The travels of Ibn Batuta : translated from the abridged Arabic manuscript copies, preserved in the Public Library of Cambridge. with notes, illustrative of the history, geography, botany, antiquities, &c. occurring throughout the work / translated with notes by S. Lee, [and, Report of the proceedings of the first general meeting of the subscribers to the Oriental Translation Fund].

  • Ibn Batuta, 1304-1377.
Date:
1829
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The travels of Ibn Batuta : translated from the abridged Arabic manuscript copies, preserved in the Public Library of Cambridge. with notes, illustrative of the history, geography, botany, antiquities, &c. occurring throughout the work / translated with notes by S. Lee, [and, Report of the proceedings of the first general meeting of the subscribers to the Oriental Translation Fund]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    and most important part, and hence looked up to by its almost countless inhabitants for protection, instruction, government,— nothing can be more obvious, than, that it is just as binding upon us to acquaint ourselves with their wants, in order to these being provided for and relieved, as it is that we should calculate upon the wealth of their commerce, or the rank and influence which our Governors, Judges, and Magistrates, should hold among them. Unhappily, however, pi’ior to the times of Sir William Jones, knowledge of this kind was scarcely accessible to the bulk of Society ; and, since that period, notwithstand- ing his glowing predictions to the contrary,^ the study of Oriental literature has seldom been carried beyond its first elements. A few Scholars have, from time to time, appeared among the servants of the Honourable East-India Company : but, when we take into the account the vastness of the means which we possess, together with the duty laid on us as a nation, accurately to know the condition of so many of our fellow subjects in the East, it must appear, that all which has been done, so far from being matter of exultation, must rather tend to lower us in the opinion we would entertain of ourselves, and much more in that of the surrounding nations. It is not my intention to dwell here, with the admirable Sir William Jones, on the beauty of their poetry, the value of their sentiments as moralists or philosophers, or the almost boundless extent and variety of their languages : but on the paramount necessity of our possessing an accurate knowledge of their countries, histories, laws, commerce, con- nexions, tactics, antiquities, and the like for purely practical * Preface to liis Persian Grammar.