POPULATION OF SHIRAZ. 
Ill 
In my former journey, the number of houses is marked at 12,000 ; 
and were I to give an opinion from the observations I have been 
enabled to make in our rides through it, I should not reckon upon 
more than half of the 7780 of the above list. Shiraz is near four miles 
in circumference, one-third of its buildings to the S.E. are in ruins. Those 
that are habitable, are also interspersed with ruins, and of the remaining 
space, so much is taken up with bazars, meydans, or squares, the Prince’s 
palace, gardens, stables, and other public buildings, that to say that 
one-half of the city is occupied by the inhabitants, is perhaps more 
than the truth. There was an opinion in the embassy, that it could not 
contain more than 10,000 souls ; but if, following my conjecture, 3800 
houses are about its real number, at five souls in each family, we should 
get a total of 19,000, which is a reasonable calculation. 
The consumption of br^ad per diem furnishes better data than the 
number of houses, to calculate the population of an Asiatic town. A 
year or two ago an investigation was made by Mahomed Nebee Khan, 
into the quantity of corn consumed daily in Shiraz ; the ostensible 
object of which was to ascertain and provide for the annual wants of its 
population. But the real object was to acquire a positive rate, upon 
which he might build his plans of monopoly. It was found that Shiraz 
consumed per diem 8000 Tabriz mauns of wheat, which was made 
up into 10,000 mauns of bread. A Tabriz maun is seven pounds and 
a quarter English: a Persian eats one char eh, or a quarter of a maun, 
every day ; then 10,000 Tabriz mauns being equal to 72,500 pounds, 
the result will be that there are 18,125 souls in the city. 
An old inhabitant of Shiraz'nearly corroborated this statement by 
another account. He told me that seventy Yahoos, or pack horses, are 
daily employed to carry corn from Shiraz to the water-mills in the 
neighbourhood of Shiraz. These horses make two trips during the 
day, one in the morning, and one in the evening, and at each trip they 
carry to the mill sixty mauns of corn each, which makes the quantity 
of corn exported from the city amount to 8400 mauns. They calculate 
that one maun and a quarter of flour produces one maun of bread j 
