Medieval Arabic sources on the Malay world
Abstract
The article presents a historiographic survey of works concerning the medieval Arabic accounts of the Malay world. Since most of Chinese and Western reports as well as the early Malay chronicles date back to the late Middle Ages, Arabic texts serve as a source of valuable data for the earlier medieval period. References to Southeast Asia can be found in more than 30 texts of different genres, among them works on history, geography, navigation and medicine as well as itineraries and fiction. Most of these texts haven’t yet been translated into Russian and are usually available in English or French translation. The scholars of the history of the Malay world often refer to Arabic sources, while those who study particular Arabic writings try to interpret the passages dealing with Southeast Asia. However, the works considering all the corpus of Arabic accounts of the region are not numerous. The work of G. R. Tibbetts remains the most important survey of the material. Refs 29.
Keywords:
Arabic sources, medieval period, Southeast Asia
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Articles of "Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Asian and African Studies" are open access distributed under the terms of the License Agreement with Saint Petersburg State University, which permits to the authors unrestricted distribution and self-archiving free of charge.