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0309 Notes on Marco Polo : vol.1
Notes on Marco Polo : vol.1 / Page 309 (Color Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000246
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158. CINGHIS   293

ciation of the title. The Persian gives no help, since Ra"sidu-'d-Din uses j with both the values of c and J.

The meaning of ja'ut-quri or ca'ut-quri is not clear either. There can be no serious doubt that the equivalence intended in the note of the Shêng-wu ch'in-chêng lu is -$ pf + chao-t'ao-shih (corrupt in the Yuän-shih lei-pien, and in all the mss. of the Shêng-wu ch'in-chêng lu except the one included in the ancient Shuo fu re-edited by the Commercial Press). It is the chao-t'ao-shih whom BI6uRIN had in view when he spoke of a « commander-in-chief against rebels ». Under the Chin dynasty, the chao-t'ao-shih were high officials of the first degree of the third rank; there were three, one for the north-east, one for the north-west, one for the south-west; their task was to « bring » (chao) and cherish those who submitted to the dynasty and to punish (t'ao) and seize those who rebelled against it (Chin shih, 57, 10 a). Yet, it seems certain that the note of the .Shêng-wu ch'in-chêng lu is a mistaken one, added by translators who no longer knew what )a'ut-quri meant, and were perhaps guided by the phonetic resemblance in the first syllable of both titles (if it were not for the cay-un törö of the Ulan-Bâtor ms., one might even think that the corrupt ch'a-wu-t'u-lu was due to the influence of t'ao in chao-t'ao-shih). But in the Secret History (§ 134), the Chin general, after granting to Tämüjin, in the name of the Chin Emperor, the title of ja'ut-quri, adds that the Emperor may himself promote him later to the

higher rank of jao-tao (    chao-t'ao[-shih]). So there can be no doubt that the ja'ut-quri was
different from the chao-t'ao-shih, and ranked below him (for a mention in Rand of a chao-t'aoshih whose title was misread in Ber, III, 17, cf. my paper in The Ts'ai Yüan P'ei Anniversary Volume, 934).

Rasidu-'d-Din does not throw much light on the point. In BEREZIN's translation (Ber, II, 104), he explains ja'ut-quri as meaning « powerful prince » in « Chinese » (bä zibdn-i Hïtdyï), the

Persian words actually used being (Ber, II, Pers. text, 169)   • Y.\ amïr-i mu`azzam « great emir »

(the   yt,.t amir-i buzurg of Temudschin, 585, seems to be an arbitrary invention of ERDMANN).

By « Chinese », we must here understand the Juden language of the Chin ruling over North China. But Rand wrote at a time when the real meaning of j"a'ut-quri was forgotten, and, as a minister of a Chinghiz-khanid dynasty, he was prone to magnify the value of the title granted to its great ancestor.

Another solution has been proposed by modern Japanese and Chinese scholars. NAKA (Chingisu-kan jitsuroku, 132) says that ja'ut is the plural of ja'un, « hundred », and that quri- is the Mongol root meaning « to assemble », « to gather together »; the whole term would thus mean « chief of a hundred families ». This explanation is clearly impossible for the second part, since a noun cannot be formed of a bare verbal root. T'u Chi (2, 13-14), while also explaining ja'ut as « hundred », adduced a passage of the Chin shih (55, 1 a), according to which ,t . . hu-lu was the title of a chief placed at the head of several clans. His conclusion, identical with that of NAKA, was that ja'ut-quri, or ch'a-wu-hu-lu as in the Shêng-wu ch'in-chêng lu, meant « chief of a hundred men » (W c : pal fu chang). This Chinese equivalent of ch'a-wu-hu-lu is also given, without comment, by WANG Kuo-wei (13 a).

It is true that the plural ja'ut of ja'un, now obsolete, occurs nearly twenty times in the Secret History, whenever it speaks of several hundred (this plural is also used as a tribal name; the