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By V. MINOKSKY
TN 1929 Professor Angela Codazzi published a careful edition, with
-*- an Italian translation, of a geographical compendium by Ishaq
ibn al-Husayn entitled Kitdb akdm al-marjdn fl dhikr al-madd'in
al-mashhura f% hull makdn.1 According to Professor Nallino's
suggestion the author may be identical with one of the sources
mentioned by Idrlsi (" Ishaq ibn al-Husayn al-munajjim ") and by
Ibn-Khaldun (" Ishaq ibn al-Hasan (?) al-Khazinl"). As regards
the date of the text, the editor takes as its terminus a quo 262/875 and
as its terminus ad quern 454/1062. Most probably he belongs to the
eleventh century. Several indications suggest that the author was a
native of the westernmost part of the Islamic world (Spain ?). He
seems to have used (directly or indirectly ?) Khuwarizmi's rifacimento
of Ptolemy and Ya'qubl's Kitab al-bulddn. Some single points of
likeness have been discovered by the editor in I. Khurdadhbih (a
legend on Alexandria and another on the Seven Sleepers) 2 and in
Ibn-Eusta (San'a, Saba', Misr, and the Khazar lands). Very judiciously
Professor Codazzi (p. 461, note 5) points out some confusion in our
author, who, under al-Khazar, quotes a feature 3 which in Ibn-Rusta
belongs to the Burdas (Burtas), and we shall see that such cases are
much more numerous in our text!
On the whole, the compendium, though not very original, gives
some curious facts regarding the towns of the Islamic countries. It
shows a marked predilection for historical data relating to their
conquest, local risings, etc. Quite isolated are the two last paragraphs,
on the Khazars and the Turks, where the description becomes very
vague and some puzzling and misunderstood forms of names occur.
These two passages will form the subject of the present article with a
view to explaining the facts quoted, and ascertaining the sources from
which they were borrowed by the author.
1
Rendiconti della R. Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Classe di scienze morali,
Novembre-Dicembre, 1929, pp. 373^63.
2
Under several towns our author quotes the amount of taxes paid by them.
I. Kh., 35, quotes the taxes only for Khorasan [and 'Iraq]. Our author seems to
have rounded off I. Kh.'s sums, e.g. Bokhara, 1,189,200 dirhams > 1,000,000;
Nishapur 4,108,900 > 5,000,000 ; Gurgan 10,176,800 > 10,000,000. But some of
the sums are apparently false : for the insignificant Sarakhs 1,000,000 (instead of
I. Kh.'s 307,440) and for the enormous Khorasan 10,000,000 (instead of 44,846,000).
3
Freedom of the women.
142 V. MINORSKY—
^-S, j£\3.J*Jl\
^ 3 j U l > Sjrv^ Jl
LLJI
L
Of these, al-Baydd " the White one " is the name given by I. Kh.
to the western part of the capital, which I. Rusta calls by its native
name of J-JLJ^L-.* " The Yellow [town ?] ". On the other hand,
*_L> ^_*_* or *J^-*?' quoted by I. Rusta is evidently the name of
the eastern part of the capital which I. Kh. spells g-~^~ o r b-^JS~-
The " Khazar lake ", out of which the river is said toflow,may
reflect some confusion of the meanings of Arabic bahr and Persian
daryd, which both stand for "a sea, and a large river ". The original
may have referred to the fact that the canal on which the capital
stood was a part of the Khazar river (bahr). Buhayra may then be
a secondary Verschlimmbesserung for bahr.
The name -*J_~JI must certainly be restored as j_^-~J1 "The
Throne ", i.e. " the possessions of the Master of the Throne ", a well-
known designation of a kingdom in the northern Daghestan, of which
the nucleus must have been the present-day Avar territory (on the
Qoy-su). The Sahib al-Sanr was quite rightly the immediate southern
neighbour of the Khazar king. The mention of wars between them is
probably a mere amplification of the epitomator's.
We shall leave aside for the moment the extraordinarily close
analogies of our Khazar paragraph with I. Rusta's text and shall
consider the question of borrowings more completely after we have
examined the second paragraph describing the " Turks ".
jUVI *x*y * % f j J ^ i3 *J
~.
VI _ Vj «J,rJl J
JI>-1 .
Though the description of the " Turks " is very general and no
tribes are distinguished among them, it is curious that the territory
of the Toghuzghuz, the most celebrated of the Turkish tribes,1 is said
to lie to the east of, and consequently separate from, the " Turk "
land. The analysis of the text shows that what the author really means
by Turk is the particular tribe of Kimak (*Kimdk),2 which lived near
the Irtish, but, " when there was peace between them and the G-huz,"
visited the latter's territory in winter, cf. Hudud al-'Alam, § 18. These
periodical movements are a source of great confusion in our sources
in which two different territories are usually telescoped into one
"Kimak land". Therefore one might improve our Bahr al-shdmi
into Bahr al-Shash (^L-i). The latter term would be
quite possible for the Aral sea into which disembogues " the Shash
river " (Jaxartes), and the Ghuz territories are usually associated
with the Aral sea. On the other hand, Professor Codazzi's correction
Bahr al-shamali (Jl_*^i) "Northern sea" has the advantage of
suiting the Hudud al-'Alam, according to which the Kimak territories
extended in the north up to the Northern Uninhabited Lands.
The river mentioned in the text belongs to the region between the
Irtish and the Caspian Sea, of which Muslim authors (Mas'udi, Muruj,
i, 213 ; Hudud al-'Alam, § 6, 41; Gardlzl, 83) give very entangled
descriptions. Our sources do not know the lower course of the Irtish :
the Hudud al-'Alam takes the latter for an affluent of the Volga ;
moreover, the authors mentioned have a vague idea of the exist-
ence of some other river flowing to the Caspian, to the west of the
Irtish. The Ural (Yayiq) river and the Emba, disemboguing into the
Caspian, the rivers of the steppes to the north-east of the Aral sea
(such as the Irghiz and Turghai), and even some left affluents of the
Irtish may be partly responsible for the confused descriptions of the
course of this second river. The new detail added by the Akdm, namely
that the river dries up in the summer, points to the steppe region.
The two last paragraphs, which stand isolated in the text of the
Akdm, refer to the north-eastern territories lying pretty close to each
other, and it would be strange if their description were due to two
1
By Toghuzghuz Muslim writers mean both the tribes which originally belonged
to the ancient Turkish (in Chinese Tu-ch'iieh) Empire, and the later Uyghur
possessions in the eastern T'ien-shan.
2
According to Idrlsl (Jaubert), ii, 221, the Kimakiya border on the Toghuzghuz in
the south, but the bearings in Muslim authors constantly vary up to 90°.
KHAZARS AND THE TURKS IN THE AKAM AL-MARJAN 149
the chapters on the Turks are lacking, but, at least, his Khazar-
Burdas-Bulkar passages account for our text almost verbatim. Still
disbelieving the possibility that two different sources were used by
Ishaq b. al-Husayn, I feel inclined to admit that at the bottom of the
two passages in the Akam there must be a more complete manuscript
of Ibn-Rusta.
As regards the parallel texts quoted in the paragraph on the Turks,
we must add that Gardizi, in his extremely valuable chapter on the
Turks,1 expressly mentions JayhanI among his sources. Biruni does
not unfortunately indicate the origin of the story about the spring in
the Kimak land, but almost immediately after, and in the same
paragraph, he quotes Jayhanl's testimony on a spring between
Bukhara and Qaryat al-hadltha, and, further, on the columns of the
Qayrawan mosque. If only the items on the Kimak in Biruni (300/1000)
and Gardizi (c. 442/1050) were borrowed from JayhanI, the earlier Ibn-
Rusta and Ibn al-Faqih2 (both writing in the earlier part of the tenth
century) could not have failed to know them through the same author,
whom they certainly did utilize.
Our examination of the two last paragraphs of the Akam
al-marjdn may appear to be merely destructive. Yet the Textkritik
of our composite geographical texts is one of the very urgent problems,
and by disentangling the data of a fresh source and defining the
measure of its trustworthiness some useful purpose is served. It is
necessary, too, to obviate any eventual speculation with misspellings
which might be taken for novelties. Indirectly our analysis gives a
new weight to the important unknown source (JayhanI ?) which is at
the bottom of so many older geographical works.3
1
Edited by Barthoid, in Memoires de VAc. de St.-Petersbourg, viiie serie, I,
No. 4, 1897.
2
According to the Fihrisl, 154, Ibn al-Faqih " plundered (salakha) Jayhani's
book ".
3
See V. Barthold's and my own Prefaces to the Hudud al-'Alam, Gibb Memorial,
new series, vol. 17, 1937.