Volga Bulgaria on the Map of Ibn Hawqal

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of information about the Volga Bulgaria in “The Book of the Picture of the Earth” (Kitāb ṣūrat al-arḍ) by an Arab scholar of the second half of the 10th century Ibn Ḥawqal who combined descriptive and cartographic ways of showing the earth in his work. This makes it possible to conduct a comparative analysis of the cartographic image of the country, on the one hand, and its textual description, on the other. The article reveals the main sources about the Bulgars and states that the image of Bulgaria on Ibn Ḥawqal’s world map was based on the Arab tradition of describing the Volga Bulgars as a people who lived on the banks of the Atil River. The real information underlying this tradition was connected with the Volga-Caspian trade route well known to Islamic merchants already in the 9th century. Therefore, the localization of the Volga Bulgaria on the map was attached to the image of the Atil River and the peoples adjacent to the Bulgars — the Rus and the Slavs. The novelty of Ibn Ḥawqal’s information about the Volga Bulgaria was connected with the cartographic localization of the Bulgars and with the positioning of Bulgaria on the religious and political map of the world as a state that occupied a peripheral position in relation to the three world empires (Islamic world, Byzantium and China), but at the same time was significant in the context of the story about the ecumene as a whole.