Familiarized Worlds in Geographic Learning Process: Geographic and Cartographic Knowledge of India from the 7th to 13th Centuries from Comparative Perspectives

Many works on the Silk Road have addressed regions within Central Asia as the meeting places of people traveling between eastern and western Afro-Eurasia. This paper instead pays particular attention to India, another region within the Eurasian heartland that played a significant role in facilitating premodern intercontinental contact. India is located at southern end of the historical network of major trade routes that connected China with the Mediterranean. Many travelers from eastern and western Afro-Eurasia converged there and returned home with substantial information about the region that they documented and disseminated to their countrymen. Using geography, travel accounts and maps, scholars have already explored geographic knowledge of India in individual societies using Chinese and Arabic/Persian sources. This paper takes a new and comparative approach: to examine a variety of major sources equally in order to ascertain the comparative significance of India to scholars in different societies throughout Afro-Eurasia. It focuses particularly on four similar sources written in Iran and China that exerted considerable influence on their own societies: the geographic and cartographic works of al-Bīrūni (973–1048), al-Qazwīnī (1203–1283), Xuanzang (c. 602­–664) and Zhipan (fl. mid-thirteenth century). From this comparative perspective, the paper demonstrates that, through geographic and cartographic works produced and circulated in their respective domains, people in Chinese and Iranian worlds grew familiarized with India in distinctive but also similar ways that made it one of the best-known foreign regions in their societies by the thirteenth century. It also argues that receiving more substantial knowledge of the realms beyond India was only possible utilizing the unprecedented inter-Eurasian connections facilitated by the Mongol empire in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The paper ultimately aims at exploring how different historical contexts and conditions affected the various extents and limits of geographical learning about the wider world in premodern societies.