206 
MINUTES OF PROCEEDINGS OF 
Mr Eedliouse reads the inscriptions on Nos. 8, 9, 12 and 21 (of which 
a careful copy will be found on Plate Y.) as follows:— 
The first line is in Persianized Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, the last two 
in Arabic, the engraved inscription in modern Turkish. 
Date a.h. 928, a.d. 1621-22. 
“The work of Mustafa son of Murad, Chief Gunner.” 
“ And in the time of Sulayman Shah the just.” 
“ I made the guns for the destruction of Forts.” 
“ The chronicler said of the great gun, ‘ This is one of the houses, judge thou 
then as to the palaces.’ 
“The last line,” he adds, “is an allusive quotation. The letters added together 
in their numeral values should give the date, but do not in any way I can see. 
The quartet is a chronogram, but a false one. There are several mistakes made by 
the moulder, or the copier, which I have indicated ; all the long inscriptions are 
verbatim copies of this.” 
This difficulty as to the chronogram has given an extraordinary amount of 
trouble. There seems to be certainly a mistake in the work, Mr Wrench 
wrote in May last. 
“ The inscription which has been puzzling me in common with the scribes here 
for so long a time is not even yet satisfactorily deciphered. I went some little 
time ago with one of the most learned men here, and we copied the inscription, as 
I thought exactly, as it was on the gun; this copy I sent to Mr Hughes our 
Oriental Secretary at the Embassy, and at a meeting I had with Mr Hughes and 
a learned friend of his it was shown that my copy could not possibly be correct, 
as the date in figures did not correspond with that in characters. They advised 
me to send a rubbing of the inscription, and I am in a day or two going to take 
one, when I sincerely trust a satisfactory result will be obtained.” 
I have already observed that only two of these guns are referable to the 
period of Muhammad II., and although we have none exactly contem¬ 
poraneous with the fall of the Byzantine Empire, one of those that have been 
lately broken up (No. 15) carries us to within seven years of that epoch. The 
interest attaching to them has been very much enhanced by the discovery at 
Constantinople within these few years of a work in MS. by a contemporary 
writer named Kkltoboulos, in which he describes the actual fabrication of 
the first of Muhammad’s great cannon. A part of this MS. has been 
will be found at p. 214. There are only two guns of the foregoing list which date from the reign 
of Muhammad II., and one of them is already broken up. We possess the other. There are four of 
the same date, A.d. 1621, one year before the conquest of Rhodes, and possibly among those which 
were cast on the Island for its subjection before the siege of the Fortress, which fell Dec. 22, 
1622. These four guns, Nos. 8, 9, 12, and 21, bear the same inscription, which has been 
deciphered by Mr Redhouse, a task of which the difficulty can only be fully appreciated by 
Oriental scholars; but having seen educated natives entirely baffled by them, I may venture to 
call the attention of artillerymen to the great obligation we are under to this eminent scholar 
for his having on many occasions brought his great learning to bear on so apparently trivial a 
subject as the inscription on a gun, at the cost of not a little time and research* 
