398 
NOTES. 
occasion was swelled by the fugitives from the whole country. Olivier reckoned the 
inhabitants of Ispahan in his days at fifty thousand; its habitable circumference was 
reduced to a diameter of two miles ; and he was riding for half an hour through the ruins 
which surrounded it. Tom. v. 175, 179. Gardanne hears that the ruins extend for 
a march of more than four hours, p. 70. A later statement indeed gives the present 
population at two hundred and fifty thousand. But even in the decay in which Olivier 
found it, it retained sufficient evidences of original greatness to excite the liveliest sensa¬ 
tions: “Tout ce que nous vimes, tout ce qu’on nous dit, tout ce que nous supposames 
“ nous en donna la plus grande idee: tout nous persuada qu’elle fut sous les Sopiiis une 
“ des plus belles, des plus riches, des plus peuplees de l’Asie.” P. ISO. 
Shah Abbas drinking wine^p. 165.]—Gibbon says, that “in every age the wines of 
“ Shiraz have triumphed over the laws of Mahomed.” In fact however, the use of 
spirituous liquors in general has depended, in Persia as in Turkey and other Mahomedan 
countries, less on the precepts of the Koran , than on the will and character of the reigning 
Prince. Pietro della Valle gives a curious account of the alternations in the use of 
inebriating liquors, which the difference in the individual habits of the Sovereign produced 
in his day in the court of Persia : and Tournefort remarks the same effect in Georgia; 
“ of all nations the greatest wine drinkers.” Tom. ii. lettre vi. Eastern monarchs indeed, 
in this as in other points, have considered themselves unfettered by the prohibitions of the 
Koran: “Kings are subject to no law;”-—“ Whatever they do, they commit no sin,” 
were the maxims by which Shah Hussein, the last of the Seffis, was seduced into 
drunkenness. (Mod. Univ. Hist. vi. p. 22.) The exclusive prerogatives of an absolute 
Prince were, however, best exemplified in Hindostan. Jehangeer, as we learn from his 
own commentaries, was accustomed to drink of the strongest spirits, a quantity equal in 
weight to ten seers a day ; wdiile (as Peter the Great, and the rising Peter of the 
South Seas, Tamaiiama, in Turnbull’s Voyage, have done since) he issued as a standing 
regulation of his government, an order for the prohibition of spirituous liquors, and every 
thing else of an intoxicating nature, throughout the whole kingdom, “ notwithstanding 
“ that I had myself,” he adds, “ from the age of eighteen to thirty-eight, been constantly 
“ addicted to them.” Extracts by James Anderson, from the Toozuke Jehangeer , Asiat. 
Miscell. vol. ii. p. 77. To evade the prohibition of wine, the Orientals have had recourse 
to compositions infinitely more inebriating: these are “the mixed wine,” “ the strong 
“ drink mingled of the Scriptures;” see Lowth’s Isaiah, p. 12-13, p. 231, &c. See a 
Chapter of K.empfer, fasc. iii. obs. 15. The liquor thus substituted in Persia is the 
Cocnos of Della Valle. Abbas the First, when he drank wine, drank it as in the text, 
publicly: for a purpose, as a contemporary traveller observes, like that of Agathocles 
in Diodorus of discovering the real character of his guests. Della Valle, tom. ii. 
341. See the entertainment in Herbert, p. 171: “Most friendly Abbas puld our 
“ Ambassador downe, seated him close to his side, smiling to see he could not sett (after 
“ the Asiatique sort) crosse-legd, and calling for a bowl of wine, dronke his Master’s 
“ health, at which the Ambassador uncoverd his head; and to complement beyond all 
