Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/157

 After examining the gateway, I went back to the town to secure a local photographer, as all the films in my camera were exhausted. On the way we paid a visit to the Chief of Police — an odd necessity ! — so as to insure no interference with the work of photographing, especially as there is still considerable traffic through the old archway ; and I wished likewise to be guaranteed permission later to enter the neighboring fortress (forbidden ground), on the chance that I might possibly find other inscriptions.

All this took time and gave opportunity for the idling natives to gather in a crowd to see what in their dilapidated gateway could so engage the farang% or stranger, who worked on, ab- sorbed in copying the difficult letters (for the light was not good at the time), but whose enthusiasm became contagious to his guide, the photographic attendant, and even to the cluster of onlookers.

My photographs at the moment were not very successful, but I sent again on a brighter day, and finally secured the pictures which are here presented.

My first impression, due to my hope, was that the tablets might be Sasanian, like the walls ; but they turned out to be Arabic of the eleventh century, and that portion of the gate had apparently been remodeled. With the help of my colleagues in the Semitic Department at Columbia I am now able to give their general contents, at least in a tentative manner. Both begin with the Bismillah formula, quoted from the first chapter of the Kuran, and the upper one of the two tablets contains the date 435 a.h. (=1044 a.d.) — an evidence that the gateway

inscription on the gate in the north and Gmelin, but the books are not

wall was composed ' in alt-arabischer accessible to me. I was told in the

Sprache,' and had been copied by his Tiflis Commercial Bank at Baku that

guide's father, some sixty years before, the tablets which I have described had

and rendered into New Persian, but been copied and reproduced in an

he himself could not secure a transcript Armenian work that had appeared

of the tablet. He refers likewise (1. some years ago, but the title was not

111) to mentions of inscriptions in known to my informant, general at Derbent by Bruce, Garber,

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