Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/486

 294 RUINED TUS, THE HOME OF THE POET FIRDAUSl

tempest of war passed over the site, for ruin and desolation reigned here, as elsewhere, supreme.

At no great distance from the citadel, and lying in an easterly and southeasterly direction, are two sets of ruins, known as the Fil-khdnah^ ' Elephant-stables,' possibly marking the site of the buildings devoted to that purpose, although this is by no means certain. 1 There is another structure in the southwest wall of the town, as noted on the sketch-map, but of this I am not able to give any account, nor again of the minaret mentioned in 1822 by Fraser (p. 518) as constructed of beautiful masonry, although, regarding it, he adds : ' There is not above fifteen or twenty feet in height of it now standing, and not a vestige of the building to which it must have belonged.'

From the Persian quotations given above, it is clear that the ruined site of Tus we had been examining, with the Rudbar and Rizan Gates, formed part of the borough of Tabaran, an impor- tant section of the town in Firdausi's day, when the city covered a large area comprising several thickly populated centres, as we know from the Oriental geographers of the tenth century, or the period covering the better portion of the poet's life. According to the authority of Istakhri and Ibn Haukal, at that time, as cited in the preceding chapter (p. 267), four boroughs — Radkan, Tabaran, Bazdghur, and Naukan — made up the metropolis of historic Tus. The section Tabaran has just been explained. ^ Radkan is represented, in part at least, by the settlement of that name, nearly twenty miles northwest of the historic city, covering a considerable area still marked by a conical tower, which resembles the one at Bustam alluded to above (p. 196), whose age cannot be very much later than the poet's tirae.^ Bazdghur has been conjecturally identified with the site of the

1 See Sykes, JBAS. 1910, p. 1119. « On Radkan see Idrisi (1154 a.d.),

2 See also Sykes, JBAS. 1910, p. 2. 184; Yakut (1220), pp. 252, 257; 1115, and compare the allusions to it and compare O'Donovan, Merv, 2. 19- and to Naukan in Ibn Khurdadbah, 24; Curzon, Persia, 1. 120; Yate, Kudamah, and Mukaddasi referred Khurasan, pp. 362-365 ; Sykes, Oeog. to by Sprenger, Postrouten, p. 15. Journ. 37. 2.

�� �