IIIF Color HighRes
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Sino-Iranica : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
PERSIAN TEXTILES—RUGS 493
as a product of India.' In the Sui Annals it appears as a product of Persia.' CHAVANNES has justly rejected the fantastic explanation given in the dictionary Si min, which merely rests on an attempt at punning. The term, in fact, represents a transcription that corresponds to a Middle-Persian word connected with the root I/ tab (" to spin") : cf. Persian taftan ("to twist, to spin"), tâbaö ("he spins"), tâf to or tâf to ("garment woven of linen, kind of silken cloth, taffeta"). Greek Tarns and Ta7r1 rLop (frequent in the Papyri; rairLSvOot, "rug-weavers ") are derived from Iranian.3 There is a later Attic form Semis. The Middle-Persian form on which the Chinese transcription is based was perhaps *tâptâ.n, tapetâ,n, -Cat being the termination of the plural. The Persian word resulted in our taffeta (med. Latin taffata, Italian taffeta, Spanish taf etan) .
To the same type as the preceding one belongs another Chinese
transcription, ëo(t`o)-pi, tso-p`i, or tso-pi, dance-
rugs sent to China in A.D. 718 and 719 from Maimargh and Bukhara respectively.' These forms correspond to an ancient *ta-bik (PI or ' ) or *ta-biS (.0), and apparently go back to two Middle-Persian forms *tabix and *tabe6 or *tâ,biô (or possibly with medial p) .5
More particularly we hear in the relations of China with
Persia about a class of textiles styled yüe no pu w i .5 As far as I
know, this term occurs for the first time in the Annals of the Sui Dynasty (A.D. 590-617), in the notice on Po-se (Persia).' This indicates that the object in question, and the term denoting it, hailed from Sasanian Persia.
1 E. CHAVANNES, Les Pays d'occident d'après le Heou Han Chou (T'oung Pao, 1907, p. 193). Likewise in the Nan Si (Ch. 78, p. 5 b) and in Cao 2u-kwa (translation of HIRTH and ROCKHILL, p. III).
a Sui Su, Ch. 83, p. 7 b.
3 P. HORN, Grundriss iran. Phil., Vol. I, pt. 2, p. 137. NÔLDEKE'S notion (Persische Studien, II, p. 4o) that Persian tanbasa (" rug, carpet") should be derived from the Greek word, in my opinion, is erroneous.
4 CHAVANNES, T `oung Pao, 1904, p. 34.
These two parallels possibly are apt to shed light on the Old High-German duplicates teppah and teppid. The latter has been traced directly to Italian tappeto (Latin tapete, taketum), but the origin of the spirant x in teppih has not yet been explained, and can hardly be derived from the final t. Would derivation from an Iranian source, direct or indirect, be possible?
s According to HIRTH (Chau Ju-kua, p. 22o), "a light cotton gauze or muslin, of two kinds, pure white, and spangled with gold"; but this is a doubtful explanation.
' Sui Su, Ch. 83, p. 7 b. This first citation of the term has escaped all previous writers on the subject,—Hirth, Chavannes, and Pelliot. From the Sui Su the text passed into the T'ai p`in hwan yü ki (Ch. 185, p. 18 b).
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