SHIRAZ. 
691 
capital of this part of the country, bears a proportionate in¬ 
feriority to the grandeur of the ancient metropolis, with the 
difference in national rank between a kingdom and a province. 
It stands in a fine valley, about ten or twelve miles wide, and 
twenty-four in length, and has rather a pleasant than an imposing 
appearance. 
Several native writers of less ambition than those lately referred 
to, arrogate no higher antiquity for the foundation of the town, 
than the first century of the Hegira; and Aben Haukel, who 
decidedly calls it a “ modern city,” dates its origin to Mahmed 
ben al Cassem Okail. It did not receive walls of strength till 
several hundred years afterwards, when we find that Azud-u- 
Doulah, the magnificent vizier who erected the dyke on the 
Araxes, rendered Shiraz a station of important consequence. 
But its time of greatest aggrandizement was under the celebrated 
Kerim Khan, who made it the seat of his empire about the 
middle of the last century, embellished it with public buildings 
and gardens, filled his courts with learned men, and girded the 
city with increased fortifications. But after the struggle for 
empire, between his descendants and the ancestors of the present 
royal family, came to an end in favour of the latter, when Aga 
Mahomed Khan took possession of the town, he levelled its walls 
with the ground; and committed so many extended ravages, 
that little now remains there of the Arcadia, whose shade blooms 
in the page of Hafiz ; and which, a few centuries before, even 
Timour the Tartar had spared for the sake of the poet and his 
song. It is related, that when that conqueror entered Shiraz, 
red with the blood of Ispahan, in the sweeping fury of his 
humour he sent for Hafiz, who was in the town, and demanded 
how he dared to dispose of two of the Tartar’s richest cities, 
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