Document of the Month 10/26: Mostly Harmless: An Early Arabic-Persian Lexicon Fragment

by Kevin Blankinship

Summary: 

In his Dictionary of the English Language, the great British essayist Samuel Johnson (d. 1784 CE), perhaps in a rare fit of self-deprecation, defined a lexicographer as “a harmless drudge.” And in fact, confessing to a room full of strangers that one writes dictionaries—or traces their histories—hardly seems like a shortcut to cocktail-party popularity. But since ancient times, those who are dismissed as mere plodders have quietly steered the course of history using nothing but words. Bilingual glossaries like the one at hand play a special role. They rank among the oldest forms of writing, stretching as far back as polyglot Sumerian wordlists, and they foster cultural exchange by encouraging language contact and helping translators do their work. War, trade, diplomacy, proselytising—in short, the main channels of globalisation, can only happen because of lexicographers.  

The lexicon in question, Ms.Heb.8333.189, is a curious case. It belongs to a minority of the Bamiyan Papers (or the so-called Afghan Genizah), which usually involve letters, deeds, executive and legal papers, account books, and “miscellaneous lists.” The latter may be the best descriptor for this fragment. Also, unlike most of the Bamiyan Papers, it puts a strong focus on Arabic. Unmistakably a glossary or wordlist, it falls within the early period of Arabic-Persian lexicography, that is, the 5^th/11^th to the 7^th/13^th centuries, just before the Mongol conquests. This is exactly the range covered by the Bamiyan Papers; consequently, this phrasebook is an early one. Coinciding with this era was the Sunnī Revival, a term coined by George Makdisi for state-sanctioned Sunnism under the ʿAbbāsids at Baghdad and the Turkic Seljuqs in Nishapur, Rayy, and Isfahan. As a result, Sunnī Islam became the leading branch in the eastern Islamicate world. 

Amid this cosmopolitan setting, where Turkic intellectuals and administrators adopted Arabic for science and Persian for statecraft and high culture respectively, one could rise through the ranks through knowledge of languages. Hence the need for Arabic-Persian dictionaries, which emerged in Iran and Central Asia to serve areas with few native Arabic speakers but where bilingual chanceries operated “with a premium on fluency in both Persian and Arabic.” There were comprehensive alphabetical or rhyming dictionaries, topical vocabularies, lexicons of nouns (asāmī) and verbal nouns (maṣādir), and mnemonic poetry (niṣāb) for schoolchildren. These works covered terms of law, theology, medicine, zoology, government, the military, epistolography, and poetry. Such topics hint at precisely who used bilingual dictionaries, that is, the elite intellectual class: theologians, judges and jurists, physicians, apothecaries, state scribes, and poets. 

            With reference to Ms.Heb.8333.189, it lacks basic clues as to its character and thus requires some informed speculation. The author, date, origin, and parent copy are all a mystery to us, as is the reason why it was written. Fading, fraying, staining, and scratching obscure the verso especially. But messy or not, it appears intended as a proper composition, judging by the basmalah at the beginning. Body parts and defects take up the entire recto side and the middle of the verso, while the margins of the verso contain other topics like fruit, vinegar, gizzards, washbasins, beards, and doors written upside-down. This linguistic potpourri suggests the author had a general interest in vocabulary, above all in afʿal-pattern words that describe physical traits. Further, he seems to have been a Persian speaker who needed a manual for Arabic, being the standard language of technical subjects; the terms always appear in Arabic first, followed by a gloss in Persian. Medieval Arabic sources include whole sections on afʿal words, such as a digression by the great ʿAbbāsid thinker and essayist Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī (d. 414/1023). Al-Tawḥīdī lists more than fifty afʿal forms plus some other patterns, mostly about the face, ears, eyes, mouths, teeth, lips, nose, and neck. He further says he is quoting a certain literatus (baʿḍ al-udabāʾ) and that knowledge of such words is useful to chancery scribes (kātib). This could also be why the author of Ms.Heb.8333.189 wrote the fragment. 

            With respect to the words themselves, as noted, a simple Persian gloss accompanies every technical term in Arabic. For instance, recto line 9, the Persian mardī dirāz gardan clarifies the Arabic rajul ajyad, both meaning “long-necked man.” In fact, all the words on the recto are about the head—eyes, ears, lips, necks, and beards. A full quarter of them relate to eye color, which in medical texts is connected to general health. One reads line 2, adʿaj (dark brown); also line 2, aḥwar (stark white-and-black), best known from the Qurʾān’s promise of big-eyed beauties in paradise; line 6, amrah (having eyes which are diseased or weak-sighted from a lack of collyrium, kuḥl); line 7, abyaḍ al-ʿayn (white) and line 8, azraq (blue or green or grey), being two of the ten colours of cataract, which also include lawn al-samāʾ (sky-coloured) for which there is likewise the Persian āsmānī; and line 8, ashhal (hazel), which as in English implies a range from brown to red to blue to grey, hence why medieval explanations of it diverge so sharply. But then again, even elementary colour terms express a range of hues in classical Arabic, e.g., akhḍar (green but also blue or dark-coloured), aṣfar (yellow going from pale to orange to gold to brown), and so on.

As for the verso, the phrases are less legible but much broader in scope. Appearing twice each are the words amsaḥ (flatfooted/-chested/-buttocked, or perhaps imsaḥ, “wipe,” as explained ahead) (lines 6 and 8) and liḥyataka (your beard, line 7), appearing in a triple sequence: rajjil liḥyatak wa-mashshiṭ liḥyatak sarriḥ liḥyatak. These are three Arabic synonyms for “comb your beard,” continuing the context of washbasins (Arabic al-mīḍaʾah, Persian āb-dastān) and wiping (imsaḥ) from the previous line (6). Note the muhmal signs (dot under the rāʾ, squiggle under the ḥāʾ of liḥyah and under the sīn of sarriḥ) used in manuscript writing to distinguish certain unpointed letters (al-ḥurūf al-muhmalah) from their pointed counterparts (al-ḥurūf al-muʿjamah). Such clarifying marks are found throughout the fragment. 

The verso’s margins offer a few intriguing puzzles. The three fruits mentioned, pomegranate (Arabic rummān, Persian nār) (lines 2 and 3), quince (Arabic safarjal, Persian ābī, a synonym of bihī), and pear (Arabic kummathrā, Persian amrūd) (both line 1), are all common ingredients in cuisine but also potions, compounds, and various remedies. This easily connects them with some of the fragment’s other contents, such as the right margin of the verso, line 21, vinegar (Arabic al-khall, Persian sik) and vinegar sop (Arabic al-murrī, Persian āb-kāma), the latter being used to help digestion and stoke the appetite. To see such provisions next to anatomical terms is not unusual. Some Arabic-Persian dictionaries like al-Mirqāh (The Staircase) attributed to the poet and grammarian Adīb Naṭanzī (fl. 5^th/11^th cen.) have chapters on food right next to those about body parts and defects. Less clear is how the “blackened door” (Arabic bāb musawwadan, Persian darī siyāh karda) found in lines 3–4 and 14–15 relate to the other vocabulary.

            There are yet more difficulties. On the one hand, several of the Arabic terms lack precision considering all the options. For example, instead of the phrase kathīth al-liḥyah (full-bearded) found in the fragment, one could simply say akathth (meaning the same thing); instead of aqṭaʿ al-udhun (crop-eared, slit-eared), one could say akhrab (meaning the same thing); instead of aqṭaʿ al-shafah (split-lipped), one could say aflaḥ for the bottom lip, aʿlam for the top, or ashram for both. This suggests the author lacked familiarity with Arabic technical language. “The twins”—fittingly mentioned twice—in verso lines 18 and 19 also seem quite elementary as a technical term. On the other hand, one finds e.g., recto line 14, the rare word athaṭṭ (scraggly-bearded), which suggests the opposite, that is, a mastery of Arabic. The Persian kūsah offered as the equivalent is surely the source of the more common Arabic kawsaj/kūsaj, which means the same thing. One can just make out snatches of words between faded areas, e.g., the gurgling in verso line 23 (Arabic yuqarqir, Persian gharghar [kubīd? khunīd? kunīd?]) or the gizzard in verso line 25 (Arabic al-qāniṣ, Persian sangdān), but without more context it is impossible to tell how they fit together.

For all that such insights from Ms.Heb.8333.189 reveal, they are even more tantalising for what they leave unsaid. Why did the author write these phrases in particular? Which text did they copy, and why? Further, the range and detail of the lexicon recalls the insatiable curiosity that has made dictionary writing a universal pursuit. Having begun as scribal aids in eastern Islamicate lands, bilingual glossaries ended up as “records and to some extent arbiters of the flood of Arabic loanwords and calques into Persian.” Arabic-Persian lexicography lasted well into the 19^th century, as seen for instance in John Richardson’s two-volume dictionary (1778–1780) written for British East India Company civil servants. It was abridged as a popular handbook by Charles Wilkins (1810) and later became the groundwork for celebrated philologues like Francis Johnson (d. 1876) and Francis Joseph Steingass (d. 1903). In turn, Steingass’s Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary remains a standard reference work today (including for this blog post). All this and more thanks to Dr Johnson’s harmless drudges. 

Notes

1.  Niek Veldhuis, “Ancient Mesopotamia,” 14–15.
2.  Haim, “What is the ‘Afghan Genizah’?” 71. 
3.  Perry, “Early Arabic-Persian Lexicography,” 248. 
4.  Makdisi, “The Sunnī revival.”
5.  Baevskii, Early Persian Lexicography, 118. 
6.  Baevskii, Early Persian Lexicography, 120.
7.  Al-Tawḥīdī, Baṣāʾir, vi, 145–147.
8.  Richardson, “Blue and Green Eyes,” 19. 
9.  Al-Aṣmaʿī, “Kitāb Khalq al-insān,” 183.
10.  Q al-Dukhān 44:54, al-Ṭūr 52:20, al-Raḥmān 55:72, and al-Wāqiʿah 56:22.
11.  Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq, The Book of the Ten Treatises, Arabic 141, English 69.
12.  Richardson, “Blue and Green Eyes,” 16.
13.  Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts, 286.
14.  Ibn al-Tilmīdh, Dispensatory, e.g., 28, 202 (#76), 306 (#423 and #424).
15.  Steingass, Persian-English Dictionary, 1009, “kāma,” also mentioned at 940, “fawāda,” and 941, “fūda.”
16.  Adīb Naṭanzī, attr., al-Mirqāh, ch. 2 and 3, 62–73; cf. the morphological arrangement of e.g., al-Zamakhsharī, Muqaddimat al-adab. 
17.  By itself, the adjective aqṭaʿ (fem. qaṭʿāʾ, pl. quṭʿān) means “one-handed amputee,” e.g., al-Fayyūmī, al-Miṣbāḥ al-munīr, 509.
18. Al-Thaʿālibī, Fiqh al-lughah, i, 401. 
19. Steingass, Persian-English Dictionary, 1062.
20. Perry, “Early Arabic-Persian Lexicography,” 249.