ABSTRACT
Al-Mas’udi was a geographer, traveler, and one of the most prominent historians in Classical Arabic. He was born in Baghdad, then settled in Egypt. He was one of the first scholars to compose a universal history and to practice scientific geography in his major work Muruj al-Thahab wa-Ma’adin al-Jawhar. Al-Mas’udi traveled around the world and gathered anthropological information about the people of the regions he visited. His other major work is al-Tanbih wa al-Ishraf (Admonition and Revision).
