Some of the ideas here were developed while composing an article on medieval Yemeni fisheries, see Roxani Eleni Margariti “The Rasulids and the Bountiful Sea: Marine Resources, State Control and Maritime Culture in the Southern Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden,” Der Islam 98 (2021): 69–99.
A standard reference on the history of ideas about the origins of ambergris is Karl H. Dannenfeldt, “Ambergris: The Search for its Origin,” Isis 73 (1982), 382–397.
For classical medieval Arabic sources on the nature and origins of ambergris, with a survey of specialist studies on the topic to date and excellent bibliography, see Thierry Buquet, “De la pestilence à la fragrance: l’origine de l’ambre gris selon les auteurs arabes,” Bulletin d’etudes orientales 64 (2016), 113–133.
On ambergris’s introduction in Mediterranean materia medica after the Arab-Islamic conquests, see Anne McCabe, “Imported materia medica, 4th-12th Centuries and Byzantine Pharmacology,” in Byzantine Trade, 4th-12th Centuries: the Archaeology of Local, Regional and International Exchange, edited by Marlia Mundell Mungo, 273–296. Surrey: Ashgate, 2009.
On ambergris and its uses in the modern perfume industry see Christopher Kemp, Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris (University of Chicago Press, 2012).
When it comes to whales and the brotherhood of the modern industry’s whaling ships, it’s hard to think of a more delightful and profound read than Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Listening it to it as an audio book in addition to reading, I was struck by its performativity and Homeric qualities, by which I mean its poetry but also its intense attention to both the wonders of the natural world and the depth of human psychology within it.
For maritime lore from the medieval Islamicate Indian Ocean, the place to start are the 10th-century compilations known by the titles Accounts of China and India and The Wonders of India attributed to Abu Zayd al-Sirafi and Buzurg b. Shahriyar respectively. It is from Tim Macintosh Smith’s translation of the former that the first epigraph at the top of the blog was taken.
The second epigraph is taken from the so-called Book of Curiosities, the anonymous 11th-century Egyptian cosmographical treatise in Arabic that has been beautifully published by Yossef Rapoport and Emilie Savage-Smith, An Eleventh-Century Egyptian Guide to the Universe: The Book of Curiosities (Brill, 2014). This work is delightful to explore and very rich in marine “science,” in the sense of both factual knowledge and lore.
