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| Notes on Marco Polo : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
580 194. CURMOS
BERG, 244; Zu, 43 : « La provincia dita Mogolistan posta qui de sopra a man dextra e in dromo de la isola dita Hormuz la quai ha el suo viver de la sopra dita provincia Mogoiistan ... », etc.). I do not think that we can separate this Mogolistan » from the above « Moy-âstân » or « Magostam », « Mogostam ». In Persian, « Mogolistan », « Land of the Mongols », is usually written
Mogolistan, but there is also a form j)i. Moyûl of the name of the Mongols, and an alter-
native spelling which would mark the first -o- vowel is quite conceivable. There is no expia-nation for the use of « Moy-âstan » or *Moyistan; but it would be quite natural, for a population which had deserted the mainland on account of Mongol inroads, to designate henceforth that mainland as Moyolistân. An alteration of Moy-âstân into « Mogolistan », though not impossible, is hard to admit. I wonder whether it is not rather Jl~ l ;. which is corrupt instead of *Môyôiistân or ~l~ J~. Moyôiistân, of which « Magostam » or « Mogostam » would represent a later shortened form.
Hormuz was well known to Western travellers, and its name occurs in various transcriptions, most of which have been collected by HALLBERG (pp. 242-246). I shall not repeat them here, and shall add only G. ADAM'S « Hormutz » (Rec. Hist. des Crois., Arm., II, 552, 553). For a later
date, Portuguese forms beginning with a- are common : « Armusa » or « Armuza » in CAMOËNS, « Armuzia » in St. FRANCIS XAVIER, « Armuz » in several other works of the 16th cent. (cf. YULE, Hobson-Jobson2, 646; DALGADO, GlossCirio Luso-Asir tiro, I, 57); moreover, TEIXEIRA always writes « Harmuz », and maintains that such is the true form (cf. SINCLAIR, p. 17) ; FERRAND is inaccurate when stating (JA, 1920, II, 34) that the ancient Portuguese texts always give « Ormuz ». All of these show a curious recurrence of the classical "Apugecz and `'Ap.wvx.
Odoric wrote « Ormes », as can be seen not only from his own account but also from early reports based on it (cf. GOLUBovICH, Bibl. bio-bibi., II, 81, 89, 98, 111); this is not without interest in view of the form occuring in Hethum, « Hormes » (cf. Rec. Hist. des Crois., Arm., II
126, 266). Hethum says that the tradition was that the city of « Hermes » had been founded by « Hermes the Philosopher »; Maundevilie copied him when he spoke of « a city that is clept Hermes, for Hermes the Philosopher founded it »; Fra Mauro knew the same tradition (Zu, 43); KAEMPFER (Amoenitatum Exoticarum, 756) still quotes it from KIRCHER, and does not reject it. Wrong as it is, the confusion is easily explainable, since Hormuz, ~ Hurmuz, represents the
very name of Ahura-mazda, but the name of Ahura-mazda is also occasionally written , Hur-
mus, and at the same time Hurmus is the form taken in Persian by the name of Hermes Trismegistus.
There is just a remote possibility that the name of Hormuz may occur in a Chinese text of the 12th cent., in connection with the account of an embassy which had come in 1071 from the kingdom of Fr}f Tsêng-t'an. HIRTH and ROCKHILL (HR, 127), who knew this embassy only from the Sung shih, 490, 9 a, have tentatively identified Tsêng-t'an with Zanzibar, but I have
left out the name in my notes on the latter country (see « Çanghibar »), because I could not
explain it. The text of the Sung shih must be studied together with the parallel paragraphs in Hsii Tzû-chih t'ung-chien ch'ang-pien (332, 3 a-b), Ch'ing-po tsa-chih (Chih pu tsu-chai ts'ung-shu ed., pieh-chih section, ch. 2, 14 a-b), and, above all, wên-ch'ang tsa-lu (Hsüeh-chin t'ao-yüan ed., 1, 4 a; 4, 5 b; on the Wên-ch'ang tsa-lu, see « Cotton », supra, p. 437). The prince of
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