502 SING-IRANICA
study on the history of some ancient textiles. According to this author, the dorôgi of the Russians were striped silken fabrics, which came from Gilan, Kagan, Kizylbag, Tur, and Yas in Persia. DAL' says in his Russian Dictionary that this silk was sometimes interwoven with gold and silver. In 1844 VELTMAN proposed the identity of Russian dorôgi with the Anglo-French term. BEREZIN derived it from Persian darddrZa ("kaftan"), which is rejected, and justly so, by Inostrantsev. On his part, he connects the word with Persian dârâi (" a red silken stuff "),1 and invokes a passage in VESELOVSKI'S " Monuments of Diplomatic and Commercial Relations of Moscovite Rus with Persia," in which the Persian word dârâi is translated by Russian dorôgi. This work is unfortunately not accessible to me, so I cannot judge the merits of the translation; but the mere fact of rendering dorôgi by dârâi would not yet prove the actual derivation of the former from the latter. For philological reasons this theory seems to me improbable: it is difficult to realize that the Russians should have made dorôgi out of a Persian dârâi. All European languages have consistently preserved the medial g, and this cannot be explained from ddrdi. Another prototype therefore, it seems to me, comes into question; and this probably is Uigur torgu, Jagatai torka, Koibal torga, Mongol torga(n), all with the meaning "silk."2 It remains to search for the Turkish dialect which actually transmitted the word to Slavic.
1 Mentioned, for instance, in the list of silks in the Ain-i Akbari (BLOCHMANN'S translation, Vol. I, P. 94).
2 Cf. T`oung Pao, 1916, p. 489.
IIIF Color HighRes
