# Nuzhat al-Mushtaq fi'khtiraq al-'Afaq (The Tabula Rogeriana) > Muhammad al-Idrisi - Text completed 1154 CE at Palermo; no manuscript copy earlier than c. 1325 survives > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/al-idrisi/al-idrisi-tabula-rogeriana/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-15 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Muhammad al-Idrisi - **Date:** Text completed 1154 CE at Palermo; no manuscript copy earlier than c. 1325 survives - **Medium:** Arabic geographical treatise (Kitab Nuzhat al-Mushtaq fi'khtiraq al-'Afaq) comprising a descriptive text and 70 sectional maps, transmitted in ink on paper manuscript copies. The original commission is reported, separately, to have included a world map engraved on a silver planisphere; that object does not survive. - **Dimensions:** Not established for a single object. Dimensions vary by manuscript copy and are not published for Bodleian MS. Greaves 42 in the sources consulted. The lost silver planisphere is reported, in modern secondary accounts rather than any verified contemporary measurement, at roughly 300 lb (136 kg). - **Object type:** Map - **Period:** Norman Sicily, 12th century (composition); later Islamic manuscript tradition, 14th-16th century (surviving copies) - **Current location:** No single original survives. The text is preserved in roughly ten manuscript copies dispersed across several institutions. The manuscript photographed for this record is held by the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary Completed in 1154 for Roger II of Sicily, the Nuzhat al-Mushtaq is a seventy-map Arabic geography compiled by the Andalusi scholar Muhammad al-Idrisi from fifteen years of interviews with travelers, verification by agents sent into the field, and the inherited framework of Ptolemaic and Balkhi-school geography. A companion world map said to have been engraved on a silver disc does not survive, and this record has found no primary source that documents how or exactly when it was lost; that part of the story is report, not record, and is presented that way.The book itself survives only through later copying: about ten manuscripts worldwide, the earliest from around 1325. This record is illustrated from Bodleian Library MS. Greaves 42, a genuine but partial and anonymous 14th- or 15th-century Arabic copy whose own history is undocumented before its arrival at Oxford in 1678. The image most people picture when they hear 'Idrisi map,' Konrad Miller's 1929 composite reconstruction, is a modern scholarly artifact assembled from later copies and is presented here only as a clearly labeled comparandum, never as the object itself.Read past the popular version and two disciplined findings emerge: the map's celebrated south-up orientation is a documented Balkhi-school convention al-Idrisi adopted rather than an invention of his own, and the frequent claim that his geography fed European Age-of-Exploration cartography does not survive contact with the fact that no Latin translation existed before 1619. What remains, honestly stated, is still substantial: one of the most systematically compiled geographies of the medieval world, made possible by a Sicilian court willing to fund fifteen years of cross-checked, multilingual fieldwork. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **1138-1154** Roger II of Sicily, royal court, Palermo `[documented]` (commission) Roger II commissioned al-Idrisi to compile a comprehensive geography over a period reported as fifteen to eighteen years, drawing on interviews with travelers and merchants, verification agents, and prior Islamic and Ptolemaic geographical writing. The text was completed and dedicated to Roger II in 1154, shortly before his death. - **1154-1160/1161** Norman royal court, Palermo (reported: the silver planisphere) `[disputed]` (loss, reported but not documented) Modern secondary sources report that a silver disc engraved with al-Idrisi's world map was produced alongside the book and was lost or destroyed during the unrest that followed Roger II's death, commonly associated with the 1160-1161 revolt led by Matthew Bonnellus and the anti-Muslim violence in Palermo that accompanied it. No primary account of that unrest consulted for this record names the disc among the palace's contents or describes its destruction. This record treats the disc's very existence, and certainly its fate, as reported rather than documented. - **14th-15th century-1678** Unrecorded `[unknown]` (gap) The specific manuscript photographed for this record, Bodleian MS. Greaves 42, was copied by an unnamed scribe at an unrecorded location, dated only by palaeography to the 14th or 15th century. Nothing is recorded of its ownership or location between that copying and its documented arrival in England in the Greaves collection by 1678. - **1678-present** Bodleian Library, University of Oxford `[documented]` (acquisition) Acquired as part of the Bodleian's 1678 purchase of the Oriental manuscript collection of the brothers John Greaves (d. 1652), the Gresham College mathematician and astronomer who collected manuscripts during travels in the Ottoman Levant and Egypt in the 1630s, and Thomas Greaves (d. 1676), an Oxford orientalist. The manuscript has remained at the Bodleian since, catalogued as MS. Greaves 42. ## Open questions - Did the silver planisphere exist substantially as later sources describe it? Al-Idrisi's own text, as consulted for this record, does not mention it, and the claim rests on later biographical notice rather than a contemporary description. - If the disc existed, exactly how and when was it lost? The common attribution to the 1160-1161 unrest under William I is plausible by timing but is not stated in the primary narrative of that unrest consulted for this record. - Who copied Bodleian MS. Greaves 42, and where and when precisely? Palaeography gives only a two-century window (14th-15th century); no colophon or scribal note has been reported. - How and when did John or Thomas Greaves acquire this specific manuscript before its 1678 sale to the Bodleian? The Greaves collection's purchase by the library is documented; the individual manuscript's earlier history is not. - Does the circular world map format associated with al-Idrisi actually originate with him, or does it predate him in the Fatimid tradition represented by the Book of Curiosities? Rapoport has argued for al-Idrisi's priority; this record has not located a published rebuttal. - What is the correct figure, in a consistent unit, for al-Idrisi's calculated Earth's circumference, and by what method was it derived? Secondary sources disagree and this record has not traced the calculation to a primary figure. - Which of the ten surviving manuscript copies, if any, most faithfully preserves al-Idrisi's original arrangement of the seventy sectional maps, given that Konrad Miller had to choose between conflicting later copies to build his 1929 composite? ## Sources - [1] Wikipedia, 'Tabula Rogeriana'. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with S. Maqbul Ahmad's chapter on al-Sharif al-Idrisi in the History of Cartography (University of Chicago Press) where a legible copy can be obtained. - [2] Wikipedia, 'Muhammad al-Idrisi'. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with a scholarly biography. - [3] Biblissima IIIF manifest, 'Oxford. Bodleian Library, MS. Greaves 42', consolidating Digital Bodleian's own catalogue description of the manuscript. - [4] Bodleian Libraries, 'Medieval Islamic maps of the world', The Conveyor (Bodleian blog), for the library's own account of MS. Greaves 42 and MS. Pococke 375. - [5] Sacred Footsteps, 'The Complex Story Behind Al-Idrisi's Iconic World Map'. Popular history site citing named scholars (Yossef Rapoport among them); flagged as secondary rather than primary. - [6] Factum Foundation, 'al-Idrisi and Roger II: Mapping The World in the Twelfth Century', for the ongoing digital reconstruction project and its own account of the silver map's loss. - [7] Wikipedia, 'Nuzhat al-Mushtaq'. Tertiary source, used for structural detail on the work's title and organization. - [8] Wikipedia, 'Book of Curiosities'. Tertiary source, used for the manuscript's acquisition date, composition date and authorship. - [9] Wikimedia Commons API (imageinfo/extmetadata) for File:Book of Roger MS. Greaves 42 9b.jpg, 13b.jpg, 49b.jpg, 87b.jpg, 94b.jpg and File:TabulaRogeriana.jpg, verifying licence, credit line, folio subject and date attribution for each file. - [10] Simerg, interview with Yossef Rapoport and Emilie Savage-Smith, authors of 'Lost Maps of the Caliphs', on the Book of Curiosities and its circular world map's relationship to the al-Idrisi tradition. - [11] Oxford LibGuides, 'Middle East - Manuscripts: Asian and Middle Eastern', Bodleian Libraries, for the 1678 purchase of the John and Thomas Greaves manuscript collection. - [12] Wikipedia, 'Matthew Bonnellus'. Tertiary source, consulted specifically to check whether the primary narrative of the 1160-1161 Palermo revolt mentions a silver planisphere; it does not. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.