AND THE INDIAN ARCHIPELAGO. 465
Nile in Egypt. The people of these villages are idolaters, but under the rule of the Musalmans. The latter take from them the half of their crops, and other exactions besides. We travelled upon this river for fifteen days, alwàys passing between villages and garden lands ; it was as if we had been going through a market. You pass boats innumerable, and every boat is furnished with a drum. When two boats meet, the drum on board each is beaten, whilst the boatmen exchange salutations. The Sultan Fakhruddin before-mentioned gave orders that on this river no passage money should be taken from fakirs, and that such of them as had no provision for their journey should be supplied. So when a fakir arrives at a town he gets half a dinar. At the end of fifteen days' voyage, as I have said, we arrived at the city of SUNUR Ikw~N .... on our arrival there we found a junk
I Sunarganw (Suvarna-gramma, or Golden Town) has already been mentioned as one of the medieval capitals of Bengal. Coins struck there in 1353 and 1357 are described by Reinaud in Jour. Asiat., iii, 272. It lay a few miles S.E. of Dacca ; but I believe its exact site is not recoverable in that region of vast shifting rivers. It appears in Frau Mauro's map as Sonargauam, and must have continued at least till the end of the sixteenth century, for it is named as a district town in the Ayin Akbari, and retains its place in Blaeu's great Atlas (Amst. 1662, vol. x) as Sornaquarn.
I formerly thought this Sornagam must be the CERNOVE of Conti. But the report of a paper on Bengal Coins by Mr. Edward Thomas (Athen., Feb. 3, 1866) informs us that Laknaoti (Gaur) was renovated some time in the fourteenth century by the name of SHAHR-I-NAU (New City). Here we have Cernove, and still more distinctly the SCIERNO of Fra Mauro. Shahr-i-nau, I find, is also mentioned by Abdul-razzak (India in the fifteenth cent., p. 6) .
Sunarganw must dispute with Chittagong the claim to be that city of Bengala" which has so much troubled those interested in Asiatic medieval geography, and respecting which Mr. Badger has an able disquisition in his preface to Varthema. That there ever was a town properly so-called, I decline to believe, any more than that there was a city of the Peninsula 'properly called Ma'bar (v. supra, p. 218), or that Canton was properly called Mahachin (p. 106) ; but these examples sufficiently show the practice which applied the name of a country to its chief port. The name becomes a blunder only when found side by side with the proper name as belonging to a distinct place. Bengala appears as a city in
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