国立情報学研究所 - ディジタル・シルクロード・プロジェクト
『東洋文庫所蔵』貴重書デジタルアーカイブ

> > > >
カラー New!IIIFカラー高解像度 白黒高解像度 PDF   日本語 English
0218 Cathay and the way thither : vol.2
中国および中国への道 : vol.2
Cathay and the way thither : vol.2 / 218 ページ(カラー画像)

New!引用情報

doi: 10.20676/00000042
引用形式選択: Chicago | APA | Harvard | IEEE

OCR読み取り結果

 

4äg   TRAVELS OF IBN BATUTA IN BENGAL, CHINA,

I have seen a milch cow sold in Bengal for three silver dinars (the cattle of that country are buffaloes) . As for fat fowls, I have seen eight sold for a dirhem, whilst small pigeons were to be had at fifteen for a dirhem... A. piece of fine cotton cloth of excellent quality, thirty cubits in length, has been sold in my presence for two dinars (of silver) . A beautiful girl of marriageable age I have also seen sold for a dinar of gold, worth two and a half gold dinars of Barbary. For about the same money I myself bought a young slave girl called Ashura, who was endowed with the most exquisite beauty. And one of my comrades bought a pretty little slave, called Lulti (Pearl), for two golden dinars.

The first city of Bengal which we entered was called SADIÄwIN, a big place on the shore of the Great Sea.' The river GANGES, to which the Hindus go on pilgrimage, and

eight dirhems of silver (see note A preceding), and that a rothl of Dehli was equal to twenty rothl of Barbary. The editors in a note on a previous passage say that a rothl and a half of Barbary was equal to a kilogramme, which (taken exactly) would make the Dehli rothl of that day equal to 28.78 lbs. avoirdupois. In another place (ii, 74) he applies the more appropriate term mann (or maund, as in Anglo-India) to the Dehli weight, and says it was equal to twenty-five rothl of Egypt. The former calculation is corroborated with an exactness which must be partly fortuitous by a deduction from a statement in the dlasdlak-ul-Absdr. Accord-ding to this work the current weights of Dehli were the sir, and the mann of forty sirs, precisely the terms and rates now current in Hindustan, but with different values. For the sir it is said was equal to seventy mithkdls. According to Amari the mithkal is 4.665 grammes, a datum which gives the sir=.72 lb., and the mann=28.80 lbs. The modern

Indian maund" is a little over 82 lbs., and all the local maunds in the Bengal Presidency at this day approximate to that. We have seen (note A, p. 441) that the dinar probably represents the rupee. The quantity of unhusked rice purchased for the rupee in Ibn Batuta's time would therefore be about 2,300 lbs., equal to 28 modern maunds, about nine times as much for the money as I can remember ever to have heard of in our own time.

1 Both Chatgrinw (or Chittagong) and SatgAnw (on the Hugli, some twenty-five to twenty-eight miles above Calcutta) were important havens when the Portuguese arrived in India, and the name here might from the pen of an Arab represent either of them. But Chittagong only of