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The ‘Iklîk,’ by Hamdâni
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2009
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.
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- Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1883
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.