1876.] 



R. Maclagan— On Uarty Asiatic Mre Weapons. 



Greek Fire, and the fact of a report of some kind being often mentioned in 

 connection with it, have helped to give occasion to this belief. 



Gibbon, in his account of the siege of Constantinople, A. D. 717, after 

 observing that the principal ingredient of Greek Fire seems to have been 

 naphtha or liquid bitumen, says that, when employed at sea, it was " most 

 commonly blown through long tubes of copper, which were planted on the 

 prow of a galley, and fancifully shaped into the mouths of savage monsters, 

 that seemed to vomit a stream of liquid and consuming fire." # A little 

 earlier than the occasion to which Gibbon's account relates, a similar mode 

 of discharging naphtha fire on land appears to have been practised by the 

 Arab invaders of Sind (A. H. 93, A. D. 712). Their employment of naph- 

 tha in their battles with the Hindu inhabitants is noticed repeatedly in the 

 Ghachndmah, in passages of which extracts are given in Yol. I, of Prof- 

 Dowson's edition of Sir H. Elliot's Muhammadan Historians of India.f 

 When the enemy's elephants approached, Muhammad Kasim ordered his 

 naphtha-throwers to attack them. Burnes, quoting from another part of 

 the ChacJindmah, not included in Sir H. Elliot's extracts, or from another 

 version, says the Muhammadans, in the battle at Alor, when the elephants 

 were brought against them, had to assail them with combustibles. They 

 " filled their pipes, and returned with them to dart fire at the elephants.' 9 

 Burnes, in his foot-note, supposes pipes for smoking to be meant, and 

 remarks that it must have been bhang or hemp which they smoked in those 

 days, as tobacco was not known. J But apparently the word should have 

 been tubes. They were probably like what were called in the West y^ipoai^va^ 

 or hand-tubes, employed for the same purpose, § in which either naphtha 

 or special fire compositions might be used, and through which the fire was 

 discharged, or in which it was thrown. One of the meanings given by 

 Golius to the word nafdt or nqffat is " instrumentum seneum quod explodi- 

 tur naphtha seu pulveris pyrii ope, soil, tormentum bellicum."j| He seems 

 to intimate that a name originally connected with naphtha may have con- 

 tinued to be used to designate the weapon, even after gunpowder or other 



* " We got into a boat like a fire ship," Ibn Batuta says, in telling of a trip on a 

 canal in China. A. D. 1345 (Yule's Cathay, II, 499.) He seems to allude to some par- 

 ticular kind or form of ship which used to be thus fitted with fire-throwing apparatus. 

 (The passage is one of those omitted in Lee's abridgment translation of Ibn Batuta.) 



f Pp. 170, 172, 174. 



% Travels into Bokhara, I, 67. 



§ Extracts from the Emperor Leo's Tactica given by Lalanne (Feu Gregeois, p. 21). 

 From Leo's description it would appear that the tubes themselves, when filled with the 

 fire composition, were to be thrown in the face of the enemy. 



II Lexicon Arabieo-latinum, klsi) and ilAJ ? p. 2425. 



