therwise called the Arabian Gulf,
or the Red Sea. Extracted from the Geography of Abulfeda_[338].

The following description of the Red Sea was written by _Ismael
Abulfeda_ prince of _Hamah_ in Syria, the ancient _Epiphania_, who died
in the 733d year of the _Hejirah_ or Mahometan era, corresponding with
the year 1332 of the Christian computation, after having lived sixty-one
years, twenty two of which he was sovereign of that principality.
Greaves has mistaken both the length of his reign, which he makes only
three years, and the time of his death[339]. Abulfeda was much addicted
to the study of geography and history, and wrote books on both of these
subjects, which are in great estimation in the East. His geography
written in 721, A.D. 1321, consists of tables of the latitudes and
longitudes of places, in imitation of Ptolemy, with descriptions, under
the title of _Takwin al Boldan_. No fewer than five or six translations
have been made of this work, but by some accident or other none of these
have ever been published. The only parts of this work that have been
printed are the tables of _Send_ and _Hend_, or India, published in the
French collection of Voyages and Travels by Thevenot; and those of
_Khowarazm_ or _Karazm, Mawara'l-nahar_, or Great Bukharia, and Arabia.
The two former were published in 1650, with a Latin translation by Dr
Greaves; and all the three by Hudson, in the third volume of the _Lesser
Greek Geographers_, in 1712; from which latter work this description of
the Red Sea is extracted, on purpose to illustrate the two preceding
journals, and to shew that there really is such a gulf on the coast of
Arabia as that mentioned by the ancients, that geographers may not be
misled by the mistake of Don Juan de Castro. In this edition, the words
inserted between parenthesis are added on purpose to accommodate the
names to the English orthography, or to make the description more
strictly conformable to the Arabic. The situations or geographical
positions are here thrown out of the text, to avoid embarrassment, and
formed into a table at the end. We cannot however warrant any of them,
as those which may have been settled by actual observation are not
distinguished from such as may not have had that advantage; which indeed
is the general fault of oriental tables of latitude and longitude. The
latitude of _Al Kossir_ comes pretty near that formed by Don Juan de
Castro; but that of _Al Kolzum_ must err above one