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| Notes on Marco Polo : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
206 123. CASCAR
BSOS, Ix, 566-567). In the modern work Hsin-mao shih-hsing chi (5, 22 a) it is said that nowadays the Turks of Ka;} ar often call the town in an abbreviated form K'o-shih (i. e. *Qa; or *Qa;i?); this is adduced to explain the « short » forms Ch'ieh-sha (Khasa) and Chia-shih of the T'ang period. But the author, who went from Tientsin to Urumci in 1891 never visited Ka;} ar, and I hold the modern abbreviated form, which I never heard on the spot, to be artificial.
STEIN says (Ancient Khotan, 47, 48) that, in Mohammedan works, the name Kasyar occurs
in different spellings : .. (Ka;} ar, ll Kasgar, if Kaskar, ~ Qa;gar, « in accordance with
the phonetic latitude allowed by Turki languages in respect of certain consonants ». But we must keep in mind that the spelling Ka;; ar is the one used in Arabic by Ibn Al-Mir, in Persian by the author of the Iludûd al-'Alam, in Turkish by the author of the Quta'yu bilig and by
Ka;yari, that is to say by the most ancient sources. Forms like Ka;kar, Ka;gar and Qâsgar, when they are not misreadings (few mss. distinguish between k and g, and -q- is easily confused with -y-), far from being the result of a « phonetic latitude » in Turkish, are more likely to be the result of the general reluctance to have in Turkish or Mongolian, in the same word, sounds of different classes like k (or g) and q (or y). On the other hand, changes between k and q or h are common in Persian. In the beginning of the 14th cent., Abû-l-Fidâ gives the two spellings Qa;yar and Kâ;) ar, but all the ancient quotations given in his notice only have Ka;yar (REINAUD, Géogr. d'Aboulféda, Arabic text, 504-505; transl. II, II, 229-230). Secondary forms -\(Kâsyar
and f,As Kâsyar are quoted by VULLERS (II, 772) from the Burhan-i Qati I do not know any
instance of « Ka} ar », which may be only due to the influence of the sonant } on the preceding s. But « Kacyar » is attested at an early date in an adjective of origin Kàj; ari (? or Kaiz}'ari). The father of the first historian of Kâsyar, who outlived his son by ten years and died in 1093, was called Husain al-Alma'i al Qkyari (cf. BARTHOLD, « Kashghar », in Ef. I have no theory to offer to explain « Kacyar ».
Before and during the T'ang dynasty, the royal family of Ka;} ar, like those of Khotan, of Kuca and of Qara-;ahr, had received or adopted, in conditions which are still unknown to us, a regular Chinese surname, that is to say one of those in use among the Chinese themselves. The
surname of the royal family of Kâsyar was P'ei. In the case of Khotan, the surname seems
to have been chosen in more or less close agreement with a native dynastic title (that of Vijaya, hence the Chinese surname Wei-ch'ih or Yü-ch'ih; see « Cotan »); we do not know whether anything similar occurred in the case of Kasyar. It has often been said, and is still repeated in STEIN, Ancient Khotan, 62, that Kâsyar was conquered by the Arabs under Qutaiba in 715. But GIBS has tried to show (BSOS, n, 467 sq.) that the whole account of the campaign is legendary, a view endorsed by BARTHOLD (« Kâshghar », in EI).
When Chinese domination had been finally eliminated from the western part of Chinese Turkestan and a Turkish dynasty installed with one of its capitals at Kasyar, the city received the new Turkish name of Ordu-Känd, « City of the Royal Camp ». This new name is mentioned by Al-Muqaddisi (cf. BROCKELMANN, 246), Al-Birûni (cf. Mi, 280), Ka;yari (BROCKELMANN, 246) and Abû-l-Fidà (REINAUD, transi. II, II, 230) ; but it never superseded « Kasyar » itself. HARTMAN, followed by BARTHOLD, maintains that from the Mongol period, the capital of the khans was not at Ka;} ar, but at Yarkänd, and that Kâ;yar's importance in modern times only dates from the
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