Ibn Wahshiyyah the Nabataean was a 9/10th century Aramean writer from Iraq who managed to produce an extensive treatise on Nabatean agriculture (Kitab al-Filahât al-Nabâtiyyah) in which we find (oddly enough) mention of the Slavs (MS Leiden 303) as follows (first published by Avraam Yakovlevich Garkavi (Albert (Avraham Eliyahu) Harkavy) in 1870 in his Skazaniya musulmanskich pisateley o Slavyanach i russkich):
“I wonder at the Slavs who, despite their great ignorance and separation from all learning and wisdom, somehow managed it together to establish the custom that corpses must be burned, so that they leave neither a king nor any other man without cremating him after death.”
Slavic King funeral pyre – 9th century
This was written sometime in the first quarter of the 10th century.
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