 1863. The board was a map of the USA printed on a gatefold in the magazine. You would cut out the pieces printed in the magazine and glue them to small squares of cardboard to represent the different military units. Millions of people learned how to play a war game from 1863 and the game was soon printed and sold by Parker Brothers with plastic soldiers in a gray and blue box. 

Civil War toy soldiers appeared everywhere. The ones you ordered from the comic books were plastic, cast in blue and gray in different poses. The soldiers were about an inch high and molded in low relief—so flat that they were almost 2D. Each rested on a flat base so they could stand up and face the enemy.

Playing war games with friends was a social activity that required imagination and communication. We each had our own preferences and ideas about how to set up and use our soldiers. One of my friends was obsessed with Custer’s Last Stand and he always played the US Cavalry, even though they always lost. Another friend usually wanted to wage war on Iwo Jima. I was partial to Civil War games and often took the South side.

My family took a trip to Gettysburg when I was eight or nine and we hired a guide to show us around the battlefield. He rattled off statistics and I had trouble understanding his accent. “There were 400 keelt, 500 wunded, and 110 meezing” meant 400 killed, 500 wounded, and 110 missing.

For a while, I thought the South had a point. Kids tend to be conservative in their thinking and the idea that the Union wanted to mess with the southern states’ traditions seemed wrong. But I soon realized that the traditions involved slavery, which I absolutely hated. That put me firmly on the Union side in future war games.

The trip to Gettysburg inspired me to buy my first board war game. A company called Avalon Hill had come up with new ways to simulate combat, using a board with a battlefield map, dice to create randomness and uncertainty, and lots of small (easy to lose) cardboard pieces representing different military units. 

The Avalon Hill Gettysburg game came with hundreds of square cardboard pieces and a book of complex rules. It was played on a map divided into hexagons, which permitted players to position units facing six different directions. After playing it a few times, it became clear that, once the whole Union army got to the battlefield, there was nothing the South could do to win the game.

A few years later, Avalon Hill came out with an updated version of Gettysburg that had a better map and more complicated rules.

I was interested in how battles were won and lost and I bought other Avalon Hill war games. Some were fun, some taught me history lessons, and a few had rules that made them simply unplayable. When I got a computer, one of the extras I purchased was a war game based on the Eastern Front in World War II. All the games had rules that evened up the contest so that, theoretically, the weaker side had a shot at winning.

But as the Civil War had first piqued my interest, it also led me away from war games when I came across a diorama of part of the Gettysburg battlefield called the battle of the railroad cut. Without going into a lot of detail, a railroad company had started to build a line into the town and excavated a path through the hills to the west. The southerners advanced on Gettysburg from the west and several units walked right through the railroad cut. Union soldiers in front of them and standing on the sides of the cut opened fire. It was “shooting fish in a barrel.” They called on the rebels to surrender, but they refused and the slaughter continued until the few remaining rebels were captured or escaped.

The story made me question the whole idea of war games. War isn’t a game, of course, but this episode left me with a strong distaste for war in any form. I learned that no one in their right mind would want to play a truly realistic war game. I learned that the outcomes of many famous “history-changing” battles were pretty much inevitable—in the real world there are no rules to make it an even match. With extremely rare exceptions, the larger, more powerful army always wins. 
I have stopped playing war games. I still play checkers with my granddaughter, but I think that's as close to combat as I ever want to go.

"Most of what we call history consists of the adventures of small bands of heavily armed teenagers lacking adult supervision"

---Steven Zwickel

==================

"I was now embarked on a military career. This orientation was entirely due to my collection of soldiers. I had ultimately nearly fifteen hundred. They were all of one size, all British, and organized as an infantry division with a cavalry brigade.

        "My brother Jack commanded the hostile army. But by a Treaty for the Limitation of Armaments he was only allowed to have coloured troops; and they were not allowed to have artillery. Very important! I could muster myself only eighteen field-guns—besides fortress pieces. But all the other services were complete—except one. It is what every army is always

short of—transport. My father’s old friend, Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, admiring my array, noticed this deficiency and provided a fund from which it was to some extent supplied.

    "The day came when my father himself paid a formal visit of inspection. All the troops were arranged in the correct formation of attack. He spent twenty minutes studying the scene—which was really impressive—with a keen eye and captivating smile. At the end he asked me if I would like to

go into the Army. I thought it would be splendid to command an Army, so I said ‘Yes’ at once: and immediately I was taken at my word. For years I thought my father with his experience and flair had discerned in me the qualities o( military genius. But I was told later that he had only come to

the conclusion that I was not clever enough to go to the Bar. However that may be, the toy soldiers turned the current of my life. Henceforward all my education was directed to, passing into Sandhurst, and afterwards to the technical details of the profession of arms. Anything else I had to pick

up for myself."

- Winston Churchill, My Early Years, “Harrow” p. 19 

        

(Churchill entered Harrow in 1888, when he was 14, and left in 1892 for Sandhurst, which he entered in 1893 when he was 19)

Anger: What Is it and Where Does It Come from?

➤ What Is Anger and Where Does It Come from?

©2019, Steven B. Zwickel

{This is the first of a series of articles about dealing with the anger in your life}

Why learn about anger?

The problem with anger for many of us seems to be that it is something that was missed or avoided while we were growing up. Our parents and other adults who raised us gave us many different skills—a whole kit of tools with which to deal with life. They tried to teach us how to survive in the world; how to deal with different situations at school, at work, in our relationships; and, by their own example, how to raise a family. However, they may have left something out of these tool kits; they may have not given us a good set of skills for dealing with anger—either our own or other people’s.

Why didn’t the adults who raised us teach us more about anger? For one thing, they may have had little experience in dealing with anger themselves. People used to be much more formal in their actions and relationships than they are today, and anger, along with other strong feelings, just wasn’t something people talked about or expressed in certain situations.

Perhaps they lived a more isolated or sheltered life, far removed from the hustle and bustle of modern-day living. We live in a more crowded society,and interpersonal conflicts occur more frequently. 

Another reason might be that they themselves were unsuccessful in handling anger and thus had few good skills to pass along to us. They may have been unable to offer us effective ways to deal with anger and may have passed along tactics that do not work.

Finally, they may not have taught us about anger because they shared society’s strong negative preconceptions about anger. They may have considered anger bad and sinful and simply too scary to deal with. We may have been told repeatedly that people who get angry are wicked, that anger makes us less civilized and more barbaric, causing us to associate being angry with being deranged. This negative view of anger is reflected even in our language: mad is used to describe both people who are angry and people who are crazy.

I’m NOT angry!

Anger is so scary for most people to deal with that they try to avoid even using the word “anger.”Here are some expressions (euphemisms) people use instead of saying they are angry:

Fury, indignation, ire, mad, wrath, dander, dudgeon, dutch, in a pet, huffy, a monkey, in a fit of pique, temper, annoyed, exasperated, infuriated, irritated, enraged, incensed, steamed up, umbrage, irked, vexed, aggravated, nettled. provoked, riled up, affronted, offended, outraged, hot under the collar, burned up, set by the ears, blowing up, boiled, bristling, burning, flaring up, fuming, raging, seething, chafing, fretting, stewing, ranting, raving, storming, breathing fire, flying into a rage, getting one’s blood up, having a cow, hitting the ceiling, seeing red, losing one’s temper, being sore, acrimonious, feeling choleric, getting hot, irate, pissed, shirty, boiling over, feeling waxy, wroth, perturbed, riley, put out, upset, uptight, worked up, wrought up, pissed off, orey-eyed, red-faced, wild-eyed, in a snit, hateful, galled, throwing a tantrum, roiled, a rising gorge, ticked off, in a frenzy, frantic, petulant, miffed, resentful, full of rancor, in ill humor, sullen, indignant, stung, cross, rankled, doing a slow burn, seeing red, flying into a passion, filled with bile, flying off the handle, smoldering, sizzling, feeling peeved, glowering, scowling, giving dirty looks, feeling bitter, righteous indignation, heated, getting one’s Irish up, having conniption fits, exploding, erupting, storming, blowing up, making a scene, in a towering rage, having one’s nose out of joint, taking something amiss, showing one’s teeth, foaming at the mouth, glaring, looking daggers, smoking, being browned off, beside oneself, livid, breathing fire and fury, blustering, carrying on, kicking up a fuss, raising cain, tearing up the place, having a cat fit, stamping one’s foot, raising hell, venting your spleen, biting someone’s nose off, chewing someone out, jumping down someone’s throat, raising the roof, snapping at someone, taking it out on someone, bridled, raising one’s hackles, getting worked into a lather, doing a slow burn, flaring up, going into a tailspin, having a hemorrhage, blowing one’s stack, blowing a gasket, feeling ruffled, aggrieved, having someone step on one’s toes, having something stick in one’s craw, feeling stirred up, driven mad, lashed into a fury, P.O.’d, mad as a hornet, fit to be tied, mad as a wet hen, bearing a grudge, having high words, feeling spiteful, bilious, hopping mad, smarting under, arching one’s back, losing one’s patience, forgetting oneself, going berserk, having shit fits, quivering with rage, feeling antagonized, pushed too far, worked up, disappointed, cut to the quick, giving someone a piece of one’s mind, madder than hell, testy, grouchy, surly, fractious, feeling antipathy, cranky, honked off, twisted my tail, had a kitten.

These are all expressions (euphemisms) people use instead of using the word angry. Do all these expressions mean the same thing? How do you think they are different? Do they all describe the same feeling?

Anger may vary in intensity. How strongly an individual feels may be reflected in the “language of anger”—the words they choose to describe how they feel. Some writers draw fine lines between anger, rage, and resentment. Others distinguish between anger that has been seething within a person for a long time and anger expressed in a flash of “temper.” 

We will call the intense emotional response (and the stress we experience) anger. My “anger,” your “irritation,” his “disappointment,” and her “ticked off’ will be considered different in degree, not type.

How Other People May React to Our Anger

The scary part of anger is that you can’t predict how an angry person may react; you can never be sure that the other person won’t strike back at you. Because anger is so unpredictable, you need to become aware of how other people may react to your telling them that you’re angry. 

Some of you will read this and be eager to apply at home or at work what you’ve learned. You may be in for a big disappointment: when most people in our society come face to face with an angry individual, they try to avoid a confrontation and attempt to run away (literally or figuratively). 

F Some people attempt to change the subject.

F Some will tell you that you’re wrong, that what you’re feeling is not anger. 

F Others may become very defensive and attack you!

F Still others will immediately start talking about all their anger! 

In other words, people will try just about anything to get away from you (and your anger) as well as to get themselves “off the hook.”

Anger is scary for most people. We tend to associate anger with destructive behavior and a loss of emotional self-control. If you decide, after reading this, to let someone know how you really feel, don’t be surprised at his or her reaction. Most people won’t want to deal with your anger.

What Makes You Angry?

Although different things make different people angry, there’s a common basis for their feelings when they feel that their self-esteem or their value system is under attack in someway.

Try making up a list of what makes you angry. Go through each item and see if you can tell what triggered your anger response.

Can you reframe each response in such a way that it’s clear how it relates either to your self-esteem or value system?

Try using terms such as should or should not to show how another person’s words or actions may violate your values. Add those words to the items on your list. You may discover patterns—the same terms cropping up repeatedly. That can tell you a lot about what triggers your anger.

Here are some examples of how this rephrasing might work:

Item: “I get angry when people are inconsiderate.”

Reframed: “People should be considerate of others. As a human being you deserve consideration.” (Write inconsiderate on the list.)

Item: “I don’t like it when people are prejudiced.”

Reframed: “People should not be prejudiced.” (Add prejudiced to the list.)

Item: “When my boss isn’t fair with me, I get upset.”

Reframed: “People should be fair.” (Add unfair to the list.)

Give yourself plenty of time to think up examples, but if none are forthcoming, try some gentle prompting. For example, consider the following:

Do you watch the news or read the newspapers? Do some of the events you hear about make you angry? How do you feel about pollution, terrorist attacks, wasted money and resources, incompetent leadership, violence against innocent bystanders, children, the elderly, the sick, animals? 

You have families, relatives, parents, and children-do they ever make you angry? Do you ever have to deal with their criticism, nagging, teasing, or manipulation and taking advantage? What about abuse-emotional, verbal, physical?

If you work outside the home for a living, you may have to deal with customers, supervisors, co-workers, or suppliers who sometimes make you angry. Do you ever feel that they are unfair or arbitrary? Incompetent, slow, careless? Fussy and demanding?

Sometimes institutions and organizations can make you angry. For example, dealing with government agencies and officials, hospitals and doctors, school systems and administrators, the legal system and lawyers, or financial institutions can make you angry. These systems can make you feel very angry when you perceive them as invading your privacy, avoiding responsibility, being slow and corrupt, insensitive to people’s needs, or greedy and expensive.

Look for patterns in your list. Be aware that different people get angry over different things; these differences don’t make the anger of one person more justifiable than the anger of another. What may outrage one person may have a very different effect on another.

Here are some more examples of things that make people angry {from participants in a workshop on dealing with anger}:

➤    People who don’t listen or who interrupt

➤    When the boss acts as if she owns you

➤    People who don’t use their turn signals in traffic

➤    Big shots who think they can boss you around

➤    Lateness, being kept waiting

➤    When my father tries to tell me how to live

➤    People who cheat on their spouses

➤    When I get blamed for someone else’s mistake

➤    Hypocrisy- saying one thing and doing another

➤    Indecisive people

➤    Litterbugs

➤     Unfair criticism

➤    People who act as though they are “holier than thou”

➤    When people don’t keep their promises

➤    Bullying

Feeling angry is a common experience, so you don’t need to feel the stigma some people feel when they think that they are “different” or “bad” for being angry. And, remember that people become angry over different things.

{The next section will describe how the anger response works}

2017 The Only Appropriate Confederate Civil War Monument

The Only Appropriate Confederate Civil War Monument

The Joy of Finding

Steven B. Zwickel

February,  2019

I have never been a loser. That is, I have never been one of those folks who is always misplacing things or forgetting where they put them. {At least, I don’t make a habit of it} Now, in my sixty-ninth year, I have found myself fully able to experience the joy of finding things.

         In just the past week, I successfully recovered a green file folder, the cork lid to a rice canister, and a CD that I brought home from the library three long days ago. And then there is the slice of pizza leftover from the restaurant two nights ago.

         I never used to lose track of my things. Well, not often enough to get a reputation for being an airhead, at least. In fact, it is a point of pride with me that I have not lost a set of keys in over 50 years. {Full Disclosure: 27 years ago my keys slipped out of my pocket into the snow, where they were shattered by the snow-blower and the shards scattered across the driveway. The keys were not technically lost, but they were also not in my possession. Two of the keys belonged to my employer and would have cost me several hundred dollars to replace.          Fortunately, when the snow melted, I was able to retrieve the pieces of the broken keys and was therefore able to avoid being penalized for “losing” them.}

         I took apart the drawers in my desk and a large box of “papers I need to sort” looking for the green folder. I asked my wife, very, very politely, lest she feel she was being accused of “moving my stuff”, if she had seen it. I found it lying on my desk at my office, just where I’d left it so I would have it when I needed it. I felt relief with fair dose of foolish.

         The lid to the rice canister must have gotten knocked off when I was reaching for a bottle of wine to give a very helpful neighbor. This fellow helped me get my car out of an icy trap in the street on a cold, snowy night and he deserved a reward. My fingers were ice cold when I reached into the turntable cabinet and grabbed for the wine bottle, so I didn’t know I’d hit the rice canister. Later, I knelt down with a flashlight to look for it, but the rice canister lid was nowhere to be seen. I am fortunate to have a 6-year old grand-daughter who went in there with a flashlight for me and she also couldn’t see the lid. {The last time a granddaughter went into the turntable cabinet she curled up in there and went to sleep. That was almost thirty years ago}. I found the lid today when I reached in to get some flour. Mystery solved—it landed in an open plastic bin. It was a joyful finding and a relief to know our house is not haunted.

         The CD turned up buried in a pile of papers I have been working on. My wife had carried it into the house, so that was where I started my inquiries. I wasn’t nearly as polite to my wife, sorry to say, when I asked her if she’d seen it. So I ended up eating humble pie and apologizing. I would call this a mix of joy and embarrassment.

         Now, the only thing missing in my life right now is a slice of pizza that I wrapped in a napkin and carried home from the restaurant. I am pretty sure I took it out to the car, but what happened to it after that, I have no idea.

         It’ll turn up. When the weather warms up. One way or another. Right?

Unanswered Questions about Book of Roads and Provinces {What scholars failed to consider}

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 19^th 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: 

1. 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.
2.  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.
3. 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).

While he was studying at Oxford, French scholar Barbier de Meynard learned from the Turkish Ambassador to France that a copy of the book was kept in a mosque in Constantinople. Barbier de Meynard didn’t get to see it, but he did get some help from Ottoman Turkey in the form of a copy with a few corrections, and he published a French translation of the book.

       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):

“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.”