Cassia Pods and Carob 423 



famb, Byzantine Greek xt-apoo-pfiep, x«a<ra;u7r&p) ; and it is a Middle- 

 Persian variation of this type that is hidden in the "Persian" tran- 

 scription of the Yu yah tsa tsu, hu-ye-yen-mo %& 5? m R, anciently 

 *xut(xur)-ya-dzem(dzem)-m'wak(bak, bax). The prototype to be 

 restored may have been *xaryadz'ambax. There is a New-Persian word 

 for the same tree and fruit, bakbar. It is also called kabuli ("coming 

 from Kabul"). 



The Fu-lin name of the plant is M M :£■ t£ a-li-k'ii-fa, *a-li(ri)- 

 go-va5. I. Loew 1 does not give an Aramaic name for Cassia fistula, 

 nor does he indicate this tree, neither am I able to find a name for it in 

 the relevant dictionaries. We have to take into consideration that the 

 tree is not indigenous to western Asia and Egypt, and that the Arabs 

 transplanted it there from India (cf. the Arabic terms given above, 

 "Indian carob," and "Indian cucumber"). The Fu-lin term is evi- 

 dently an Indian loan-word, for the transcription *a-ri-go-va5 cor- 

 responds exactly to Sanskrit argvadha, answering to an hypothetical 

 Aramaic form *arigbada or *arigfada. In some editions of the Yu yah 

 tsa tsu, the Fu-lin word is written a-li or a-li-ja, *a-ri-va5. These would 

 likewise be possible forms, for there is also a Sanskrit variant arevata 

 and an Indian vernacular form alt (in Panjabl). 



The above texts of C'en Ts'an-k'i and Twan C'en-si, author of 

 the Yu yah tsa tsu, give occasion for some further comments. Pelliot 2 

 maintained that the latter author, who lived toward the end of the 

 ninth century, frequently derived his information from the former, who 

 wrote in the first part of the eighth century; 3 from the fact that C'en 

 in many cases indicates the foreign names of exotic plants, Pelliot is 

 inclined to infer that Twan has derived from him also his nomenclature 

 of plants in the Fu-lin language. This is by no means correct. I have 

 carefully read almost all texts preserved under the name of C'en (or 

 his work, the Pen ts'ao H i) in the Ceh lei pen ts'ao and Pen ts'ao kah mu, 

 and likewise studied all notices of plants by Twan; with the result 

 that Twan, with a few exceptions, is independent of C'en. As to Fu-lin 

 names, none whatever is recorded by the latter, and the above text is 

 the only one in which the country Fu-lin figures, while he gives the 

 plant-name solely in its Sanskrit form. In fact, all the foreign names 

 noted by C'en come from the Indo-Malayan area. The above case 

 shows plainly that Twan's information does not at all depend on C'en's 



1 Aramaeische Pflanzennamen. 



2 T'oung Pao, 1912, p. 454. 



3 The example cited to this effect (Bull, de I'Ecole frangaise, Vol. IV, p. 1130) 

 is not very lucky, for in fact the two texts are clearly independent. 



