ABSTRACT
THE records of the Arab geographers provide the earliest documentary evidence for the history of the Western Sudan. Modern historians use these sources extensively, mainly through translations into European languages. Yet they have paid more attention to analysing the information available in these sources for the reconstruction of history, than to a critical study of the way in which such information reached the Arab geographers. Such a study is all the more important because too much is sometimes inferred from the few and thin references to the Western Sudan before the eleventh century.
