Arab maps placed Biläd al-südän ambiguously for centuries

Evidence

Biläd al-südän, where al-Tunisï first traveled at the age of fourteen, has had a long history in the geographic imaginations of Arabs from further north, although its exact place on maps seems to have shifted over the centuries. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 142

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Biläd al-südän (land of the blacks) as an elastic geographic category in Arab imagination.
• CANDY: A light curiosity: the medieval geographic name for the region kept drifting across maps for centuries.
• XREF: connects to: The Semitic frame so dominated that Palestine maps were subordinated to Semitic ones; Medieval Arabic maps of Africa mixed myth with empirical knowledge; Medieval Arab geography of Africa mixed empirical fact with scriptural legend
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: The Semitic frame so dominated that Palestine maps were subordinated to Semitic ones; Medieval Arabic maps of Africa mixed myth with empirical knowledge; Medieval Arab geography of Africa mixed empirical fact with scriptural legend