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0210 Sino-Iranica : vol.1
Sino-Iranica : vol.1 / Page 210 (Color Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000248
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384   SING-IRANICA

carui), however, is commonly termed in Persian .dh-zire (" cummin of the Shah ") or zire-i rûmi (" Byzantine or Turkish cummin").'

While the philological evidence would speak in favor of a transmission of cummin from Persia to China, this point is not clearly brought out by our records. C`en Ts`an-k`i, who wrote in the first half of the eighth century, states that ki-lo grows in Fu-gig (Bhoja, Sumatra). Li Sün, in his Hai yao pen ts`ao, says after the Kwan cou lei that the plant grows in the country Po-se;2 and Su Sun of the Sung notes that in his time it occurred in Lin-nan (Kwan-tun) and adjoining regions. Now, the Kwan iou ki is said to have been written under the Tsin dynasty (A.D. 265-420) ;3 and, as will be shown below in detail, the Po-se of Li Sün almost invariably denotes, not Persia, but the Malayan Po-se. Again, it is Li Sün who does not avail himself of the Iranian form 3`i-lo =lira, but of the Sanskrit form jiraka, possibly conveyed through the medium of the Malayan Po-se.

LiSi-ben has entered under ki-lo another foreign word in the form

g   ts`e-mou-lo (*cHi-rnu-lak), which he derived from the Ktai
pao pen ts`ao, and which, in the same manner as . i-lo, he stamps as a foreign word. This transcription has hitherto defied identification,4 because it is incorrectly recorded. It is met with correctly in the Oen

lei pen ts`ao5 in the form   We-lo, *dzi-lak(rak), and this answers
to Sanskrit jiraka. This form is handed down in the Hai yao pen ts'ao, written by Li Sün in the eighth century. Thus we have, on the one hand a Sanskrit form jiraka, conveyed by the Malayan Po-se to Kwantun in the Tang period, and on the other hand the Iranian type H-lo=tira, which for phonetic reasons must likewise go back to the era of the Tang, and which we should suppose had migrated overland to China. The latter point, for the time being, remains an hypothesis, which will perhaps be elucidated by the documents of Turkistan.

1 Corresponding to Arabic karâwyâ, the source of our word caraway.

2 The Cen lei pen ts`ao (Ch. 13, p. 27 b) repeats this without citing a source.

3 Cf. below, p. 475.

4 STUART, Chinese Materia Medica, Q. 176. 6 Ch. 13, p. 17 b.