IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
| |||||||||
|
| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Sino-Iranica : vol.1 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Citation Information
428 SING-IRANICA
loan-word), denoting Narcissus tazetta, which is still cultivated in Persia and employed in the pharmacopoeia.' Oil was obtained from the narcissus, which is called vapKLQVCOv in the Greek Papyri.2
HIRTH3 has erroneously identified the Chinese name with the nard. Aside from the fact that the description of the Yu yan tsa tsu does not at all fit this plant, his restoration, from a phonetic viewpoint, remains faulty. K`ail-hi does not indicate the reading not for the first character, as asserted by Hirth, but gives the readings nai, ni, and yin. The second character reads k`i, which is evolved from *gi, but does not represent ti, as Hirth is inclined to make out.'
For other reasons it is out of the question to see the nard in the term nai-kti; for the nard, a product of India, is well known to the Chinese under the term kan sun hian 1.~ .b The Chinese did not have to go to Fu-lin to become acquainted with a product which reached them from India, and which the Syrians themselves received from India by way of Persia.' Hebrew nerd (Canticle), Greek v6pôos,7 Persian nard and hard, are all derived from Sanskrit nalada, which already appears in the Atharvaveda.8 Hirth 's case would also run counter to his theory that the language of Fu-lin was Aramaic, for the word nard does not occur there.
1 SCHLIMMER, Terminologie, p. 39o. Narcissus is mentioned among the aromatic flowers growing in great abundance in Bigavur, province of Fars, Persia (G. LE STRANGE, Description of the Province of Fars, p. 51). It is a flower much praised by the poets Hafiz and JamI.
2 T. REIL, Beiträge zur Kenntnis des Gewerbes im hellenistischen Aegypten, p. 146. Regarding narcissus-oil, see Dioscorides, I, 5o; and LECLERC, Traité des simples, Vol. II, p. 1o3.
3 Journal Am. Or. Soc., Vol. XXX, 191o, p. 22.
See particularly PELLIOT, Bull. de l'Ecole française, Vol. IV, p. 291.
b STUART, Chinese Materia Medica, p. 278.
I. LoEw, Aram. Pflanzennamen, pp. 368-369.
7 First in Theophrastus, Hist. plant., IX. VII, 2.
8 See p. 455.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Copyright (C) 2003-2019 National Institute of Informatics and The Toyo Bunko. All Rights Reserved.