Iranian Minerals — Amber 523 



exhausted long ago. Thus Pliny and the ancient Chinese agree on the 

 fact that amber was a product of India, while no amber-mines are 

 known there at present. 1 Amber was formerly found in the 

 district of Yuh-c'ah in Yun-nan, and even on the sacred Hwa-san in 



ben-si/ 



G. Jacob 3 has called attention to the fact that the supposition of a 

 derivation of the Chinese word from Pahlavi kahrupdi is confronted 

 with unsurmountable difficulties of a chronological character. The 

 phonetic difficulties are still more aggravating; for Chinese hu-p'o S£ 18 

 was anciently *gu-bak, and any alleged resemblance between the two 

 words vanishes. Still less can Greek harpax* come into question as the 

 foundation of the Chinese word, which, in my opinion, comes from an 

 ancient San or T'ai language of Yun-nan, whence the Chinese received 

 a kind of amber as early at least as the first century a.d. Of the same 

 origin, I am inclined to think, is the word tun-mou ^ ^ for amber, 

 first and exclusively used by the philosopher Wan C'uh. 6 



Uigur kubik is not the original of the Chinese word, as assumed by 

 Klaproth; but the Uigur, on the contrary (like Korean xobag), is a 

 transcription of the Chinese word. Mongol xuba and Manchu xdba 

 are likewise so, except that these forms were borrowed at a later period, 

 when the final consonant of Chinese bak or bek was silent. 6 



90. Coral is a substance of animal origin; but, as it has always been 

 conceived in the Orient as a precious stone, 7 a brief notice of it, as far 

 as Sino-Persian relations are concerned, may be added here. The 



1 Cf . Ts'ien Han Su, Ch. 96 A, p. 5 (amber of Kashmir) ; Nan H, Ch. 78, p. 7. 



2 Cf. Hwa yoti^fc^ jg, Ch. 3, p. 1 (ed. of 1831). 



3 L. c, p. 355. 



4 Proposed by Hirth, China and the Roman Orient, p. 245. This was merely 

 a local Syriac name, derived from Greek dprAfw (In Syria quoque feminas verticillos 

 inde facere et vocare harpaga, quia folia paleasque et vestium fimbrias rapiat. — 

 Pliny, xxxvii, II, § 37). 



6 Cf. A. Forke, Lun-heng, pt. II, p. 350. This is not the place for a discussion 

 of this problem, which I have taken up in a study entitled "Ancient Remains from 

 the Languages of the Nan Man." 



6 For further information on amber, the reader may be referred to my Historical 

 Jottings on Amber in Asia (Memoirs Am. Anthr. Assoc, Vol. I, pt. 3). I hope to come 

 back to this subject in greater detail in the course of my Sino-Hellenistic studies, 

 where it will be shown that the Chinese tradition regarding the origin and properties 

 of amber is largely influenced by the theories of the ancients. 



7 The proof of the animal character of coral is a recent achievement of our 

 science. Peyssonel was the first to demonstrate in 1727 that the alleged coral- 

 flowers are real animals; Pallas then described the coral as Isis nobilis; and Lamarck 

 formed a special genus under the name Corallium rubrum (cf. Lacaze-Duthiers, 

 Histoire naturelle du corail, Paris, 1864; Guibourt, Histoire naturelle des drogues, 

 Vol. IV, p. 378). The common notion in Asia was that coral is a marine tree. 



