Re-Reading the Rus’

Sometime before 850 CE, the Abbasid bureaucrat and spymaster Ibn Khurradādhbih wrote the first version of his treatise of administrative geography known as the Book of the Highways and the Kingdoms. Utilising the knowledge of the Caliphate’s intelligence services, he described the various groups of foreigners whose trade and other activities took them through the territory of the Arab empire, listing where they came from, where they went, how they got there, and sometimes, what they did. Among them were the Rus’, the merchant venturers and, eventually, political players of the eastern river systems that joined the Baltic with the Black Sea and the Caspian. Traditionally they have been viewed simplistically as the ‘Vikings in the East’, and it is clear that the Rus’ were to a very large degree culturally Scandinavian, though their actual ethnicity was mixed and changeable. Their operations along the waterways of what are now the Baltic States, Ukraine and the Russian Federation are well-known, including their foundation of cities such as Kyiv and Novgorod, but their travels further east are more opaque. Ibn Khurradādhbih’s description, difficult though it can be to interpret, provides one of the textual keys in relating how the Rus’ took two different routes far into Asia, one overland and one by sea, almost a textbook definition of what later scholars would call the Silk Roads. The challenge of comparing this written itinerary with the multi-strand evidence of archaeology is one of WIVA’s central objectives.