Aglaya A. Yankovskaya
(Museum of Anthology and Ethnography named after Peter the Great (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences, St.Petersburg)

Accounts of the 14th century Arab Traveller Ibn Battuta on the Malay Archipelago: the Problem of Interpretation of the Source.

The article is devoted to the accounts of the Malay Archipelago and the Malay peninsula by the Arab traveller of the 14th century Ibn Battuta that represent a valuable source on the history of Malay culture. “The Journey” of Ibn Battuta contains a great deal of ethnographic data opening a wide field for interpretation. The author raises the problem of interpreting the traveller’s reports on the Malay world and identifies a number of difficulties associated with it, such as the unresolved issue of the reliability of Ibn Battuta’s tales, the fragmentarity of the data given and the lack of Malay terms in the text.