Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:24:15.833Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The ‘Iklîk,’ by Hamdâni

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

G. G. Zerffi
G. G. Zerffi
Affiliation:
Chairman of Council, Royal Historical Society
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The historian meets with greater difficulties in treating of Oriental history than in any other branch of his subject. The dawn of awakening consciousness in humanity had not yet reached broad daylight. All was still bathed in the golden rays of the rising sun, surrounded by the fantastic clouds of myths and fables. In the East the allegorical and the metaphorical have always proved serious stumbling-blocks in the path of the seeker after dry facts. We find towns personified as nations; nations reduced to mere names of places.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , March 1883 , pp. 70 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1883

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

page 73 note 1 See on Arabia, , The Hebrew Migration from Egypt. London: Trübner & Co., Ludgate Hill, 1879Google Scholar.

page 75 note 1 Only a few MS. copies of the ‘Iklîk’ have reached Europe. The first was brought from the East by M. Ch. Schefer, and is in Paris; the second was sent to England by Col. S. Miles, and is in the British Museum, as is also a third one acquired by Mr. Prideaux. The ‘Iklîk’ by Hamdani is a historical poem, written, as far as intrinsic evidence goes, about 300 years after the Hegîra, in the tenth century.

page 75 note 2 See Sitzungsberichte der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-Historische Classe, vol. xciv. 1879Google Scholar.

page 77 note 1 Perhaps Homa- or Soma-dân (town), which would bear out the assertion of Captain Wilford (Asiatic Researches, vol. x.), that the greatest number of the names of the old places in Arabia and Persia are either Sanskrit or Hindoo. We need only mention Pumbadita (Bombay) and Sora (Surat), the centres of Jewish learning about A.D. 183–498, situated not far from the Euphrates and Tigris.