Ahmad ibn Fadlān

Ahmad ibn Fadlān was a tenth-century Arab traveller and writer who journeyed from Baghdad in AD 921 as a secretary of an embassy to the court of the Bulgars on the Volga. His vivid report, surviving as Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness, is one of the most extraordinary eyewitness accounts of the early Middle Ages.

His observations of the peoples of the steppe, including a famous description of a Norse ship burial, make him a uniquely valuable source for medievalists. Ibn Fadlan's account also inspired Michael Crichton's novel Eaters of the Dead, which fueled its wider fame.