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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
Khurāsān in the middle ages was far more extensive than is the province of this name in modern Persia. Mediæval Khurāsān extended on the north-east to the Oxus, and included all the districts round Herat which now belong to Afghanistān. On the other hand, the small province of Kūmis, on the northern boundary of the Great Desert, which at the present day is included within the limits of Persian Khurāsān, was of old a separate district, and formed in the time of Mustawfi a province apart.
page 736 note 1 Kilāt, which has come to be the name of more than one important fortresstown of western Asia, is a word that apparently came into use at the close of the middle ages, and is presumably a Persianized form of the Arabic Ḳal'ah (spelt with dotted ḳ), meaning ‘a castle’. It is worth noting that the name Kilāt does not occur in Yāḳūt or, I believe, in any of the earlier Arab geographers.
page 736 note 2 The name Fūshanj, or Būshanj, has apparently gone completely out of use; on the other hand, I can find no mention of this Ghūriyān in any Eastern author. Yāḳūt (iii, 821, 824) mentions Ghūraj, which he says is commonly pronounced Ghūrah, and is a village near the gate of the city of Herāt; and there was the village of Ghūriyān near Mary. Neither of these, however, can be the modern town of Ghūriyān, the name of which recalls the province of Ghūr, where the Ghūrid Sultans held sway in the latter half of the twelfth century a.d.
page 738 note 1 In this passage, in place of Ghūr, many MSS. of the Nuzhat read Gharj, and some have Gharjistān. The name of this region has nothing to do with Georgia, or Gurjistān, to the north of Armenia, desorihed by Mustawfi in Chapter 6; for Gharjistān took its name from the ancient kings of northern Afghanistān, called by the Arabs Gharj-ash-Shār. According to Yāḳūt (iii, 785, 786, 823) Gharjistān, often confounded with Ghūristān, and spelt indifferently Gharshistān or Gharistān, was the country along the upper waters of the-Murghāb, to the eastward of Marv-ar-rūd. Its limits were Ghūr on the one side and Herāt on the other, with Ghaznah to the south-east. The sites of the many towns in Ghūr and Gharjistān, mentioned by the Arab geographers, are completely unknown.
page 738 note 2 See Northern Afghanistan, by C. E. Yate (1888), p. 157. The Chachaktu ruins are forty-five miles as the crow flies from Bālā Murghāb, which last, I consider, undoubtedly represents Marv-ar-Rūd, and this distance may be counted as the equivalent of three days' march in the hill country. Ḳal'ah Walī and Takht-i-Khātūn, one or other of which is put forward by Colonel Yate (op. cit., pp. 194–6 and 211) as a possible site for Tāliḳān, being each of them only some twenty-seven miles distant from Bālā Murghāb, are both of them too near to suit the case. As regards the site of the city of Fāryāb, this may well have been at the modern Khayrābād, where there is an ancient fort and mounds with ruins, as described by Colonel Yate (op. cit., Map of the North-West Frontier of Afghanistan, and p. 233), who narrates some local legends of past times that have clustered round this site. The name of this Fāryāb of Jūzjān is also spelt Firyāb by Yāḳūt (iii, 888), and it must not be confounded either with Fārāb, otherwise written Bārāb (now called Otrār), on the Jaxartes, or with Firabr, sometimes written Firab, on the Oxus, at the ferry of Chārjūy. It will be noticed also that there were during the Middle Ages three Ṭāliḳāns, viz., Ṭāliḳān, or Ṭāliḳān, the town of Ṭukhāristān which still exists; next, Ṭāliḳān of Jūzjān aforesaid; lastly, the Ṭāliḳān district in Persian 'Irāḳ, to the south-west of Ḳazvīn, which has been noticed in Chapter 2.
page 740 note 1 Professor de Goeje has written a most learned and interesting work on this subject (Das alte Sett des Oxus, Leyden, 1875), in which he seeks to discredit the statements of the Persian geographers, and in conclusion gives it as his opinion that the Oxus during all the middle ages (as at the present time) flowed into the Aral. I shall not presume to enter the lists against Professor de Goeje; I only quote in the following passages the authorities on the other side. But I may mention that Sir Henry Eawlinson, who had studied the question as a practical geographer, and knew as well the writings of the Persian and Arab authors, was always of a contrary opinion, holding that from the earlier years of the thirteenth century a.d. down to about the year 1575 the Oxus had continued to have its chief outflow into the Caspian, not into the Aral.
page 746 note 1 In the Catalogue of Oriental Coins in the British Museum (vols. iii, 52, 53, and ix, 282), a series of copper coins is described, bearing the numbers 107, 107a, 107b, 108, which are dated 595 a.h. and 598 a.h., and attributed to the mint-city of Rasht. These coins bear the name and titles of Sulaymān II, the Saljūḳ Sulṭān of Rūm, and if the reading Rasht be accepted, would go to prove that the Saljūḳs of Rūm exercised sovereign rights in Gīlān, and that Rasht was already an important city at the close of the sixth century a.h. The reading, however, does not appear, on examination of the coins, to be tenable; and the facts as known to us from history are decidedly against Rasht having ever belonged to Sulaymān II of Rūm.
page 748 note 1 Much of this country is described in Notes of a Journey from Kazveen to Hamadm, by Rees, J. D. (Madras, 1885)Google Scholar, but the names given by Mustawfi do not occur.