The famous travel document of the geographer and historian Katib Çelebi, or Mustafaben Abd Allah Haji Khalifa (1609-1657), originally written in Turkish is here presented in the Latin translation of Matthew Norberg, a professor at Uppsala University. One of the great Arabic examples of a travel document written during the “Age of Discoveries,” Cihan-numa, or Geographia Orientalis is one of the great historic exemplars of the compilers of travel accounts. Having penned one of the earliest books ever actually printed in Turkey, Çelebi followed his success in this venture by writing the present work, originally published in 1732. Very early this encyclopedic book was translated into Latin, the scholar European language of the day. With over a twelve hundred pages, this work set out to be a manual of the earth itself. Obviously written from the perspective of a Turkish author of the seventeenth century, this account is not strictly a travelogue, but more of a compendium of material about the world. It stands as an historic attempt to understand the wider world.

Matthias Norberg (1747-1826) was a Swedish scholar who became professor of Oriental Languages and Greek at Uppsala University. He was one of the pioneers of Mandaic studies.