This is a list of notable travelers, consisting of people that are known for their travels or explorations. Travel is the movement of people between relatively distant geographical locations, and can involve travel by foot, bicycle, automobile, train, boat, airplane, or other means and can be one way or round trip. [1] [2] Travel can also include relatively short stays between successive movements.
Abū Abd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Abd Allāh Al-Lawātī, commonly known as Ibn Battuta, was a Maghrebi traveller, explorer and scholar. Over a period of thirty years from 1325 to 1354, Ibn Battuta visited most of North Africa, the Middle East, East Africa, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, China, the Iberian Peninsula, and West Africa. Near the end of his life, he dictated an account of his journeys, titled A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling, but commonly known as The Rihla.
Johann LudwigBurckhardt was a Swiss traveller, geographer and Orientalist. Burckhardt assumed the alias Sheikh Ibrahim Ibn Abdallah during his travels in Arabia. He wrote his letters in French and signed Louis. He is best known for rediscovering two of the world's most famous examples of rock-cut architecture – the ruins of the ancient Nabataean city of Petra in Jordan and the temples of Abu Simbel in Egypt.
Riḥla refers to both a journey and the written account of that journey, or travelogue. It constitutes a genre of Arabic literature. Associated with the medieval Islamic notion of "travel in search of knowledge", the riḥla as a genre of medieval and early-modern Arabic literature usually describes a journey taken with the intent of performing the Hajj, but can include an itinerary that vastly exceeds that original route. The classical riḥla in medieval Arabic travel literature, like those written by Ibn Battuta and Ibn Jubayr, includes a description of the "personalities, places, governments, customs, and curiosities" experienced by the traveler, and usually within the boundaries of the Muslim world. However, the term rihla can be applied to other Arabic travel narratives describing journeys taken for reasons other than pilgrimage; for instance, the 19th–century riḥlas of Muhammad as-Saffar and Rifa'a al-Tahtawi both follow conventions of the riḥla genre by recording not only the journey to France from Morocco and Egypt, respectively, but also their experiences and observations.
Dame Freya Madeline Stark was a British-Italian explorer and travel writer. She wrote more than two dozen books on her travels in the Middle East and Afghanistan as well as several autobiographical works and essays. She was one of the first non-Arabs known to travel through the southern Arabian Desert in modern times.
The Journey of Ibn Fattouma is an intermittently provocative fable written and published by Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz in 1983. It was translated from Arabic into English in 1992 by Denys Johnson-Davies and published by Doubleday.
Benjamin of Tudela, also known as Benjamin ben Jonah, was a medieval Jewish traveler who visited Europe, Asia, and Africa in the twelfth century. His vivid descriptions of western Asia preceded those of Marco Polo by a hundred years. With his broad education and vast knowledge of languages, Benjamin of Tudela is a major figure in medieval geography and Jewish history.
The genre of travel literature or travelogue encompasses outdoor literature, guide books, nature writing, and travel memoirs.
Celia Fiennes was an English traveller and writer. She explored England on horseback at a time when travel for its own sake was unusual, especially for women.
Harriet Chalmers Adams was an American explorer, writer and photographer. She traveled extensively in South America, Asia and the South Pacific in the early 20th century, and published accounts of her journeys in National Geographic magazine. She lectured frequently on her travels and illustrated her talks with color slides and movies.
Urduja was a legendary warrior princess recorded in the travel accounts of Ibn Battuta. She was described to be a princess of Kaylukari in the land of Tawalisi. Though the locations of Kaylukari and Tawalisi are disputed, in the Philippines, Urduja is believed by modern Filipinos to be from Pangasinan, and has since been regarded as a national heroine.
Sa'id of Mogadishu was a 14th-century Somali scholar and traveler.
Journey to Mecca: In the Footsteps of Ibn Battuta is an IMAX dramatised documentary film charting the first real-life journey made by the Islamic scholar Ibn Battuta from his native Morocco to Mecca for the Hajj, in 1325.
Ross E. Dunn is an American historian and writer, the author of several books including The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, and coauthor of the highly cited History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past. He is Professor Emeritus at San Diego State University.
Rosita Forbes, née Joan Rosita Torr, was an English travel writer, novelist and explorer. In 1920–1921 she was the first European woman to visit the Kufra Oasis in Libya, in a period when this was closed to Westerners.
Barbara Alex Toy FRGS was an Australian-British travel writer, theatrical director, playwright, and screenplay writer. She is most famous for the series of books she wrote about her pioneering and solitary travels around the world in a Land Rover, undertaken in the 1950s and 1960s. Toy was drawn to deserts, and so the majority of her journeys were in the arid lands of Northern Africa and the Middle East.
Helen Caddick was an English travel writer. She travelled the world between 1889 and 1914, writing A White Woman in Central Africa in 1900.
The Rihla, formal title A Masterpiece to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Traveling, is the travelogue written by Ibn Battuta, documenting his lifetime of travel and exploration, which according to his description covered about 73,000 miles. Rihla is the Arabic word for a journey or the travelogue that documents it.
Lyuba Kutincheva was a Bulgarian traveler and polyglot who was known to speak at least seven languages. She traveled for almost a decade (1929–1938) in the Middle East, Far East, northern Africa and Europe.
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