Page 100 - Arabian Studies (I)

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ARABIA IN THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY

NAVIGATIONAL TEXTS
by G. R. TIBBETTS

This article is really a sequel to one published in the Geographical
Journal of 1961 entitled ‘Arab Navigation in the Red Sea’. There I
began with a brief history of the Arab navigational texts which I will
not repeat here. It will suffice to say that the two authors who wrote
texts on navigation in Arabic at this period and which have survived
to the present day are Ahmad ibn Majid (d.ca. 1500) and Sulaiman
al-Mahrl (d. before 1553). The works of the former arc numerous,
but those which are relevant to Arabia excluding the Red Sea are the
Hawlyah, the Fawa’id, the Mn'arrabah, a poem in the rajaz metre (on
the Gulf of Aden), and an unnamed rajaz poem on the Persian Gulf.
The two works of Sulaiman which contain topographical material
both cover the Arabian coasts in detail (i.e. the ‘Umdah and the
Minhaj).1 The Hawlyah is a rajaz poem dealing with navigation in
general and contains stellar altitudes of important places on the
I Arabian peninsula as well as bearings to and from the coasts of the
Peninsula. It does not mention the Persian Gulf. The Fawa’id is a
prose work (dated 1490) which covers the same field, but includes
some general information in two sections (fa’idah) labelled ‘Islands’,
where the Arabian peninsula is regarded as an island, and ‘Descrip­
tions of the coasts of the world’. Sulaiman al-Mahrl’s ‘Umdah (1511)
and Minhaj are similar in content to the Hawlyah, but are arranged
more logically and carefully, and form the basis on which this article is
built. In addition the shorter poems by Ibn Majid entitled Makklyah
and Sab'lyah contain material on Arabia which duplicates the
previous works and many of the other minor poems of Ibn Majid
mention places on the Arabian coasts with routes to and from them.
The poems on the Gulf of Aden and the Persian Gulf form
specialised treatises in verse dealing exclusively with the areas
mentioned and are of obvious importance here.2
Ibn Majid’s Fawa’id, in the section on islands, gives an overall view
of the Arabian peninsula. He counts it as an island because the phrase
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