''Book of Roads and Kingdoms'' or ''Book of Highways and Kingdoms'' (, ) is an eleventh-century

geography Geography (from Ancient Greek ; combining 'Earth' and 'write', literally 'Earth writing') is the study of the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. Geography is an all-encompassing discipline that seeks an understanding o ...

text by

Abu Abdullah al-Bakri Abū ʿUbayd ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Muḥammad ibn Ayyūb ibn ʿAmr al-Bakrī (), or simply al-Bakrī (c. 1040–1094) was an Arab Andalusian historian and a geographer of the Muslim West. Life Al-Bakri was born in Huelva, the ...

. It was written in 1067-8 in Córdoba,

al-Andalus Al-Andalus () was the Muslim-ruled area of the Iberian Peninsula. The name refers to the different Muslim states that controlled these territories at various times between 711 and 1492. At its greatest geographical extent, it occupied most o ...

(present-day Spain). Al-Bakri based his work on the accounts of traders, the writings of Muhammad ibn Yūsuf al-Warrāq, (''On the Topography of North Africa''), and

Ibrahim ibn Yaqub Ibrahim ibn Yaqub ( ''Ibrâhîm ibn Ya'qûb al-Ṭarṭûshi'' or ''al-Ṭurṭûshî''; , ''Avraham ben Yaʿakov''; 961–62) was a 10th-century Hispano-Arabic, Sephardi Jewish traveler, probably a merchant, who may have also engaged in diploma ...

. Despite the fact that al-Bakri never left al-Andalus, his writings are regarded as objectively reporting the accounts of other travelers by contemporary historians, and much of what he wrote is substantiated in other sources. He described a wide array of regions from the

Atlantic Ocean The Atlantic Ocean is the second largest of the world's five borders of the oceans, oceanic divisions, with an area of about . It covers approximately 17% of Earth#Surface, Earth's surface and about 24% of its water surface area. During the ...

, through the

Sahara The Sahara (, ) is a desert spanning across North Africa. With an area of , it is the largest hot desert in the world and the list of deserts by area, third-largest desert overall, smaller only than the deserts of Antarctica and the northern Ar ...

, to

Central Africa Central Africa (French language, French: ''Afrique centrale''; Spanish language, Spanish: ''África central''; Portuguese language, Portuguese: ''África Central'') is a subregion of the African continent comprising various countries accordin ...

, giving descriptions of the geography, people, culture and political situation in each region. The ''Book of Roads and Kingdoms'' exists today only in fragmentary form. It is sometimes confused with a work by the same name written in the ninth century by

Ibn Khordadbeh Abu'l-Qasim Ubaydallah ibn Abdallah ibn Khordadbeh (; 820/825–913), commonly known as Ibn Khordadbeh (also spelled Ibn Khurradadhbih; ), was a high-ranking bureaucrat and geographer of Persian descent in the Abbasid Caliphate. He is the aut ...

References

Islamic-spain.tv: Geography and al-Andalus
- ''Website of a documentary on the rise, reign, and fall of Islamic Spain''. Geographical works of the medieval Islamic world 11th-century Arabic-language books History of the Sahara Geography of Africa {{manuscript-stub