Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/332

 186 EXCURSIONS FROM DAMGHAN TO FRAT AND TAK

reference to its historic past.^ So we galloped forward, leaving behind the noise of the mill busy with the wheat brought by our harvesting friends, and passing lines of pistachio trees, fragrant in odor and mellifluous with the music of the nightin- gale, till we reached the fields spreading around Tak.

Tak today is but a large walled village of mud, spread over a considerable area. The hurj^ or citadel, is about eight hun- dred yards long by four hundred yards wide, with fairly high walls, but the bricks of which it is partly constructed did not strike me as large enough to denote any extreme antiquity. Probably it has superseded a more ancient fortification. The settlement itself did not contain more than a hundred houses, or a population of possibly five hundred persons, according to my informant, the old shepherd who had compared his home somewhat disparagingly with the more flourishing Gaz.

The gateway which formed the entrance to the townlet was a portal of modern date, leading into a small square from which there were narrow, lanelike streets bordered by high walls. No traces of real antiquity could I see. If Tak be Tagae, the signs of the past have gone. The meaning of the name of the place is open to some question. The natives could answer noth- ing except that it was *Tak.' According to General Schindler, Tak is derived from an Old Persian word denoting 'vine.'^ My own feeling is that Tak means *arch,' a common word in Persian, as in the name of the park Tak-i Biistan, 'Garden Arch,' near Kermanshah.^ This explanation — despite the lack of local information on the subject of the etymology — may have something to do with the tunnel, or arched vault, in the mountains near Tak, which was described in the tenth century by Ibn Fakih of Hamadan.'* The suggestion is at least worth considering.

lOn the Persian term Tanki maschek, Zwr.^isi.ropogr. Pers. 1.224.

Dunyd^ • New World,' which looks se- « See Jackson, Persia, p. 214.

ductively like ' Yankee Doodle,' see * The passage from Ibn Fakih al-

Fersia Past and Present, p. 346. Hamadani is cited at length by Yakut,

2 See Houtum-Schindler, in Zt. 3, 490. 10 (though abridged in the

Ges. f. Erdkunde, 12. 217, n. 1; To- edition of Yakut by De Goeje, 6. 310.

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