IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Sino-Iranica : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
GALBANUM
23. There is only a single Chinese text relative to galbanum, which is contained in the Yu yan tsa tsu,' where it is said, "P`i-ts`i' 34 (*bit-dzi, bir-zi, bir-zai) is a product of the country Po-se (Persia). In Fu-lin it is styled TN 'J M 'it han-yo-li-t`a (*xan-bwiô-li-da).3 The tree grows to a height of more than ten feet, with a circumference of over a foot. Its bark is green, thin, and extremely bright. The leaves resemble those of the asafoetida plant (a-wei), three of them growing at the end of a branch. It does not flower or bear fruit. In the western countries people are accustomed to cut the leaves in the eighth month; and they continue to do this more and more till the twelfth month. The new branches are thus very juicy and luxuriant; without the trimming process, they would infallibly fade away. In the seventh month the boughs are broken off, and there is a yellow sap of the appearance of honey and slightly fragrant, which is medicinally employed in curing disease."
Hirth has correctly identified the transcription p`i-ts`i with Persian birzai, which, however, like the other Po-se words in the Yu yan tsa tsu, must be regarded as Pahlavi or Middle Persian;4 and the Fu-lin hanp`o-li-t`a he has equated with Aramaic xelbânita, the latter from Hebrew xelbendh, one of the four ingredients of the sacred perfume (Exodus, xxx, 34-38). This is translated by the Septuaginta xaX(3âvn and by the Vulgate galbanum. The substance is mentioned in three passages
' Ch. 18, p. i I b.
2 HIRTH, who is the first to have translated this text (Journal Am. Or. Soc.
Vol. XXX, p. 21), writes this character with the phonetic element 04, apparently in agreement with the edition of the Tsin tai pi .u; but this character is not authorized by K`aii-hi, and it is difficult to see how it could have the phonetic value p'i; we should expect ni. The above character is that given by K`an-hi, who cites under
it the passage in question. It is thus written also in the Min hiai p`u ff aby
Ye T`iti-kwei E (p. 10, ed. of Hian yen :stun .u) and in the Pen ts`ao haft
mu (Ch. 33, p. 6), where the pronunciation is explained by *biet. The editors
of cyclopdias were apparently staggered by this character, and most of them have chosen the phonetic man, which is obviously erroneous. None of our Chinese dictionaries lists the character.
ê The Pen tea() lean mu (1. c.) annotates that the first character should have
the sound to, *dwat, which is not very probable.
4 There are also the forms pirzed, bärzed (LECLERC, Traité des simples, Vol. I, p. 201), berzed, barije, and bazrud; in India bireja, ganda-biroza. Another Persian term given by SCHLIMMER (Terminologie, p. 294) is we§ä.
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