Persian Textiles — Yue No 495 



it to its ancient phonetic condition. 1 Moreover, it was not recognized 

 that yiie no represents a combination of two Iranian words, and that 

 each of these elements denotes a particular Iranian textile. 



(1) The ancient articulation of what is now sounded yiie ^ was 

 *vat, va5, wia5, or, with liquid final, *var or *val. 2 Thus it may well 

 be inferred that the Chinese transcription answers to a Middle-Persian 

 form of a type *var or *val. There is a Persian word barnu or barnun 

 ("brocade")? void, which means "a kind of silken stuff," 3 and balds, 

 "a kind of fine, soft, thin armosin silk, an old piece of cloth, a kind of 

 coarse woollen stuff." 4 



(2) Hr no corresponds to an ancient *nak, 5 and is easily identified 

 with Persian nax (nakh), "a carpet beautiful on both sides, having a 

 long pile; a small carpet with a short pile; a raw thread of yarn of any 

 sort," 6 but also "brocade." The early mention of the Chinese term, 

 especially in the Sui Annals, renders it quite certain that the word nak 

 or nax was even an element of the Middle-Persian language. Hither- 

 to it had been revealed only in mediaeval authors, the Yuan fao pi H t 



1 De Goeje's identification of yue-no pu with djannabi (in Hirth, Lander des Islam, 

 p. 61) is a complete failure: pu ("cloth") does not form part of the transcription, 

 which can only be read vaS-nak, var-nak, or val-nak. Tsuboi Kumazo (Actes XII" 

 Congres international des Orientalistes Rome 1899, Vol. II, p. 112) has already 

 opposed this unfortunate suggestion. 



2 For examples, see Chavannes, Memoires historiques de Se-ma Ts'ien, 

 Vol. IV, p. 559; and particularly cf. Pelliot, Journal asiatique, 1914, II, p. 392. 



1 Steingass, Persian-English Dictionary, p. 1453. Horn (Grundriss iran. 

 Phil., Vol. I, pt. 2, p. 29) translates the word "a fine stuff, " and regards it as a loan- 

 word from Greek ftijXov ("veil"), first proposed, I believe, by Noldeke (Persische 

 Studien, II, p. 39). This etymology is not convincing to me. On the contrary, 

 vala is a genuine Persian word, meaning "eminent, exalted, high, respectable, sub- 

 lime, noble"; and it is quite plausible that this attribute was transferred to a fine 

 textile. It was, further, the Persians who taught the Greeks lessons in textile art, 

 but not the reverse. F. Justi (Iranisches Namenbuch, p. 516) attributes to vala 

 also the meaning "banner of silk." 



4 Steingass, op. cit., p. 150. The Iranian character of this word is indicated 

 by WaxI palds, Sariqoll palus ("coarse woollen cloth") of the Pamir languages. 

 Perhaps also Persian bat ("stuff of fine wool"), WaxI bot, Sariqoll bei (cf. W. Toma- 

 schek, Pamirdialekte, Sitzber. Wiener Akad., 1880, p. 807) may be enlisted as possible 

 prototypes of Chinese *vat, val; but I do not believe with Tomaschek that this 

 series bears any relation to Sanskrit pa\\a and lafa or Armenian lotik ("mantle"). 

 The latter, in my opinion, is a loan-word from Greek X<£5i£ ("cover, rug"), that 

 appears in the Periplus (§ 24) and in the Greek Papyri of the first century a.d. 

 (T. Reil, Beitrage zur Kenntnis des Gewerbes im hellenistischen ^Egypten, p. 118). 



s See, for instance, T'oung Pao, 1914, p. 77, and 1915, p. 8, where the character 

 in question serves for transcribing Tibetan nag. It further corresponds to nak 

 in Annamese, Korean, and Japanese, as well as in the transcriptions of Sanskrit 

 words. 



8 Steingass, Persian-English Dictionary, p. 1391. 



