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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
Four years ago I submitted to the readers of this Journal “A Description, of Mesopotamia and Baghdad, written about the year 900 a.d. by Ibn Serapion,” in the course of which paper an attempt was made to sketch, in rough outline, the Plan of the mediaeval City of the Caliphs. This was derived from the accounts of the canals given by Ibn Serapion; and recognizing the imperfection of this Sketch Plan, I expressed my intention of returning again to the subject of Baghdad topography, and of completing, in a future article, the very cursory notes which were all that I had then been able to give with the translation of Ibn Serapion.
page 847 note 1 See J.R.A.S. for 1895, January, April, and October.
page 847 note 2 See in J.R.A.S. for 1895, the Plan facing p. 275, where the whole of Western Baghdad is put too low down in regard to the Eastern Quarter; further the lower course of the 'Īsā Canal should be as it is marked in the two following Plans.
page 848 note 1 Kulturgeschichte des Orients unter den Chalifen, vol. ii, pp. 47 to 94 (Wien, 1875)Google Scholar.
page 854 note 1 Ṭabarī, iii, 837 to 925. For the editions of works quoted in this and the following notes see my former paper J.R.A.S., 1895, p. 7.
page 858 note 1 Ṭabarī, iii; 1553 to 1578.
page 862 note 1 Instances are too numerous for reference in full, but the following will be sufficient to prove what is stated above. Ya'ḳūbī 244, Muḳaddasi 120, Mas'ūdī vi, 482, Yaḳūt i, 640, Marāsid ii, 486.
page 864 note 1 Iṣṭakhrī, 83; Ibn-Hawḳal, 164.
page 866 note 1 Muḳaddasi, 119.
page 867 note 1 See J.R.A.S. for 1897, p. 35. The full name of the writer is Aḥmad ibn 'Alī al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī, and I have adopted the name Khaṭīb, meaning the “Preacher,” merely for convenience of brevity. The British Museum has three MSS. of his work, and there is also another good copy in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The MS. which is referred to in the following pages is that numbered Or. 1607 of the British Museum Catalogue.
page 868 note 1 It is important to distinguish between the two Caliplis 'Ali Muktafī 289 (902 a.d.) and Muḥammad Muḳtafī 530 (1136 a.d.), hence the addition of the personal name. For the same reason I write Manṣūr Rāshid 529 (1135) to distinguish this Caliph from Hārūn-ar-Rashīd 170 (786 a.d.). Khaṭīb, f. lO3a; and for what follows see f. 108a, b.
page 869 note 1 For this estimate of the Jarīb compare Mawardi, edited by M. Enger, p. 265. (Bonn, 1853.)
page 870 note 1 For the length of the side of the Jarīb, namely sixty ells, Khaṭīb uses the term Ḥabl, meaning a “cord” or “rope,” which apparently is not given in this special sense in our dictionaries, and it may therefore be worth noting.
page 871 note 1 The details of the third siege of Baghdad are given by Ibn-al-Athīr, xi, 26.
page 873 note 1 'Imād-ad-Dīn, ii, 246 to 255 (in Recueil des Textes relatifs à l'histoire des Seldjoucides par M. Th. Houtsma, Leyden, 1889); Ibn-al-Athīr, xi, 140.
page 874 note 1 Khāḳānī, p. 91, of the Lithographed Lucknow edition of 1294 (1877 a.d.). I have to thank my friend Professor E. G. Browne, of Cambridge, for the loan of thia work, which I should otherwise have failed to see.
page 875 note 1 “The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela,” i, 97 (in Hebrew and English, by A. Asher, 1840).
page 875 note 2 “The Travels of Ibn Jubayr,” edited by Wright, W., p. 219Google Scholar.
page 876 note 1 This name has had a long life. The ‘Attābī silks became famous throughout the Moslem world, and were imitated in other towns. Idrīsī in 548 (1153 a. d.) describes Almeria in Southern Spain as in his time possessing eight hundred looms for silk weaving, and the 'Attābī stuffs are particularly mentioned among those that were manufactured. The name passed into Spanish under the form Attabi, and thence to Italian and French as tabis. The name taby for a rich kind of silk is now obsolete in English, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the word was in common use. In February, 1603, when Elizabeth received the Venetian Envoy Scaramelli, the Queen is described as wearing a dress of silver and white taby (“vestita di tabi d'argento et bianco”). The Diary of Samuel Pepys records how on October 13, 1661, he wore his “false-taby waistecoate with gold lace”; and a century later Miss Burney, on the occasion of the birthday of the Princess Royal at Windsor, September 29, 1786, appeared in a gown of “lilac tabby.” Dr. Johnson gives the spelling tabby in his Dictionary, and explains it as “a kind of waved silk,” adding that the tabby-cat is so named from the brindled markings of the fur. It is certainly curious that the common epithet applied to a cat in modern English should be derived from the name of a man who was a Companion of the Prophet Muḥammad, and governor of Mecca in the seventh century a.d.
page 880 note 1 Chronicle of Abu-1-Faraj, p. 425. (Beyrout, 1890.)
page 880 note 2 Elfachri, Arabisch von W. Ahlwardt, p. 380. (Gotha, 1860.) “Bombay Government Records,” No. xliii, New Series (1857). “Memoirs by Commander Felix Jones,” p. 252, where two drawings of this bridge will be found, also the copy of the inscription by Mustanṣir which it bears, dated in the year 629 (1232 a.d.).
page 881 note 1 Another almost contemporary writer is Waṣṣāf, the historiographer of Ghāzān the Il-Khān of Persia. He was born at Shīrāz in 1263 a.d., five years, therefore, after the Mongol siege of Baghdad; and must have known personally many of those who had taken part in this famous event. I have gone through the pages of this work (edited in Persian with a German translation by Hammer-Purgstall in 1856) which are devoted to the times of Hūlāgū and the siege, but have been unable to glean a single fact not already mentioned by Rashīd-ad-Dīn; the bombastic style in which Waṣṣāf writes being indeed but ill-adapted for conveying any precise topographical information.
page 882 note 1 Major Eaverty has made some blunders in his very useful translation of the Tabaḳāt-i-Nāṣirī (published in the Bibliotheca Indica, 1881) in the matter of place-names, some of which, to save further misunderstanding, it may be well to correct. Op. cit., p. 1240, Dajayl is several times put for the Dujayl Canal, and this does not mean “branch” as here stated, but is the diminutive form of Dijlah, and hence signifies “the Little Tigris.” It will be remembered that Kalwādhā is the outlying suburb or township below East Baghdad, which gave its name to the Southern Gate of the city called the Bāb Kalwādhā. Now Kalwādhā in the Persian pronunciation becomes Kalwāzā (with a z for the Arabic dh), but under no circumstances should the name be written as though consisting of two words “Kul-wāzī,” as given on p. 1243 op. cit., also a is the right vowel throughout. A similar remark, as regards the Persian pronunciation, applies to the ‘Aḍudī Hospital, which name the countrymen of the Buyid Princes would, of course, pronounce 'Azudī; Major Raverty, however (a few lines below his Kul-wāzī), changes 'Aḍudī or 'Azudī into 'Uzdi, which makes the name almost unrecognizable.
page 883 note 1 A full description of the fall of Baghdad, carefully put together from all available sources—Arabic, Persian, and Turkish—will be found in SirHoworth's, H. “History of the Mongols,” vol. iii, pp. 113 to 133Google Scholar. For the death of the Caliph Musta'sim, the well-known account given by Marco Polo (see the translation of Sir Henry Yule, vol. i, p. 65), who was almost a contemporary, is probably true in the main facts, though the details may be fictitious; at any rate, his authority is as good as that of most of the Moslem writers.
page 884 note 1 Marāṣid, i, 163.
page 885 note 1 Ibn Baṭūṭah, ii, 107.
page 885 note 2 The Persian text of the section on Baghdad has been printed by Sehefer, C. in the Supplément au Siasset Nameh, p. 146. (Paris, 1897.)Google Scholar
page 888 note 1 Niebuhr, C., “Voyage en Arabie,” vol. ii, p. 240. (Amsterdam, 1780.)Google Scholar
page 888 note 2 Ibn-al-Athīr, ix, 395.
page 888 note 3 Cf. Ṭabarī, iii, 1105.
page 888 note 4 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edition, article “Baghdad.”
page 889 note 1 For illustrations representing the so-called tomb of Zubaydah, and the shrine of Ma'rūf Karkhī, see Jones, , “Memoir,” p. 311Google Scholar. It is possible that this modern tomb of Zubaydah may be the building described in the twelfth century a.d. as standing near the high road outside the old Basrah Gate (see Ibn Jubayr, 227; and Baṭūṭtah, ii, 108). The tomb within this shrine then bore an inscription, stating that 'Awn and Mu'n were buried here, two of the descendants of the Caliph 'Alī, son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad. In the fourteenth century a.d. this same shrine is described by Ibn Baṭūṭah as a beautiful building, within which was the gravestone lying under a spacious dome-shaped monument. It would seem not unlikely that in the course of the next three centuries, the inscription having become illegible, and all memory of these 'Alids long forgotten, popular tradition may have fixed on this tomb as that which had been built over the remains of the celebrated wife of Hārūn-ar-Rashīd, more especially since her real sepulchre in the Kāẓimayn probably did not survive the Mongol siege and the subsequent conflagration.