Book of Roads and Kingdoms (al-Bakrī)

"Book of Roads and Kingdoms" or "Book of Highways and Kingdoms" (Arabic: كتاب المسالك والممالك‎, "Kitāb al-Masālik wa'l-Mamālik") is the name of an eleventh-century geography text by Abu Abdullah al-Bakri. It was written around 1068 in Córdoba. Al-Bakri based his work on the accounts of merchants and adventurers such as Yusuf al-Warraq and Abraham ben Jacob. Despite the fact that al-Bakri never left al-Andalus, his writings are regarded as objectively reporting the accounts of other travelers by modern historians, and much of what he wrote is substantiated in other sources. He described a wide array of regions from the Atlantic Ocean to Central Africa, 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.