الرحلة

Sources & credits

The Rihla is an original retelling. These are the texts, data, type and tools it stands on.

The text

Tuhfat al-Nuzzar fi Ghara'ib al-Amsar wa 'Aja'ib al-Asfar, the travels of Ibn Battuta (1304–1368/9) as written down by Ibn Juzayy al-Kalbi in Fez, 1355–56. The work is in the public domain.
Arabic text checked against the transcription on Arabic Wikisource (transcription offered under CC BY-SA 4.0) and the machine-readable edition in the OpenITI corpus (file IbnBattuta.Rihla.Shamela0011769; used only to check quotations, not shipped in the app). Every Arabic quotation shown in the app is checked against these texts before each build.
Every English rendering is our own. We do not reproduce any published translation. Quotations are short and marked “From the Rihla, our rendering”.
Where the record is uncertain (a date that cannot be right, a meeting he may only have heard about, a ruler named for the wrong year) the story says so in a “note on the record”. Dates are given in the Julian calendar used in the 14th century, with Hijri dates from the tabular calendar, which can differ from the sighted month by a day or two.
Place coordinates are checked against the coordinates of the corresponding Wikipedia articles (via the Wikipedia API) within a stated tolerance.

Imagery: Sentinel-2 cloudless – https://s2maps.eu by EOX IT Services GmbH (contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2016 & 2017), licensed under CC BY 4.0. The imagery shows the Earth today, not in the 14th century; coastlines, rivers and cities have moved since.
Terrain: Terrain Tiles (Terrarium encoding) on the AWS Open Data Registry, produced by Mapzen. Sources include SRTM, GMTED2010, ETOPO1 and others; see the data attribution.
Map engine: MapLibre GL JS, BSD 3-Clause licence (bundled, licence text in vendor/LICENSE.txt).
Routes are our own reconstructions from the Rihla's itinerary, drawn through waypoints and smoothed. They show the likely line of travel, not a surveyed road.

Cormorant Garamond by The Cormorant Project Authors (Christian Thalmann, Catharsis Fonts), SIL Open Font License 1.1.
Cinzel by The Cinzel Project Authors (Natanael Gama), SIL Open Font License 1.1.
Amiri by The Amiri Project Authors (Khaled Hosny), SIL Open Font License 1.1.
The licence texts ship with the fonts: Cormorant · Cinzel · Amiri.

Scenes: the painted city scenes, the title image and the gate image are original illustrations made for this project (AI-assisted), not reproductions of historical artworks. They are imaginative reconstructions, not evidence of how a place looked.
Sound: the ambient soundscapes are generated live in your browser with the Web Audio API. No recordings or samples are used. Read-aloud uses your device's own speech voices.
The caravan, ship and junk markers and all ornaments are original vector drawings.

The Messenger of God ﷺ is named with the customary blessing. The story is written for teens and adults, and keeps to what a family can read together.

If you find an error of fact, date or place, we would like to hear about it. Known open questions are tracked with each edition.