The title chosen by the editor and translator of this text acknowledges two famous texts. The first is Description de l’Égypte composed between 1809 and 1829 by the savants who accompanied Napoleon Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt in 1798. Regarded as a foundational document in the modern study of Egypt and a characteristically encyclopedic work of Enlightenment scholarship, Description catalogues every aspect of Egypt's culture, from Antiquity to the beginning of the nineteenth century, including the country's geography, flora, fauna, material culture, antiquities, and system of government. The second work is Daniel Defoe's 1722 work A Journal of the Plague Year. Once regarded as a historical work, Defoe's book is now classified as a kind of historical fiction.
The work under review was written in 600/1204 by ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī, who intended to present it to the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, al-Nāṣir lil-Dīn Allāh (r. 575–622/1180–1225). Al-Baghdādī was born in Baghdad in 557/1162. He spent much of his early life travelling between the principal cities of the Ayyubid sultanate—Damascus, Cairo, and Jerusalem. Like many scholars of his time, his travels were structured by a perpetual search for patronage. This search was complicated by struggles within the Ayyubid family for control over their patrimony after the death of the dynasty's founder, Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb (known in the West as Saladin). Eventually, Saladin's brother al-ʿĀdil established his pre-eminence and al-Baghdādī moved to Cairo. Soon after his arrival, in the years 597–598/1200–1202, Egypt experienced one of its worst medieval famines. Not long after he finished his account of those years in 600/1204, al-Baghdādī resumed his travels. He resided in a number of cities over the next few years, including Jerusalem, Damascus, Aleppo, and Erzincan. Finally, he returned to Baghdad, where he died in 629/1231.
Al-Baghdādī is said to have been a very prolific author. Medieval sources credit him with 173 works, including 53 on medicine and 48 on philosophy. Of these, 16 are extant, in addition to a collection of short treatises. This text survives in only one manuscript. It may be a rough draft, the final version of which was completed three years later, but if so, the finished version does not survive. S. M. Stern argued that it is an autograph, albeit one compared with an earlier version, and that the numerous corrections and annotations belong to the author. Mackintosh-Smith is less certain.
The manuscript has been published twice before. One edition is riddled with errors, while the second is incomplete. Mackintosh-Smith is a good Arabist and this edition is not only complete but precisely executed. The English translation is very readable and accurate. For readers unfamiliar with Arabic, it is a reliable guide to the contents of the text. The introduction, while serviceable, is less satisfactory. Mackintosh-Smith has not made use of the secondary scholarship on the period and major works are missing from his bibliography and analysis of the historical context. He plans a second, scholarly edition with a full textual apparatus, and one hopes that he will address this deficiency then.
The text is divided into two parts. The first is devoted to a description of Egypt, as al-Baghdādī observed it at the turn of the thirteenth century, and as it is recounted in medieval Arabic geographic works. Thus al-Baghdādī describes Egypt's geography, flora, fauna, ancient monuments, buildings and boats, and food. The second part explains the nature of the annual rise of the Nile and relates the traumatic events of the famine years 597 and 598 (1200–1202).
The description of Egypt in the first part follows the rules of the genre of geographical writing that medieval Muslim writers inherited from Antiquity. One highlight is a detailed description of the farms used to mass incubate eggs. This practice was noted by many medieval travellers to Egypt, but al-Baghdādī's description is particularly rich. Readers familiar with modern Egyptian cuisine will recognise medieval dishes such as mulūkhīya (mallow), qulqās (taro), and fūl (broad beans). Al-Baghdādī also takes an interest in Egypt's classical monuments, especially the pyramids. He even notes the distinctive architecture of Egyptian bathhouses.
Geographers and travellers to Egypt invariably note the annual flooding of the Nile and its significance for Egyptian agriculture. Al-Baghdādī had the misfortune to reside in Egypt during a period of terrible famine, when the Nile rise failed to provide sufficient water to irrigate much of the country's lands. His description of the social consequences of famine takes up the last third of the book. It is full of lurid descriptions of cannibalism. If al-Baghdādī is to be believed, poor people hunted down vulnerable neighbours, especially children, to cook and consume to satiate their hunger. He relates one story after another of appalling human cruelty that beggars belief.
While one should not underestimate humans’ capacity for cruelty under desperate conditions, it is clear that these anecdotes belong to an established literary genre. Descriptions of famine and other social crises in medieval chronicles often include stories of the ferocious behaviour of the lower classes, and the idea that the poor are little more than wild animals is a common trope. Furthermore, the lurid character of these stories is clearly intended to entertain an educated, upper-class audience. Such bestial descriptions of peasants and the urban poor cannot be taken at face value. They tell us more about the prejudices of the urbane, literate class than they do about actual historical events.
Al-Baghdādī claims to have seen some of the cooked corpses of children lying in pots and heard other stories of cannibalism from reliable sources. There may well have been a genuine moral panic during the famine. Rumours of child murder and cannibalism could have been widespread, leading to wild accusations and even executions. In the second year of the famine, stories of cannibalism mysteriously peter out, reinforcing the sense that this was a panic. If this sort of hysteria seems unlikely, one should consider the persistence of the blood libel in the Christian West or the murderous panics of the French Revolution. In any case, al-Baghdādī's stories are best seen as literary entertainment of a particularly nasty sort rather than historical description.
In his introduction, Mackintosh-Smith credits al-Baghdādī's stories of cannibalism. He sees them as evidence of the author's humanity. A more sceptical reader, familiar with the literary representations of the lower classes, is more likely to see this as evidence of Mackintosh-Smith's taste for the sensational. Travel writers seek to entertain their audience and, in this respect, Mackintosh-Smith differs little from al-Baghdādī.
