Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/495

 THE LITTLE CITY OF EUCHAN

��The town of Kuchan, the head of a principality, is the hered- itary seat of the Il-Khans, or ruling lords of the territory, and is remembered in history because in June, 1747, the conqueror Nadir Shah was treacherously slain beneath its walls by some of

��(a name which is still preserved in a settlement lying ten miles northwest of the town), must have been in exist- ence before the eleventh century of our era, since Yakut (about 1220) re- fers to Khabushan as ' the birthplace of Abu'l-Harath, who died about 430 A.H. (1038 A.D.) ' ; see Yakut, tr. Barbier de Meynard, p. 196 and n. 1. The identity of Kuchan and Khabushan is accepted by Fraser, Narrative, p. 554 (' Cochoon, or Kabooshan'), and by Le Strange, Eastern Caliphate^ pp. 377, 393. Le Strange (p. 393) writes as follows : ' The town of Ku- chan, which in medieval times was called Khabushan, or Khiijan ' ; and he furthermore observes that ' Yakut, who states that the name of the chief town [of the Nisa district] was in his day pronounced Khushan, says that ninety-three villages belonged to it. The surrounding plain he praises for its fertility, and adds that Hiilagu Khan, the Mongol, had rebuilt Kha- bushan in the seventh (thirteenth) century, his grandson Arghun, the Il-Khan of Persia, afterwards greatly enlarging the town.'

Kuchan was also the birthplace of the poet Muhammad Riza Nau'i, who went to India in the time of Akbar the Great and died at Burhanpur, 1610 A.D., and whose poem Suz u Guddz commemorates the sati of a Hindu princess who burned herself on her husband's funeral pyre. Kuchan was likewise for three years the resi- dence of the author Barkhvardar ibn Mahmud Mumtaz, who, during a ma- rauding invasion while he was residing

��there early in the eighteenth century, was robbed of all his possessions, and was even forced to recast from memory an abbreviated version of his collection of anecdotes entitled Mahjildrd, this abridgment still sur- viving as his Mahbub al-Kulub ; see Eth^, Grundr. Iran. Philol. 2. 254, 333.

Some authorities maintain that Kuchan is to be identified in ancient times with the Parthian Arsaka of Pliny, 6. 113, and Asaak of Isidor of Charax, Mansiones Parthicae, 11, and regarding which the latter writer says: 'The city Asaak ('Aa-adK) in which Arsakes the First was declared king ; and an eternal fire is preserved there.' If so, it was one of the seats of early fire-worship in the third cen- tury B.C. Such is the view of Hoff- mann (Ausziige aus syrischen Akten persischer Marty rer, p. 291), Toma- schek {Zur hist. Topog. Pers., in Sb. Akad. Wiss. zu Wien, 102. 227), and Justi {Grundr. if an. Philol. 2. 481). Nevertheless, I am inclined to identify this 'Acradx with the Ashak, Ashk, or Ask, near Isfarain and Buj- nurd, of the Arab geographers; see Le Strange, Eastern Caliphate, p. 381 ; but on this point others must decide.

A list of the travelers who visited Kuchan in the nineteenth century is given by Curzon, 1. 102, n. 1, who describes his own visit in detail (1. 97-111). For some account of the ruined site of the older Kuchan (about twelve kilometers distant), which was ruined by earthquakes, see Lacoste, Around Afghanistan, pp. 31-38, Lon- don and New York, 1909.

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