This is an English translation of the Risala, letters by the 10th century scholar Ibn Fadlan, one of the great medieval travellers. He journeyed from Baghdad to

In 922 AD, an Arab envoy from Baghdad named Ibn Fadlan encountered a party of Viking traders on the upper reaches of the Volga River. In his subsequent report o

The earliest surviving instance of sustained first-person travel narrative in Arabic Mission to the Volga is a pioneering text of peerless historical and litera

In its ports, we find a priceless cargo of information; here are the first foreign descriptions of tea and porcelain, a panorama of unusual social practices, ca

Learn the ways of the Japanese Bushido Code with this very readable, modern translation of the Bushido Shoshinshu. Code of the Samurai is a four-hundred-year-ol