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『東洋文庫所蔵』貴重書デジタルアーカイブ

from the fruit of the Tree, and placed them under the tongue of his father, when burying him in
the Valley of Hebron; a triple shoot sprang up of cedar, cypress, and pine, but the three eventually
united into one stem (Y, I, 136); it is also in the Valley of Hebron that Maundevile locates the Dry
Tree, but for him it was an oak : « A lytille fro Ebron is the Mount of Mambre, of the whyche the
Valeye taketh his name. And there is a Tree of Oke that the Saracens clepen Dirpe, that is of Abra-
ham's Tyme, the which men clepen the Drye Tree » (cf. Y, I, 131; instead of « dirpe », or « dyrp »,
some Mss. of Maundevile give « sirpe », hence the wrong reading « supe » in MONMERQUÉ and Fran-
cisque MICHEL, quoted by CORDIER, Odoric de Pordenone, 23). There can be no doubt that Maun-
devile copied this passage from an earlier work, and it is practically certain that this earlier work
was the Tractatus de Terra Sancta published by J. C. M. LAURENT, Peregrinatores Medii Aevi
Quatuor, Leipzig, 1864, as the work of Odoric de Pordenone. This ascription has still been retained
by BOVENSCHEN (in Zeitschr. d. Ges. f. Erdk., XXIII [1888], 238-240) and by HALLBERG (p. 40), but it is
untenable; to YULE's judgement in Y¹, II, 22-23, may be added that the Pseudo-Odoric, like his pla-
giarist Maundevile, locates the Dry Tree in the Valley of Hebron, whereas, as we shall see, Odoric's
real identification of the Dry Tree is quite different. But the agreement of the Pseudo-Odoric with
many of the Mss. of Maundevile establishes that the true « Saracen » form of the name of the tree
actually is dirp, not « sirpe ». REINAUD and Francisque MICHEL, starting from dirp, have thought
of Arabic دلب dulb, « plane », and this would be quite satisfactory, if it were not for the indication
of the « oak ». Curiously enough, Schiltberger (LANGMANTEL ed., 72) has copied Maundevile's
whole paragraph. He used a text which gave the wrong reading sirpe, hence (p. 189) FALLMERAYER's
natural, but here mistaken, derivation from Persian sāruc>Osm. Turk. sārvi, « cypress ». But
SCHILTBERGER adds the new information that heathen call the Dry Tree « Kurruthereck »; this has
been explained by YULE (Y, I, 131) and by LANGMANTEL (p. 184, perhaps tacitly copying YULE) as
Turkish Quru-diraḫt, « Dry Tree ». But the explanation is certainly wrong. Diraḫt is not Turkish,
but Persian, and is excluded, although it has more or less passed as dārāḫ in modern Turki of Chinese
Turkestan. The word intended is tārāk, which means « poplar », a word which RADLOV (III, 2061)
hypothetically, but without any ground, connects with diraḫt; in fact, it is an old Turkish word,
already listed as tirāk (= terāk) in Kāšγari, with the same meaning « poplar » (cf. BROCKELMANN,
209). Consequently, for SCHILTBERGER's informants, the Dry Tree of the Valley of Hebron would
seem to have been neither an oak, nor a cypress, but a poplar and not even a balsam-poplar. I must
add, however, that, just in the same way as sögüt>sügāt, now « willow », had in ancient Uighur the
meaning of « tree » in general, « terak » is given as the Turkish word for « tree » in general in Codex
Cumanicus (KUUN ed., 103). Whatever the case may be with SCHILTBERGER's « thereck », one
century after him, the tree of Hebron was an oak according to Friar Anselmo, and quite
verdant, having «remained green from the days of Abraham» (Y, I, 132). As a matter of fact, the
tree of Mamre has a long story, which, many centuries before Maundevile, reaches as far back as
the time of Constantine and Theodosius. It was at first a terebinth (cf. Y, I, 132), but in the Middle
Ages it had become an oak, more precisely an ilex or holly, and is described as such, dry but
revered, by Marino Sanudo (Secreta fidelium crucis, BONGARS ed., 248).
The third location of the Dry Tree is that given by Odoric (Wy, 417; Y¹, II, 102) : « From that
country I passed to Tauris, a great city and a royal, which anciently was called Susis. This Susis