1 86 Sino-Iranica 



part of which have tested the ingenuity of several sinologues and 

 historians; but few of these Sino-Iranian terms have been dealt with 

 accurately and adequately. While a system for the study of Sino- 

 Sanskrit has been successfully established, Sino-Iranian has been 

 woefully neglected. The honor of having been the first to apply the 

 laws of the phonology of Old Chinese to the study of Sino-Iranica is 

 due to Robert Gauthiot. 1 It is to the memory of this great Iranian 

 scholar that I wish to dedicate this volume, as a tribute of homage not only 

 to the scholar, but no less to the man and hero who gave his life for 

 France. 2 Gauthiot was a superior man, a kiiin-tse ^ J" in the sense of 

 Confucius, and every line he has written breathes the mind of a thinker 

 and a genius. I had long cherished the thought and the hope that I 

 might have the privilege of discussing with him the problems treated 

 on these pages, which would have considerably gained from his sagacity 

 and wide experience — #^A£,^HfrWft^. 



Iranian geographical and tribal names have hitherto been identified 

 on historical grounds, some correctly, others inexactly, but an attempt 

 to restore the Chinese transcriptions to their correct Iranian prototypes 

 has hardly been made. A great amount of hard work remains to be 

 , done in this field. 3 In my opinion, it must be our foremost object first 

 to record the Chinese transcriptions as exactly as possible in their 

 ancient phonetic garb, according to the method so successfully inaugu- 

 rated and applied by P. Pelliot and H. Maspero, and then to proceed 

 from this secure basis to the reconstruction of the Iranian model. 

 The accurate restoration of the Chinese form in accordance with 



1 Cf. his Quelques termes techniques bouddhiques et manich£ens, Journal 

 asiatique, 191 1, II, pp. 49-67 (particularly pp. 59 et seq.), and his contributions to 

 Chavannes and Pelliot, Traite" manicheen, pp. 27, 42, 58, 132. 



* Gauthiot died on September It, 191 6, at the age of forty, from the effects of a 

 wound received as captain of infantry while gallantly leading his company to a 

 grand attack, during the first offensive of Artois in the spring of 1915. Cf. the 

 obituary notice by A. Meillet in Bull, de la Societe de Linguistique, No. 65, 

 pp. 127-132. 



8 I hope to take up this subject in another place, and so give only a few examples 

 here. Ta-ho §wi 3^ -|g ^fC is the Ta-ho River on which Su-li, the capital of Persia, 

 was situated (Sui Su, Ch. 83, p. 7 b). Hirth (China and the Roman Orient, pp. 198, 

 313; also Journal Am. Or. Soc, Vol. XXXIII, 1913, p. 197), by means of a Cantonese 

 Tat-hot, has arrived at the identification with the Tigris, adding an Armenian 

 Deklath and Pliny's Diglito. Chinese la, however, corresponds neither to ancient 

 ti nor de, but only to *tat, dat, dad, dar, d'ar, while ho fisj represents *hat, kat, kad, 

 kar, kal. We accordingly have *Dar-kat, or, on the probable assumption that a 

 metathesis has taken place, *Dak-rat. Hence, as to the identification with the Tigris, 

 the vocalism of the first syllable brings difficulties: it is i both in Old Persian and in 

 Babylonian. Old Persian Tigram (with an alteration due to popular etymology, cf. 

 Avestan tiyriS, Persian dr, "arrow") is borrowed from Babylonian Di-ik-lat (that 



