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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
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566 SING-IRANICA
cussed by me in two articles.' VIILLERS2 gives no less than seven definitions of the Persian word: (1) cornu bovis cuiusdam Sinensis; (2) secundum alios cornu rhinocerotis; (3) secundum alios cornu avis cuiusdam permagnae in regno vastato, quod inter Chinam et Aethiopiam situm est, degentis, e quo conficiunt anulos osseos et manubria cultri et quo res venenatae dignosci possunt; (4) secundum alios cornu serpentis, quod mille annos natus profert; (5) secundum alios cornu viperae; (6) secundum alios cornu piscis annosi; (7) secundum alios dentes animalis cuiusdam. Of these explanations, No. 3 is that of al-Akfani, and the bird in question is the buceros. No. 4 is a reproduction of the definition of ku-tu-si in the Liao Annals (" the horn of a thousand-years-old snake "). How the Persians and Arabs arrived at the other definitions will be easily understood from my former discussion of the subject. In the Ethiopic version of the Alexander Romance are mentioned, among the gifts sent to Alexander by the king of China, twenty (in the Syriac version, ten) snakes' horns, each a cubit long.3
Meanwhile I have succeeded in tracing a new Chinese definition
of ku-tu. Cou Mi T (1230-1320), in his Ci ya t`an tsa c`ao,4 states,
"According to Po-ki ,' what is now styled ku-tu si f IV is
a horn of the earth (ti kio f 5 , `a horn found underground' ?) ." He refers again to its property of neutralizing poison and to knife-hilts made of the substance.
In the edition of the Ko ku yao lun,6 the text regarding ku-tu-si is somewhat different from that quoted by me in T`oung Pao (1913, p. 325). Ku-tu-si is not identified there with pi-si, as appears from the text of the Pei wen yün fu and Pen tstao kan mu, but pi-si is a variety of ku-tu-si of particularly high value.
1 Arabic and Chinese Trade in Walrus and Narwhal Ivory (T `oung Pao, 1913, pp. 315-364, with Addenda by P. PELLIOT, pp. 365-370) ; and Supplementary Notes on Walrus and Narwhal Ivory (ibid., 1916, pp. 348-389). Regarding objects of walrus ivory in Persia, see pp. 365-366.
2 Lexicon Persico-Latinum, Vol. I, p. 659.
3 E. A. W. BUDGE, Life and Exploits of Alexander the Great, p. 180; likewise his translation of the Syriac version, p. 112 (Syriac edition, p. 200). In the Syriac occurs another gift from China, "a thousand talents of mai-kdsi" (literally, "waters of cups "). Budge leaves this problem unsolved. Apparently we face the tran-
scription of a Chinese word, which I presume is *mak, mag (at present mo),
"China ink." In Mongol and Manchu we find this word as bexe, in Kalmuk as beke.
4 Ch. A, p. 29 b (ed. of Yüe ya ran ts`un Su).
6 Surname of Sien-yü C`u DfE , calligraphist and poet at the end of the thirteenth century (see PELLIOT, T`oung Pao, 1913, p. 368).
6 Ch. 6, p. 9 b (ed. of Si yin hüan ts`un Su).
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