Page 5 - Journal of the Cenral Asian Society (1960)

AND THE PERSIAN GULF 71
70 SOME EARLY TRAVELLERS IN PERSI
tho Shiraz-Bandar Abbas road, which terminated in his day on the
military fame must take second plaoe. That will always rost on tho
coast at Suru, not far west of the present port and town of Bandar
second count, on the economy of life, whereby he certainly ranks above
Abbas ; but his narrative and those of his contemporaries are very
Napoleon, perhaps above Hannibal; on his campaigns beyond tho
mattor-of-fact documents, closely resembling the gazetteers and route
Tigris, wherein his ever-happy dispositions discomfited every variety of
reports prepared by British officials to-day in India and elsewhere.
enemy, of whom some had baffled every great king since Cyprus; on
A The Arab writers do not boast of Arab conquests, nor of the law and
the merited fortune that never failed before a wall or lost a battle,
order which they introduced into the countries they overran. They
that never knew a Zama or Waterloo." *
aosumo it as confidently and implicitly as do our own officials in
The next Westerner of whose exploits and travels we have any "n-
countries over which they rule.
record was the Roman Emperor Trajan (a.d. 116), in whose mind the
$ After these came the systematic geographers, Istakhri (a.d. 951),
praises of Alexander, transmitted by a succession of poets and
Ibn Hawqal, and Muqadassi (a.d. 985). Istakhri, a native of
historians, had kindled a dangerous emulation. “ The degenerate
Persepolis, gives the description of his native province, Fare, in far
Parthians," says Gibbon,! “broken by intestine discord, fled before his
greater detail than is to be found in Ibn Hawqal, who reduced his
arms. He descended the river Tigris in triumph, from the mountains
chapter on Fars to the due proportion of the remainder of the book.
of Armenia to the Persian Gull He enjoyed the honour of being the
Ibn Hawqal’8 work is indeed but a new edition, partly enlarged and
first, as he was the last, of the Roman generals who ever navigated
v amended, of Istakhri. Muqadassi wrote his geography entirely on
that remote sea. His fleets ravaged the coasts of Arabia." But his
independent lines, and chiefly from personal observation. His is
death soon clouded the -splendid prospect which his victories had
opened to the expectant Senate. probably the greatest, as it is certainly the most original, work of
all those which the Arab geographers composed; his descriptions of
Trajan, like Alexander, was a European, and his exploits, as re-
corded by Dion Cassius and Julian and other commentators, were, like * places, of manners and customs, of products and manufactures, and his
careful summaries of the characteristics of each province in turn, are
those of Alexander, undertaken in a spirit of adventure and with the
indeed some of the best written pages to be found in all the range of
object of exploration as well as of conquest.
mediasval Arab literature.*
An interval of some six centuries separates the relations of Trajan’s
In the tenth century also flourished Tabari,! whose work is, for
commentators from the next books of travel and geography that have
geography as well as for history, a primary authority, and Hamzah
come down to us—namely, those of the Arab geographers, Ibn
Ispahani, whose work, though composed in Arabic, was evidently
Khurdadbih, who wrote in a.d. 864, and was followed by Qudamah,
••2
Yaqubi, Ibn Serapion, Ibn Rustah, and Ibn Faqih (a.d. 903). These based on many Persian books now lost, and relates facts of which we
should otherwise be ignorant.
set forth in detail, in the form of road books, the various itineraries, in-
Coming to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, we have the work of a
' terspersed with Bhort accounts of the towns passed through, and the
famous traveller, Nasir-i-Khusraw, the Persian (a.d. 1047), who went
revenues and products, in turn, of each province. Ibn Khurdadbih f|
was postmaster of the Jibal Province, which included Tabriz, Tehran, from Khurasan to Mecca and'back, visiting Egypt and Syria on his
way out, and crossing Arabia on the homeward journey; and his diary,
Hamadan, and Ispahan; Qudamah was a revenue accountant: their
written in Persian, is one of the earliest works we possess in that
itineraries give, stage by stage, the distances along the great Khurasan
3 language. His account of Basrah, the Shatt-al-Arab, Mehruban (the
road and the other travel roads which radiated from Baghdad to Mecca,
modern Hindijan), and Arrajan, the great city whose ruins are still to
to Basrah, and, indeed, to every centre of importance of the Old
be seen east of Behbahan, is of extraordinary interest. He says that
World. On all these trunk lines not only are the distances and stages
in his day the rulers of Basrah had built on the Shatt-al-Arab bar a
given, but an exact description is added of the nature of the country
scaffolding with great beams of teak wood, very broad below and
passed through, whether the way be hilly, ascending or descending, or
narrowing above, forty yards in height, to serve as a lighthouse to
whether the road lies in the plain.!
warn mariners. On its summit was the watchman’s cabin, and the
We are indebted to Ibn' Khurdadbih for the earliest account of
platform being stone-flagged and supported on arches was used at
* Hogarth, “The Army of Alexander.!’ Journal of Philology, xvii., 1888. night as a brasier wherein a be^oon fire was lighted. A similar light-
See also “ Eine Quellenkritik zur Geschichte Alexanders dee Grossen in Diodor,
Curtiua und Justin.” Rudolf Kohler, Leipzig, 1879. (London Library Pam­
phlets, 1839.) * Le Strange, op. cit.
t “ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” vol. i. f Tabari’s “ Chronicles.” Zotenberg,s French translation, 4 vols., Pans
} Le Strange, “ Lands of the Eastern Caliphate.” 1905. 1867-74.
■ \l