The advent of geography in Arabic (in the ninth century) has been related to two factors: on the one hand, translations from the Greco-Roman tradition, but most importantly the work by Ptolemy titled Geographia; and, on the other hand, the need not only to map the confines of the vast new unfathomable empire, but also to gather all the information possible on new territories, including administrative and tax issues in particular. It is therefore understandable that a significant part of the early geographical works were intended for training “public officials” and were produced in the East, close to the central power. 

Within this context, the Maghreb was one of the regions least known to early geographers (all of whom were Easterners), who relied on indirect information to describe—or imagine—the most ‘Western’ and remote reaches of the Arab-Islamic empire. 

More specifically, this talk will address the image of the Maghreb conveyed in these early geographical texts. 

This scientific outreach activity has resulted from the coordinated research project MAGNA II: “Transits and transformations in Maghreb space and population” (TRAMAGHIS. PID2021-122872NB-C21 and DIANA. PID2021-122872NB-C22), funded by MICIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and ERDF. A Way to Make Europe. 

Laura Gago Gómez 
Doctor Europeus from the University of Salamanca (2016). She holds a degree in Hispanic Philology and Arabic Philology and has studied at Yarmouk University (Irbid, Jordan), Cairo University, Tilburg University and the Institut des Recherches du Monde Arabe et Musulman (IREMAM-CNRS, Aix-en-Provence, France), among other centers of learning. 

She specializes in Arabic sociolinguistics and dialectology and lexical statistics. She has participated in various research projects, such as Cultural Geography of the Medieval and Modern Islamic Maghreb on the Internet (GEOMAGRED) and as the principal researcher in the AVBRE- Arabic Varieties Bibliographic References project (avbre.usal.es). She is currently working as a researcher on the TRAMAGHIS-Transformations of the Maghreb space in historical perspective project, directed by Prof. Miguel Á. Manzano Rodríguez.