Search Results: Travelogue

Leo Africanus (al-Hasan ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Wazzan al-Fasi al-Granati, 1485-1554) was a diplomat, merchant traveller and scholar who famously voyaged from Timbuktu to the Niger River and wrote 'The History and Description of Africa'...

Pausanias was a Greek author, historian, and geographer of the 2nd century CE who journeyed extensively throughout Greece, chronicling these travels in his Periegesis Hellados or Description of Greece. His ten volumes of observations are...

Ibn Battuta (l. 1304-1368/69) was a Moroccan explorer from Tangier whose expeditions took him further than any other traveler of his time and resulted in his famous work, The Rihla of Ibn Battuta. Scholar Douglas Bullis notes that “rihla”...

The urdubegis were a group of female warriors in the Mughal Empire, who protected the zenana, the harem of the emperor. Although the origins of female bodyguards go back to the beginning of Indian civilizations, the urdubegis were a Mughal...

Edward Winslow (l. 1595-1655 CE) was a member of the separatist congregation (later known as pilgrims) which sailed aboard the Mayflower in 1620 CE to establish the Plymouth Colony in modern-day Massachusetts, USA. He became one of the more...

The Description of Africa is the first comprehensive book about Africa, written by Leo Africanus, an African scholar trained in the Islamic intellectual tradition, in 1526, during the Italian Renaissance. A skillful mixture of anthropology...

A map illustrating Ibn Battuta's (Abū Abd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Abd Allāh Al-Lawātī, 1304 – c.1368) series of extraordinary journeys across the Islamic world and beyond spanning close to 75,000 miles (120,000 kilometers). A 14th-century Maghrebi...