Page 10 - The Postal Agencies in Eastern Arabia

and -later- Pakistan.

Others may regret that Postal Stationery has not been given
sufficient prominence: to which I can only reply that, important though
that branch is, the line has to be drawn somewhere. The inclusion of
the Appendices in Part I giving early and late dates of cancellations may
well be criticised on the grounds that the dates can never be definitive;
but 1 have put them in particularly to give to newcomers to this field of
Postal History some reasonably accurate picture of the span of use.

Many covers from this area will be found bearing the Arabic
numerals Y A 1(786) or A 11 1(8642): and, lest they be mistaken for
postal markings, it should be explained that each letter of the Arabic
alphabet has a numerical value, ranging from ] to 1000. ‘786' is th*.
sum of the letters in the Arabic preface “h- tno name of God, the
Merciful, the Compassionate." wJvlf-i 8. . . ond 2 arc the digiss
representing H, U, D and B, which v. o ; . .. ,:ght to left - becomes
B(E)DUH, a mystical word invoking th-: uige of the lettc u> its
destination. The Persian variation o? ' may also be found - /\ f r* f
It should also be remembered that a’um.s: manuscript notes on
covers, indicating dates of receipt, give the 1 iijra year.
A brief word about the English rendering of names from the
Arabic. The short vowels are not written in Arabic, though they are,
of course, pronounced; there are word-ending letters written in Arabic
but not pronounced. Thus the English rendering will greatly depend
upon whether it was done from the spoken or from the written word.
An example is BASRA, thus pronounced; but it is written in Arabic
‘BSRH\ and if you add short ‘A’s for the vowels and take note of the
‘IT at the end you get BASRAH. Indeed, both the spellings were used
on the date-stamps in the 1930s; and, in earlier years, the rendering
was equally correctly BUSREH or BUSRAH - though BUSSORAH was
perhaps going a bit too far!
So many people have provided, over the past 25 years, so
much of the detail in this Handbook that it would be impossible to
name them all and invidious to name but a few - so, I say “thank
you" to all of them. I must, however, acknowledge the artistry of
Gog Horsman who has produced almost all the drawings, often from

9