Page 19 - Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean (before portuguese)_Neat

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26 ARAB NAVIGATION
are comparatively much more prevalent in it than in the more
orderly works of Sulaiman al-Mahri from MS 2559, although the
same mistakes do exist in this manuscript also. The writing of the
Paris manuscript shows a large.number of deletions, insertions and
corrections and this can to some extent be attributed to faulty
scribal work, although the fact that many of these corrections are
due to technical problems tends to show that the copyist was not
familiar with the subject of the work and that navigational works
were not always copied by navigators—perhaps by scribes working
for a navigators* market or perhaps by scribes working only for a
general—say antiquarian—market, hence the possession of the
Damascus manuscript by a Meccan resident Ahmad b. Muhammad
ibn al-Hammal. This man was originally from Aleppo and ipay have
been a retired merchant but it is noteworthy that he does not hail
from a region of Indian Ocean navigators.
Examples of such scribal incompetence in MS 2292 are shown on
f. 25r, 1. 2 and 12 (insertions); f. 32r, 1. 1-3, f. 53r, 1. 2-3 (deletions);
f. 51r, 1. 1 and f. 52v, 1.11 (corrections; f. 53r, 1. 4, f. 71r, 1. 8 (omis­ written copy of the whole manuscript before him. Close comparison
sions). On f. 55v, 1. 1 the pointing is omitted because the copyist
could not understand the difficult terminology, but unlike the text
of Sulaiman al-Mahri in MS 2559 the pointing has not been omitted
from incomprehensible place-names. Place-names throughout have
often the oddest pointing (e.g. SuwaidI for Blyundi
f. 60r, 1. 11) and in the poetical sections it is possible that the words
were not even recognised as place-names (e.g. f. 78r, 1. 1-2, 4ff). !
Both of the manuscripts which contain the Fawa'id, that of Paris
and that, of Damascus, consist of a series of navigational treatises
by Ibn Majid containing the same works in the same order, but
that of Damascus continues only to f. 154v of the Paris manuscript.
The Damascus manuscripHhus covers in 173 leaves at 23 lines to
the page, 154 ff. of the ..Paris manuscript which has an average of
19 lines to a page.
£ | The date of the Damascus manuscript is 1592-30 RabTa I 1001
' and it seems to have originated in Mecca, while the Paris one is
dated 1576 i.e. 984 and is of unknown origin, although presumably
from the handwriting it was written in the Middle East and arrived
in Paris via North Africa as some North African owner has written
notes in the margin in a Maghribi hand.
The fact that the two manuscripts contain the same treatises shows
that they must have been copied from each other or from a single
original unless there was by 1575 a fixed corpus of Ibn Majid’s work.
A more detailed comparison of. the texts of the Fawa'id in each
manuscript reveals more about their, relationship. The Damascus
[*■ .1 -'.j . «■•
*••• -u -
:f: v. • .
THE NAVIGATORS AND THEfR WORKS 27
manuscript is written in a far better hand than that of Paris, and there
are practically no alterations to the text. Comparing the texts one
finds a number of passages omitted from the Damascus one which
appear in the Paris manuscript but none found in the former which
are omitted from the latter. The Paris manuscript, as has been said
i before, is full of deletions and omissions, deleted and inserted by
the same hand as wrote the manuscript—a rather slap-dash hand
who obviously falters over the difficult passages and in every case
| knows nothing about the subject he is copying. But he does insert
» the pointing wherever it might be difficult to read, especially in the
poetry and proper names of obscure origin. The Paris copyist was
therefore a not too careful worker hampered by the fact that he was
dealing with a subject about which he knew nothing and he may
have been copying from a miscellaneous collection of papers and not
from one clear examplar. The Damascus copyist on the other hand
was fairly careful, wrote well, but obviously copied from something
f which gave him little trouble—I feel he had already a completely
of the differences shows that the Damascus manuscript is usually
wrong when they differ: only occasionally is the Damascus one
l clearer when the Paris one is difficult to read. However anyone
; reading my notes to the translation will see that the Paris manuscript
is very far from correct, quotations (even from other works appearing
i
in the same manuscript) are quoted quite wrongly, omissions must
be frequent and marginal notes have been incorporated into the
text. In all these cases, the Damascus manuscript follows the Paris
one blindly. Thus place-names, always pointed and usually vowelled
in the Paris manuscript, appear in exactly the same guise in the
Damascus one; JoJ is JoJ in both, although JoJ must
be correct; is in both, and when the Paris manuscript
spells place-names in two different ways on the same page it is
followed blindly by Damascus; e.g. jlL and for
v£JLJL and pl>- ^ for the usual fU and and
In two cases it is possible that a later hand has corrected the
Paris manuscript and the Damascus one retains the original and
wrong reading; thus we have on f. 2v, 1. 9 and in f. 6v, 1. 8 *UI
in both manuscripts but the Paris one has been corrected to
and »UI. Three further cases can be mentioned where bad writing on
the Paris manuscript has led to error on the Damascus one; i.e.
(a) Paris has written £>> to look like £and Damascus has pro­
duced £jo (f. 6v, 1. 13); (b) on f. 69v, 1. 8 <1*^ has been written to look
as if a diacritical point appears under the line between the td and
the td marbuta, the Damascus manuscript has (c) f. 52r, 1. 18
!
• i