The Cartographer of Shadows
Ibn Khordadbeh — The 9th-Century Spymaster, Dreamer, and Geographer Who Mapped the World Without Leaving ItBy Narin Hikma
Length8h 11m
About this audiobook
He never went anywhere. That is what makes the book he wrote almost impossible.
You know the feeling of doing careful, invisible work for years without recognition, holding something together that may not outlast you.
In ninth-century Baghdad, Ibn Khordadbeh spent sixty years as Director of Posts and Intelligence. The entire world arrived on his desk in pieces. From an office in western Iran, having never seen an ocean, he wrote the earliest surviving Arabic geography of the world.
This narrative biography tells the story of a mind that refused to let its map be smaller than the world.
• Meet the Jewish Radhanite traders who traveled from France to China
• Read the earliest account of Viking traders on the Volga River
• Discover why careful, unglamorous work outlasts the empire it served
This is for anyone who has done quiet, patient work and wondered if it counted.
The empire collapsed. His work is still read twelve hundred years later.
Open the first page. The lamp is lit.
Audiobook details
GenreBiography and Memoir, History
Length8 hrs 11 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateMay 17, 2021
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Epigraph
1210. The Men from the North
2Prologue
1311. The Tang Horizon
31. The Grandfather's Fire
1412. Nadim: The Companion
42. Son of a Governor
1513. The Man of Many Books
53. The Music Lessons
1614. The First Book and Its Second Life
Show all chaptersShow less
64. The City of Wonders
1715. The Invisible Empire
75. The Caliph's Network
1816. What the Roads Remember
86. Every Letter a Secret
1917. The Long Twilight
97. The Jewish Merchants Who Crossed Everything
2018. The Map That Never Ends
108. Roads of the Faithful
21Epilogue
119. The Edge of the Known
2219. Author's Note
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