The Last Civilized Place: Sijilmasa and its Saharan Destiny By Ronald A. Messier and James A. Miller
2016; Oxford University Press; Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jis/etw035
ISSN1471-6917
Autores Tópico(s)African history and culture analysis
ResumoFans of Sijilmasa can rejoice. At last, an entire book devoted to that fabled city, a city which looms large in the historical imagination but whose physical reality has been, until now, a challenge to understand. How many academics, Africanists, Orientalists and Medievalists can precisely locate Sijilmasa, let alone describe its configuration? Yet, in its heyday Sijilmasa and its dromedary caravans were as important to the trade of the Sahara as contemporary Venice and its shipping were to that of the Mediterranean. Until now, Sijilmasa has been a textual place, encountered and briefly described in the works of every great geographer and traveler from Ibn Ḥawqal and al-Bakrī through to Ibn Baṭṭūṭa and Leo Africanus. But what about Sijilmasa as a terrestrial place? Until Messier and Miller’s The Last Civilized Place, published sources have been few and short (notably early write-ups of the first years of their fieldwork: Dale Lightfoot & James Miller, ‘Sijilmassa: The Rise and Fall of a Walled Oasis in Medieval Morocco’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 86/1 (1996): 78–101; Ronald Messier, ‘Sijilmasa: Five Seasons of Archaeological Inquiry by a Joint Moroccan-American Mission’, Archéologie Islamique, 7 (1997): 61–92).
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