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| 0044 |
Notes on Marco Polo : vol.1 |
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But there is more. Hsüan-Tsang, who was Harṣa's guest in 643 and left India in 644,
speaks of the « Western 'Kingdom of Women' » (西 女 國 Hsi Nü-kuo), which lay to the south-
west of the kingdom of Fu-lin (Frōm = Rōm, the Roman Orient). According to the Chinese
pilgrim, there were only women in that country, some of the precious productions of which were
sold in Fu-lin. « That is why the king of Fu-lin sends every year men who have sexual inter-
course with those women . . . » In that Kingdom of Women, Lévi saw « the famous kingdom of
Amazons ruled by the Queen Candace [this is not quite correct; Candace was not a queen of the
Amazons], which has taken such an important place in the development of the Romance of
Alexander ». « The yearly sending of human stallions to the kingdom of the Amazons », Lévi
adds, « is not mentioned, as far as I know, in any of the numerous versions of the Romance; but
it frequently appears in the literature of the Physiologus and of the Mirabilia. The Chinese
monk must have noted a version of the tale which had undergone some contamination, or perhaps
he himself is responsible for a contamination between two tales he had heard. »
Without maintaining that Lévi has conclusively proved his case, I am prepared to accept the
bulk of his deductions. A weak point of his argument is that, as he has himself stated (p. 422),
there are several Kingdoms of Women mentioned in Chinese historical literature, as well as in
Indian and in Mussulman sources (see «Female [Island] »). While many tales of the Physiologus
have found their way to India and the Far East (or sometimes may have originated there and
been carried to the West), it is moreover somewhat risky to assume a double origin for Hsüan-
tsang's brief account. On the other hand, Lévi said nothing as to the date when the Romance of
Alexander could have reached India or as to the channels through which it may have passed. We
may perhaps add more precise indications on these points.
The Kingdom of the Amazons, or Kingdom of Women, is well known in the Mussulman
versions of the legend of Alexander. Its most detailed exponent is no other than Firdausī.
Alexander first sends to the Kingdom of Women a philosopher from Rōm, and afterwards himself
reaches the country, the main city of which was called ﻡﻭﺭﺎﻫ Hārūm (cf. Mohl, Livre des Rois, 8vo
ed. v, 206, 208; Spiegel, Die Alexandersage bei den Orientalen, Leipzig, 1851, 28; Nöldeke,
loc. cit. 51). The name Hārūm is unexplained. Although it was not adduced in Schaeder's
Iranica (1934), phonetically it may very well be a doublet of Rōm, Rūm, and represent the form
with an initial h- which is known in Armenian, has passed to Frōm in Middle-Iranian and is the
original of Ch. Fu-lin. In Firdausī's time, this form would be a survival, but its curious
misapplication to a city of the Kingdom of Women would find some sort of explanation in the
relations which, according to Hsüan-tsang, existed between Rōm and the Kingdom of Women.
If Hsüan-tsang really owed his information to an Iranian source which had reached the basin of
the Ganges, that lost source may have also spoken of the men annually dispatched to the Kingdom
of Women by the king of Rōm.
The question of date remains. If a Romance of Alexander corresponding to the Pseudo-
Callisthenes was known in India in time to leave traces in the writings of Bāṇa and Hsüan-tsang,
it must have reached India in 630-640 at the latest. On the other hand, the only likely channel
for a transmission of the Greek romance to India is Pahlavī. But Nöldeke has shown that the
Pahlavī translation of the Pseudo-Callisthenes can neither be earlier than the end of the 6th cent.,
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