Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 

About: Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society is an academic journal published by Cambridge University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Islam & Politics. It has an ISSN identifier of 1356-1863. Over the lifetime, 3980 publications have been published receiving 15581 citations.

The Parthian Gōsān and Iranian Minstrel Tradition

Abstract: The word gōsān is known to occur twice in Persian literature. One passage is in the poem Vīs u Rāmīn, now shown to be of Parthian origin. Here, while the king Mōbad is feasting with his wife and his brother Rāmīn, a gōsān-i navāgar sings to them. His song is of a lofty tree, shading the whole earth. Beneath it is a sparkling spring, with sand in its sweet water. A bull of Gīlān grazes by it, drinking the water and eating the blossoms at its brink. “May this tree continue to cast its shade,” ends the gōsān, “the water ever flowing from the spring, the bull of Gīlān ever grazing at it!” His pretty song was well calculated, however, to frustrate this pious wish; for it was in fact a dangerous and provocative allegory, the tree representing Mōbad himself, the spring his wife Vīs, and the bull his brother Rāmīn, the queen's lover. This meaning the king instantly divined; but his rage flared up, not against the gōsān, but against his brother, on whom he sprang to kill him.

The Kārimī Merchants

Abstract: The important role which the Kārimī merchants played in Oriental trade at the end of the Middle Ages has been touched upon by some outstanding orientalists. The last to treat the subject exhaustively was W. J. Fischel in his paper “Uber die Gruppe der Kārimī-Kaufleute”, published in 1937 in the series Analecta Orientalia (of the Pontifical Bible Institute) no. 14. The Arabic historical works of the later Middle Ages contain, however, additional material, which partly corroborates and partly modifies Fischel's conclusions. A good many of the notices on the Kārimīs to be quoted in this paper are taken from the hitherto unpublished chronicle Inbā' al-ghumr bi-abnā al-'umr of Ibn Ḥajar al-'Asqalānī (d. 1449), MS. Constantinople, Yeni Cami 814 and the Who's Who of the fifteenth century composed by al-Sakhāwī (d. 1497) and called ad-Ḍau' al-lāmi' fī a'yān al-qarn al-tāsi' (Cairo, 1353–55).