Muslims on the Volga in the Viking Age

In the Footsteps of Ibn Fadlan

Jonathan Shepard, Luke Treadwell (Herausgeber)

Buch | Hardcover

440 Seiten

2023
I.B. Tauris (Verlag)
978-1-78453-933-7 (ISBN)

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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.

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).

List of maps
List of illustrations
List of tables and appendices
Preface and acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
List of contributors
Maps
Plates

PART ONE: OVERVIEW

1. Editors' introduction

2. Ibn Fadlan’s Kitab: text and afterlife
Viacheslav S. Kuleshov with Jonathan Shepard

PART TWO: TEXT AND CONTEXT

3. Where is the real Ibn Fadlan? Editing and translating the Kitab
James E. Montgomery

4. From Kitab to Risala: the long shadow of Yaqut’s version of Ibn Fadlan’s account
Luke Treadwell

5. Other Arab geographers’ sources on the North: al-Jayhani and the ‘Anonymous Relation’
Jean-Charles Ducène

6. Other ethnographies of the steppe
Walter Pohl

7. Other travellers’ tales
Ian Wood

PART THREE: BACKGROUND TO THE JOURNEY

8. The Abbasid background
Hugh Kennedy

9. Ibn Fadlan and the Khazars: the hidden centre
Nick Evans

10. Beyond the Gate of the Turks: archaeology around the Aral Sea
Irina Arzhantseva and Heinrich Härke, with a contribution by Ekaterina A. Armarchuk

PART FOUR: VIKING-AGE RUS

11. Ibn Fadlan and the rituals of the Rus: Vikings on the Volga?
Neil Price

12. Viking-Age markets and emporia
Søren M. Sindbæk

13. Rus, routes and sites
Veronika Murasheva

14. Identities, ethnicities, cultures: Ibn Fadlan and the Rus on the Middle Volga
Þórir Jónsson Hraundal

15. Rus and other Northmen under non-Arabic eyes
Jonathan Shepard

PART FIVE: VOLGA BULGARIA

16. What was Volga Bulgaria?
Leonard Nedashkovsky

17. Ninth- and tenth-century Volga Bulgar trade
Evgeniy P. Kazakov

18. Volga Bulgar imitative coinage
Marek Jankowiak

PART SIX: CONCLUSION

19. ‘Failure of a mission’?
Jonathan Shepard

List of Reign Dates
List of Alternative Place Names
Glossary
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	09.09.2023
Reihe/Serie	Library of Medieval Studies
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Mittelalter
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Religionsgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Islam
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-78453-933-3 / 1784539333
ISBN-13	978-1-78453-933-7 / 9781784539337
Zustand	Neuware