The Regions of the World (Hudud al-'Alam)

An unnamed Persian geographer wrote this survey of the known world in 982 to 983. It describes regions, peoples, towns and trade, including Central Asia and the steppe, from books and reports rather than from a journey of his own. The only surviving manuscript was copied in 1258. The corpus entry points to Vladimir Minorsky's English translation and commentary of 1937. The atlas does not hold the text of this edition: the corpus lists it but stores no text of it, under its rights rule, so nothing from it was read for this guide.

How they knew

Compiled from others

Who “Tartar” means here

Not recorded on the card. The work was written more than two centuries before the Mongol empire, so it could not mean the Mongols in the later European sense. Whether it names a people called Tatar is not recorded here.

Why read it

It shows how a Persian geographer of the tenth century named and placed the peoples of the steppe, a native baseline for names that later travellers and mapmakers reshaped.

Watch out

This is a compilation, not a travel account, and it survives in one manuscript copied in 1258. The 1937 commentary is Minorsky's own voice, separate from the original author.