Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam

The Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam is a Persian geography written in 982 by an author who did not name himself. It is arranged as a list: region after region, each with its boundaries, its people, its goods and its ruler.

The Turkic sections

Its value lies in the sections on the Turkic peoples. It names them one after another, among them the Karluk, the Kirghiz, the Oguz and the Khazars. For each it gives where they sat, whom they bordered, what they traded and who ruled them.^[1] No narrative source gives that cross-section, because a narrative follows one thread and a geography does not.

Reliability

The date is the whole question. Written in 982, the Ḥudūd describes a world that is no longer the world of the khaganates. The Göktürks are three centuries gone, and the Uyghurs have long since moved into the Tarim. The Khazars are within a generation of their fall.

The Ḥudūd is therefore a witness of the first order for the tenth century and a witness of the last order for the sixth. Where a notice in it evidently rests on older material, it can preserve a statement about the older period. Which notices those are is itself argued. Used without that caution, it turns a tenth-century list into a picture of a sixth-century steppe. This is the commonest way this literature goes wrong.

The same limit applies to Ibn Fadlan and to al-Masʿūdī, and for the same reason. Its notices on the Turkic peoples probably draw on the lost geography of Jayhānī, as do those of Gardīzī and Marvazī. The three count as one witness.^[2]