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
IRANO-SINICA-PEACH, CINNAMON 541
in a cultivated state, and does not even succeed well, the fruit being mediocre and acid.' There is no ancient Sanskrit name for the tree; nor does it play any rôle in the folk-lore of India, as it does in China. Further, as regards the time of the introduction, whether the reign of Kaniska be placed in the first century before or after our era, it is singularly synchronous with the transplantation of the tree into western
Asia.
5. As indicated by the Persian name dar-nni or dar-cin (" Chinese wood" or "bark"; Arabic dar ,Fini), cinnamon was obtained by the Persians and Arabs from China.2 Ibn Khordâ dzbeh, who wrote between A.D. 844 and 848, is the first Arabic author who enumerates cinnamon among the products exported from China.3 The Chinese export cannot have assumed large dimensions : it is not alluded to in Chinese records,
c ao Zu-kwa is reticent about it.' Ceylon was always the main seat of cinnamon production, and the tree (Cinnamomum zeylanicum) is a native of the Ceylon forests.' The bark of this tree is also called dar-cini. It is well known that cassia and cinnamon are mentioned by classical authors, and have given rise to many sensational speculations as to the origin of the cinnamon of the ancients. Herodotus6 places cinnamon in Arabia, and tells a wondrous story as to how it is gathered. Theophrastus' seeks the home of cassia and cinnamomum, together with frankincense and myrrh, in the Arabian peninsula about Saba, Hadramyt, Kitibaina, and Mamali. Strabo8 locates it in the land of the Sabæans, in Arabia, also in Ethiopia and southern India; finally he has a "cinnamon-bearing country" at the end of the habitable countries of the south, on the shore of the Indian ocean.' Pliny10 has cinnamomum or cinnamum grow in the country of the Ethiopians, and it is carried over sea on rafts by the Troglodytae.
1 C. JORET, Plantes dans l'antiquité, Vol. II, p. 281.
2 LECLERC, Traité des simples, Vol. II, pp. 68, 272. The loan-word dariEenik in Armenian proves that the word was known in Middle Persian (*dar-i éénik) ; cf. HÜBSCHMANN, Armen. Gram., p. 137.
$ G. FERRAND, Textes relatifs à l'Extrême-Orient, p. 31.
4 SCHOFF (Periplus, p. 83) asserts that between the third and sixth centuries there was an active sea-trade in this article in Chinese ships from China to Persia. No reference is given. I wonder from what source this is derived.
6 DE CANDOLLE, Origin of Cultivated Plants, p. 146; WATT, Commercial Products of India, p. 313.
e III, I07, III.
7 Hist. plant., IX. IV, 2.
8 XV. IV, 19; XVI. IV, 25; XV. I, 22. I. Iv, 2.
10 XII, 42.
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