Accounts of Sulayman the Merchant

The Accounts of Sulayman the Merchant, usually dated to 851 AD, is an Arabic text describing maritime trade between the Persian Gulf and the ports of India and China. It is one of the earliest surviving firsthand-style descriptions of the Indian Ocean routes that linked the Abbasid Caliphate to Asia, and it offers a rare glimpse of how goods, people, and information moved across the medieval world.

The background lies in the rise of Baghdad, founded in the 760s as the Abbasid capital, and the nearby port of Basra. Abbasid wealth created strong demand for Chinese silk and porcelain, Indian textiles and spices, and aromatics from across the ocean. Siraf, on the Persian coast, became a major departure point. Merchants used monsoon winds to sail to Indian ports and onward through Southeast Asia to southern China, where Tang dynasty Guangzhou (known in Arabic sources as Khanfu) hosted foreign traders.

The text, often called the Silsilat al-tawarikh in older scholarship, is a compact collection of observations rather than a single narrative. It describes the sequence of seas and ports along the route, the distances and sailing conditions, and the customs of the lands encountered. It comments on Indian kingdoms and religious practices, and on Chinese administration, trade regulation, money, and the treatment of foreign merchants. Some passages are factual and detailed, while others include marvels and hearsay typical of travel writing of the time.

Authorship is uncertain. Sulayman is named as a merchant whose experiences underlie the account, but historians are unsure how much he wrote himself, and whether he made all the voyages described. The date of 851 is itself tied to the text's internal references. A later writer, Abu Zayd al-Sirafi, added material around the early tenth century, correcting and extending the original and creating the combined work later known to scholars. The two parts are not always easy to separate.

The work's importance lies in its testimony to a thriving commercial network before the decline of Tang China. It mentions the unrest in China later in the ninth century, which disrupted foreign trade, and the mention of attacks on foreign communities at Guangzhou is often discussed alongside other sources. The text reached Europe in the early modern period through a French translation in 1718, which influenced scholarly knowledge of the medieval East. Today it is valued less as a precise guide than as evidence of Abbasid-era curiosity, the reach of Muslim merchants, and the deep roots of Indian Ocean trade, which long preceded the arrival of European ships.