Ibn Hawqal remains silent when it comes to the real motives for his travels. But at the beginning, in his prologue, he presents a succinct account of his investigative methods and the reasons for choosing the people he deemed worthy of inclusion in his account and those whom, because of their different characteristics, he excluded. The author provides a geographical and ethnocultural map of the world based on phenotypical and religious criteria. In an empirical way, it offers a classification that crosses the line of colour and distinguishes people by their customs and modes of governance. This chromatic, custom-orientated and political taxonomy ended with territories inhabited by blacks being seen as the representation and quintessence of the most radical kind of otherness. In the author's eyes this part of the world was the prototype of wild societies living in a state of nature. Dark-skinned, devoid of beliefs and intelligence, these people had slid to the bottom of the human hierarchy.