Iranian Minerals — Litharge, Gold 509 



in the silver and copper foundries of Kwan-tun and Fu-kien. It is 

 further mentioned briefly in the Pen ts'ao yen ioim 6, 1 which maintains 

 that the kind with a color like gold is the best. 



According to Yaqut, mines of antimony, known under the name 

 razi, litharge, lead, and vitriol, were in the environs of Donbawend or 

 Demawend in the province of Kirman. 2 In the Persian pharmacopoeia 

 of Abu Mansur, the medicinal properties of litharge are described under 

 the Arabicized name murddsanj, to which he adds the synonymous term 

 murtak* Pegoletti, in the fourteenth century, gives the word with a 

 popular etymology as morda sangue* The Dictionary of Four Lan- 

 guages 5 correlates Chinese mi-Vo-sen with Tibetan gser-zil (literally, 

 "gold brightness"), 6 Manchu lirlan, and Mongol jildunur. 7 



81. Palladius 8 offers a term $£ M & tse-mo kin with the meaning 

 "gold from Persia," no source for it being cited. In the Pen ts'ao kan 

 mu* the tse-mo kin of Po-se (Persia) is given as the first in a series of 

 five kinds of gold of foreign countries, 10 without further explanation. 

 The term occurs also in Buddhist literature: Chavannes 11 has found it 

 in the text of a Jataka, where he proposes as hypothetical translation, 

 "un amas d'or raffine" rouge." It therefore seems to be unknown what 

 the term signifies, although a special kind of gold or an alloy of gold is 

 apparently intended. The Swi kin ?m ^S & 12 says that the first 

 quality of gold, according to Chinese custom, is styled tse-mo kin 

 (written as above); according to the custom of the barbarians, how- 

 ever, yan-mai 81 }§. From this it would appear that tse-mo is a Chinese 

 term, not a foreign one. 



1 Ch. 5, p. 6 b (ed. of Lu Sin-yuan). 



2 Barbier de Meynard, op. tit., p. 237. 



I Achundow, Abu Mansur, p. 139. This form goes back to Middle Persian 

 murtak or martak. 



* Yule, Cathay, new ed., Vol. Ill, p. 167. 



s Ch. 22, p. 71. 



8 Jaeschke, in his Tibetan Dictionary, was unable to explain this term. 



7 Kovalevski, in his Mongol Dictionary, explains this word wrongly by 

 "mica." 



8 Chinese-Russian Dictionary, Vol. II, p. 203. 



9 Ch. 8, p. 1 b. 



10 The four others are, the dark gold of the eastern regions, the red gold of 

 Lin-yi, the gold of the Si-zuh, and the gold of Can-5'en (Camboja). The five kinds 

 of foreign gold are mentioned as early as the tenth century in the Pao ts'an lun 



x*». 



II Fables et contes de lTnde, in Actes du XIV 8 Congres des Orientalistes, 

 Vol. I, 1905, p. 103. 



12 Ch. 36, p. 18 b (ed. Wu-c'an, 1877). See p. 622. 



