Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/154

 74 OFF TO DERBENT A.D., as a quotation, but without mentioning the source.^

The moment that my eye fell upon these two old passages I knew that the description of the Bab-Jihad, or ' Gate of War,' in the northern wall (see the list of names of the gates still preserved, as given by Kazem-Beg),^ was practically identical with the Bayat Kapii (in Russian, Vorota Vayat), or ' Gate of the Bayats,' which I was examining. Here, as seen in the pho- tograph, are the ' two pillars of stone,' here the ' lion ' over the arch, and here the * inscriptions ' (as we are perhaps to read instead of ' lionesses ') on two stones. There was a kind of joy in finding these old passages to bear on the gateway, as there had been a thrill in seeing the gate itself with its chiseled tablets. The tablets, as I have since noted after gaining access to my books, had been observed by Olearius and by one or two other Europeans, but I know of no detailed description of the stones and their location, or of any previous photograph of the inscriptions here reproduced. ^

miswriting of the Arabic characters, name from the Bayats, * a people who

although Yakut (see next note) form the greater part of the present

follows the reading 'lionesses,' with inhabitants.'


 * >-;,,,,.., . ... 8 The incidental references that I

..jLJ*^ labu'atain^ m his quotation. , . ^m • ^^.jorTN on-r

1 See Yakut, ed. Wiistenfeld, 1. (= tr. Davies, p. 404 ); Dumas (1858), 441, Leipzig, 1886, and cf. Yakut, tr. p. 279 ; and a brief mention by Schuyler Barbier de Meynard, Diet. geog. de la (author of Turkistan, London, 1876), Perse, p. 72. in a letter referred to by Yule, Marco

2 The name Bab-Jihad for a gate in Polo, 2. 537, n. 3. Yule states that the northern wall is among those noted Schuyler had communicated to him by Kazem-Beg, p. 100, as still given. in this letter 'some notes regarding Its location in the north rampart as inscriptions that have been found at the ' Gate of War ' is natural, as the or near Derbend, embracing Cufic inroads came from that quarter. The of a.d. 465, Pehlvi, and even Cunei- name ' Bab-Jihad ' was known equally form.' From this brief memorandum to Tabari (838-923), who refers (CAro- I cannot tell whether the inscriptions nique, tr. Zotenberg, 4. 270) to an referred to are actually those in ques- Arab expedition under Jarrah from tion. Eichwald, Beise in den Cau- the south northward as passing out of casus in 1825-1826, 1. 122, on the the Bab-Jihad. According to Kazem- authority of a Moslem priest, states Beg, p. 100, the Bayat Gate derived its (as I have recently found) that an

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