From the Meadows of Gold (Penguin Great Journeys) - Softcover

Mas'udi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141025352 ISBN 13: 9780141025353

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2007

Synopsis

Edition Great Journeys published by Penguin Books, 2007. This is extracts from the English translation first published in 2007. ISBN: 978-0-141-02535-3. PAPERBACK. 120 pages, size: 11.2 x 18.1 x 1 cm. The new and unread book remains in excellent condition throughout. Text all clean, neat and tight. Prompt dispatch from UK.

About this title

About the Author:

Mas'udi was born in Baghdad and is known as the 'Herodotus of the Arabs' because he was the first Arab to combine history and scientific geography in a large-scale work. He travelled extensively in India, the Middle East, and Africa. Al-Masudi wrote a 30-volume history of the world and recounted the experiences of his travels form Europe to India.

Caroline Stone was educated at Cambridge and the University of Kyoto, Japan. She has lived and worked largely in Rome and Seville, with periods in Tunisia and Saudi Arabia and now, again, Cambridge. Interests include textiles - with a book and several catalogues on Chinese export embroideries published in Spanish - and travel accounts, particularly those written by people who don't normally write books - the poor, women, slaves...Several in the series listed here were produced with the support of the Civilizations in Contact Project at Cambridge University. Work in progress includes a cookery book and family history written for Syrian Christian friends in Kerala and an edition of letters written by a family connection: the composer, and suffragette Ethel Smyth's, whose lesbian amours included Virginia Woolf.

Synopsis:

Much of his work has vanished, but Mas'udi's (c.890-c.956) matchless "The Meadows of Gold" has almost miraculously survived: a compendium of stories and information on what he knew of the worlds of the Middle East, the Far East and Europe. It is both a great monument to Islamic scholarship and a time capsule allowing us into the world over a millennium ago. "Great Journeys" allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries - but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things: great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be discovered.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0141025352
• ISBN 13: 9780141025353
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 112