---
title: Wonders of creation
type: Source
description: The aja'ib (wonders) literature, above all al-Qazwini's cosmography, which gathered and transmitted the Waq-Waq story.
resource: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wonders_of_Creation
tags: [ajaib, cosmography, qazwini, sources]
timestamp: 2026-06-01T00:00:00Z
---

# Wonders of creation

The story of Waq-Waq was carried above all by the genre of *aja'ib*, the literature of wonders. Aja'ib writing gathered marvels of the natural and human world, things whose causes lay beyond ordinary explanation, and set them out both to instruct and to entertain. The genre sat next to serious geography and natural history, and borrowed freely from sailors' reports.

Its best known work is the *Aja'ib al-makhluqat wa-gharaib al-mawjudat* (The Wonders of Creation and the Oddities of Existence), compiled by Zakariya al-Qazwini (about 1203-1283), a jurist and scholar born at Qazwin in Iran shortly before the Mongol invasions. Completed around 1280, the cosmography descends from the heavens and their angels to the earth and its animals, plants, and minerals. Among its marvels are the [[islands-of-waqwaq|land of Waq-Waq]] and its [[waqwaq-tree|tree]] of human fruit.

The work was copied and illustrated for centuries. Manuscripts made from the fourteenth century onward often show the queen of Waq-Waq seated among her female attendants, and the tree hung with heads, and it is largely through these copies that the image of the tree passed into [[in-art|later painting]]. For the texts that lie behind the legend, see [[sources|Sources and further reading]].
