The intenerary of Benjamin of Tudela: A twelfth-century Jewish description of North-East Africa

The travel literature of medieval Jewry may yield new information about the African past. The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, a case in point, throws light on the little-known eastern Sudan of the twelfth century. From the Itinerary may be reconstructed trade routes south from Alexandria to Christian Nubia, east from the Upper Nile Valley to southern Arabia and India, and west to the Fezzan and, ultimately, to the western Sudanic States. Commodities traded included wheat, raisins, figs, copper, salt, gold, precious stones, and slaves. These routes tied in with the better known trans-Saharan, Mediterranean, and Indian Ocean networks of trade. Benjamin's Itinerary describes a spectrum of political development ranging from primitive Negroids south of Aswan and the tribal Beja and Rabi a Arabs to the more sophisticated Arab-controlled city-State of Aswan and the Christian kingdoms of Nubia. Benjamin mentions Christian Nubia only in passing, but indicates that Aiwa still flourished as a trading kingdom as late as 1170.