502 Sino-Iranica 



study on the history of some ancient textiles. According to this author, the dorSgi 

 of the Russians were striped silken fabrics, which came from Gilan, Kasan, Kizylba§, 

 Tur, and Yas in Persia. Dal' says in his Russian Dictionary that this silk was some- 

 times interwoven with gold and silver. In 1844 Veltman proposed the identity of 

 Russian dorogi with the Anglo-French term. Berezin derived it from Persian 

 daradza ("kaftan"), which is rejected, and justly so, by Inostrantsev. On his part, 

 he connects the word with Persian darai ("a red silken stuff"), 1 and invokes a 

 passage in Veselovski's "Monuments of Diplomatic and Commercial Relations of 

 Moscovite Rus with Persia," in which the Persian word darai is translated by 

 Russian dorogi. This work is unfortunately not accessible to me, so I cannot judge 

 the merits of the translation; but the mere fact of rendering dorogi by darai would 

 not yet prove the actual derivation of the former from the latter. For philological 

 reasons this theory seems to me improbable: it is difficult to realize that the Russians 

 should have made dorogi out of a Persian darai. All European languages have con- 

 sistently preserved the medial g, and this cannot be explained from darai. 

 Another prototype therefore, it seems to me, comes into question; and this probably 

 is Uigur torgu, Jagatai torka, Koibal torga, Mongol torga(n), all with the meaning 

 "silk." 2 It remains to search for the Turkish dialect which actually transmitted 

 the word to Slavic. 



1 Mentioned, for instance, in the list of silks in the Ain-i Akbari (Blochmann's 

 translation, Vol. I, p. 94). 



3 Cf. T'oung Pao, 1916, p. 489. 



