Overview

The year 922 saw a series of remarkable face-to-face encounters in the steppes between Bukhara and the Middle Volga. Ibn Fadlan was an intrepid member of a diplomatic and religious mission from the distant caliphate in Baghdad to the ruler of the Volga Bulgars. His account gives a vivid eyewitness description of the peoples he came upon (whose appearance, rituals and filthy habits both fascinate and appal) and a famous depiction of a Viking Rus ship burial. It is unique testimony to burgeoning exchanges between several different cultures, and to the emergence of new political structures on the steppes. Yet the account survives only as part of a later composite work, raising questions of meaning and historical interpretation. This pioneering interdisciplinary study of Ibn Fadlan’s text and the world he surveyed draws on a variety of specialists to give readers both ‘the bigger picture’ of cultural and economic change in Eurasia, Byzantium and the Muslim world, and hard facts, in the form of archaeological and numismatic data.

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9781784539337

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Reviews

These nineteen essays on language, travel narratives, trade, religion, archaeology, and sex by top experts are as lively and compelling as Ibn Fadlan’s original narrative of his journey to the Volga in 923. A must-read for anyone interested in cultural encounters. * Valerie Hansen, Stanley Woodward Professor, Yale University, USA *

Author Information

Jonathan Shepard was Lecturer in Russian History in the University of Cambridge, UK. His books include The Emergence of Rus (1996, with S. Franklin) and (co-edited) Byzantium and the Viking World (2016) and Political Culture in the Latin West, Byzantium and the Islamic World (2021). Luke Treadwell is the Samir Shamma Lecturer in Islamic Numismatics and Curator of Islamic Coins at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK. He is the author of Craftsmen and Coins: Signed Dies in the Iranian World (2011) and Buyid Coinage: A Die Corpus (322–445 AH) (2001).

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