Kitab al-Kharaj wa-Sina'at al-Kitaba of Qudama ibn Ja'far

The "Book of Land Tax and the Secretary's Craft" of Abu al-Faraj Qudama ibn Ja'far, the Baghdadi secretary, is arranged in "stations" (manazil) divided into chapters. De Goeje printed extracts from it in volume VI of the Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum, after Ibn Khurradadhbih's Book of Routes and Realms. ¹

Qudama says the post needs a separate office whose head forwards every letter arriving from the provinces to its destination, presents the reports of the postmasters and intelligence officers to the caliph or compiles digests of them, oversees the couriers and the staff posted at the stages and their pay, and appoints the officials of the mailbags in the cities; what is needed in its head is that he be "trustworthy", because the work calls not for an able examiner but for a careful man of trust. ^{1 2} He then says the head of the office cannot do without knowledge of the roads and post stages, since the caliph may ask him when sending out an army, and so lists them stage by stage in miles and parasangs with the state of water and road, beginning with the road from Baghdad to Mecca, "the greatest pilgrimage", and then onward to Yemen. ² The fifth station ends after this chapter. ³

In chapter 2 of the sixth station Qudama divides the inhabited earth and names the climes: the first that of Meroe, the second Aswan, the third Egypt, the fourth Antarsus, the fifth Rhodes and the sixth Pontus. ⁴ The sixth station ends with the lands of the west: the descendants of Muhammad ibn Idris and their move to Fez, then al-Andalus, ruled by the Umayyad at Cordoba, "and al-Andalus is the end of the west". ⁵