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0321 Sino-Iranica : vol.1
Sino-Iranica : vol.1 / Page 321 (Color Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000248
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PERSIAN TEXTILES--YÜE No   495

it to its ancient phonetic condition.' Moreover, it was not recognized that yüe no represents a combination of two Iranian words, and that each of these elements denotes a particular Iranian textile.

  1.  The ancient articulation of what is now sounded yüe   w as
    *vat, vas, wiäS, or, with liquid final, *var or *val.2 Thus it may well be inferred that the Chinese transcription answers to a Middle-Persian form of a type *var or *val. There is a Persian word barn's or barniin ("brocade"), vdld, which means "a kind of silken stuff,"3 and bdlds, "a kind of fine, soft, thin armosin silk, an old piece of cloth, a kind of coarse woollen stuff."4

  2.      no corresponds to an ancient *nak,5 and is easily identified
    with Persian nax (nakh), "a carpet beautiful on both sides, having a long pile; a small carpet with a short pile; a raw thread of yarn of any sort,"6 but also "brocade." The early mention of the Chinese term, especially in the Sui Annals, renders it quite certain that the word nak or nax was even an element of the Middle-Persian language. Hitherto it had been revealed only in media val authors, the Yüan Oao pi ,i,

IDE GoEJE's identification of yüe-no pu with djanndbi (in HIRTH, Länder des Islam, p. 61) is a complete failure: pu (" cloth") does not form part of the transcription, which can only be read vaS-nak, var-nak, or val-nak. TsuBOI KUMAZO (Actes XII° Congrès international des Orientalistes Rome 1899, Vol. II, p. 112) has already opposed this unfortunate suggestion.

2 For examples, see CHAVANNES, Mémoires historiques de Se-ma Ts'ien, Vol. IV, p. 559; and particularly cf. PELLIOT, Journal asiatique, 1914, II, p. 392.

z STEINGASS, Persian-English Dictionary, p. 1453. HORN (Grundriss iran. Phil., Vol. I, pt. 2, p. 29) translates the word "a fine stuff, " and regards it as a loan-word from Greek ß7-1Xov ("veil"), first proposed, I believe, by NOLDEKE (Persische Studien, II, p. 39). This etymology is not convincing to me. On the contrary, vola is a genuine Persian word, meaning "eminent, exalted, high, respectable, sublime, noble"; and it is quite plausible that this attribute was transferred to a fine textile. It was, further, the Persians who taught the Greeks lessons in textile art, but not the reverse. F. JusTI (Iranisches Namenbuch, p. 516) attributes to väld also the meaning "banner of silk."

STEINGASS, op. cit., p. 15o. The Iranian character of this word is indicated by Waxi palâs, Sarigoli palus (" coarse woollen cloth") of the Pamir languages. Perhaps also Persian bat (" stuff of fine wool "), Waxi böt, Sarigoli b él (cf. W. ToMAScHEx, Pamirdialekte, Sitzber. Wiener Akad., 188o, p. 807) may be enlisted as possible prototypes of Chinese *vat, val; but I do not believe with Tomaschek that this series bears any relation to Sanskrit pafla and ldfa or Armenian lötik ("mantle").

,•      The latter, in my opinion, is a loan-word from Greek Matt ("cover, rug "), that
appears in the Periplus (§ 24) and in the Greek Papyri of the first century A.D. (T. REIL, Beiträge zur Kenntnis des Gewerbes im hellenistischen Ægypten, p. I18).

See, for instance, T`oung Pao, 1914, p. 77, and 1915, p. 8, where the character in question serves for transcribing Tibetan nag. It further corresponds to nak in Annamese, Korean, and Japanese, as well as in the transcriptions of Sanskrit

words.

6 STEINGASS, Persian-English Dictionary, p. 1391.