Navigating the Texts of Ibn Majid by Eric Staples скачать в хорошем качестве

Navigating the Texts of Ibn Majid by Eric Staples

Ahmad b. Majid is the single most famous navigator of pre-modern Arabic literature. Born in the ninth century AH/fifteenth century CE, he sailed the seas for decades, in the process recording the complex practices involved with navigating across the Indian Ocean in a series of prose and poetic works, many of which are still extant today. These practices include the use of star altitude measurements (qiyās), stellar compass rhumbs (akhnān), lunar mansions (manāzil), estimated distances (masāfa) and detailed sailing dates (mawāsim). It is Ibn Majid’s work, along with the treatises of the tenth-century AH/sixteenth-century CE Yemeni navigator Sulayman al-Mahri, that provides us with the single most detailed corpus of indigenous navigational material of the Indian Ocean prior to the twentieth century. And yet these texts can be difficult to navigate. This talk will explore the wide variety of techniques found in his writings that mariners relied upon to make their way across the oceans, from natural wayfinding to more the technical aspects of celestial navigation. It will also discuss some of the challenges involved with studying his compositions. Finally, it will assess the different approaches that scholars have taken to the study of his work and suggest potentially novel and interesting avenues for future research. Eric Staples is an interdisciplinary maritime experimental archaeologist and historian whose interests include Indian Ocean shipbuilding, seafaring and navigation. He is currently head of maritime archaeology at the Department of Culture and Tourism, Abu Dhabi.