A dictionary in six languages Peter B. Golden translates a 14th-century king's lexicon Archived article from Oct 13, 2000 By Phyllis Gottlieb   When Peter B. Golden, professor of history on the Newark campus, agreed to help translate a six-language dictionary compiled in Yemen during the 14th century, he never expected the project to take a quarter century or that of the four scholars who began the work in 1974, he would be the only one still alive at its completion. The project, at times, seemed endless, so Golden was elated when "The King's Dictionary: The Rasulid Hexaglot" was finally published by Brill in June. He only wishes his colleagues had survived to reap the rewards of their monumental labor. The dictionary contains approximately 7,300 words in Arabic, Persian, Turkic, Greek, Armenian and Mongol, the main languages of the vibrant Asian and Middle Eastern states of the Middle Ages. It first came to the notice of Western linguists and historians when a Lebanese scholar, Mahmud al-Ghul, brought a photocopy of the work to Tibor Halasi-Kun, professor of Turkish studies at Columbia University and a well-known authority on transcription texts. Halasi-Kun, fascinated by the dictionary's potential to open new insights into the medieval Islamic world, assembled a team of eminent experts: Louis Ligeti of Budapest University to translate the Mongol; Edmund Schutz of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences for the Armenian; and Golden for the Byzantine Greek. Halasi-Kun would work on the Turkic, assisted by Golden, while he and Golden took joint responsibility for the Arabic and Persian entries. All worked from photocopies; none of the Western scholars ever saw the original manuscript. A dictionary of this type was not unique, Golden points out. As the Mongol Empire spread from Korea to Mesopotamia and from Poland to Vietnam during the 13th century and the Mamluks took control of the Middle East from Syria to Egypt, the need to communicate with an array of people speaking a daunting variety of languages and dialects became essential. According to the introductory essay to "The King's Dictionary," by Thomas T. Allsen of the College of New Jersey, translators were highly prized by the ruling elite and richly rewarded for their linguistic skills. Indeed, Allsen attributes Marco Polo's ready acceptance at the Mongolian court to his great facility with languages. Dictionaries of the time, whether composed in China, India or Egypt, tended to have a similar organization. Rather than being listed alphabetically, words were arranged in categories. Among the more common were: heaven and earth; time and seasons; the human body; food and drink; clothing and textiles; weapons and riding equipment; animals, insects and birds; plants and trees; colors; numbers and measures. The Hexaglot follows this general pattern of semantic categories, beginning with the word for God and concluding with a section on numbers. But in other ways it is unlike its counterparts. For one thing, it is the most extensive dictionary known with the largest grouping of languages. "What's extraordinary about the Hexaglot is that the languages represented here are all the major cultural languages of the eastern Mediterranean/Mongol world," Golden says. For another, unlike most such works, which were assembled by bureaucrats for practical commercial, military or administrative purposes, the Hexaglot is the work of a member of the Rasulid dynasty, which ruled Yemen from 1229 to 1454, when the country was a great commercial center. The author, Al-Malik al-Afdal al-Abbas, king of Yemen from 1363 to 1377, was a man with a keen interest in intellectual endeavors, Golden surmises. "He was an extraordinary fellow, but within a tradition of scholarship that was part of this ruling family. He just loved knowledge, and he had certain things he found fascinating." The Hexaglot is part of a much larger codex in which the king compiled information on a variety of topics, "everything from agriculture to calendrical systems, including treatises on internal medicine, prosody and philology; sample letters and receipts for court clerks; an abridgment of a work on growing grains and cereals; a crop registry; a discussion of the relation of the lunar calendar to the Christian solar calendar -- you get the idea," says Golden. The complete text of the codex, without translation, was edited by Daniel Martin Varisco and published in 1998. In working on the Hexaglot, Golden and his colleagues sought to provide both a transliteration into the English alphabet and an English translation. But the endeavor presented many difficulties. "At times, it seemed like a great complicated jigsaw puzzle," Golden remarks. The first problem was interpreting the transcription. All entries in all languages are transcribed in Arabic script. This presented no difficulty for the Persian entries, because Persian has been written in Arabic script since the ninth century and the transliteration in the Hexaglot, by and large, conforms to traditional orthography. Turkic also had a history of being written in Arabic letters, although its spelling at this time was less standardized than the Persian and there were differences between the systems used in Central Asia, the homeland of the Turks, and the Middle East. But, Golden says, there was no tradition of writing Greek or Armenian in Arabic script, and only a few examples of Mongol documents written in the Arabic alphabet survive. Deciphering the Greek, Armenian and Mongol words thus presented quite a challenge, made all the more difficult by the fact that there are no Arabic letters corresponding to some of the sounds essential to these languages. The work was further complicated by the Arabic use of dots to indicate just how a letter should be pronounced -- to distinguish, for instance, among "b," "p," "t," "th," "n," " y" and others. Sometimes the dots were in the proper place, but at other times they were misplaced, incorrectly noted or missing altogether. In addition, the handwriting could be hard to read, especially since several Arabic letters are very similar in shape. "In some instances, the fellow was just writing in a hurry and he just scribbled," Golden observes. This inattention to detail also led to words ending up in the wrong column or columns becoming misaligned. Interestingly, many of the words in the dictionary stem not from the classical literary form but from everyday speech of the Middle Ages. Golden is convinced that the Greek, for instance, derived from a living informant whose actual pronunciation was captured in the Arabic alphabet. Similarly, three very different dialects of Turkic are represented at various points in the dictionary, while the Armenian is drawn from a dialect spoken primarily in western Armenia. At times it seemed as though these problems might be insurmountable, especially since Golden's colleagues were quite a bit older than he and in poor health. Ligeti died in 1987 and Halasi-Kun in 1991. Golden felt obligated to complete the work, but the project stagnated until the mid-1990s, when he received a grant from the American Research Institute in Yemen that allowed him to use computer technology to format pages for publication. Sadly, Schutz died just a few months before the book came out. Although not much is known about Al-Malik al-Afdal al-Abbas, the dictionary does provide some insights into his culture. Golden points, for instance, to the large number of entries for food and drink, along with the unexpected inclusion of a word meaning the fold of fat above the abdomen. There is also the term for the box for storing black eyeshadow, then fashionable for both men and women. The dictionary contains the word for Chinese duck, probably indicating some contact with the Far East. One word that puzzled the researchers for many years turned out to be the Turkic term for chopsticks -- literally "two pieces of wood with which one eats noodles" in Arabic. Scholars should find the Hexaglot a rich source of materials about both medieval Islamic culture and the development of modern languages, Golden maintains. Linguists and philologists will be better able to trace the phonetic history of the represented languages from their classical to modern forms. Cultural historians will be interested in studying such sections as those dealing with foods of the times or articles of clothing. "The Hexaglot is one of those works that every time I open it up and look at it, I find something new. It never ceases to surprise me," Golden says. Meanwhile, Golden, author of several other books dealing with the Turkic world, has moved on to other projects, including a book on the history of the Qipchaqs, an important Turkic people of medieval Eurasia from whom many of the modern Turkic peoples derive, and another on the politics and culture of the steppe peoples of Eurasia, an area he has spent the major part of his scholarly career exploring. He doesn't expect either project to take a quarter century, but then one never knows. Catastrophe in the Making It's not every day that a scholar studying the ancient nomadic steppe peoples of Eurasia is asked to participate in a television program meant for the mass market, but that's just what happened to Newark history Professor Peter B. Golden. "Catastrophe: The Day the Sun Went Out" was aired in Britain in 1999 and in the United States last May on PBS. It was among the best-rated science shows ever broadcast by the BBC, Golden reports. Golden's role as a TV personality began when he received a phone call from David Keys, a well-known journalist who writes for The Independent, a British publication. Keys was working on a theory that the end of the ancient world was precipitated by the explosion of a volcano, which spewed sufficient amounts of matter into the atmosphere to cause major climatic changes, leading to famine and disease. The resulting social disruption, according to Keys, changed the course of human history worldwide. With money from the BBC, Keys was turning his theory into a television special. Keys used tree ring data and contemporary accounts to place the explosion at Krakatoa in 535. He then turned to events in diverse civilizations from Constantinople to Mexico. Among the societies he studied was that of the Mongolian Avars, a warrior tribe defeated by the Turks in the late 550s. It is a subject Golden knows well. So Golden was flown to Denver to discuss these peoples and the role climate might have played in their downfall. Specifically, Keys theorized that the Avar culture was based almost entirely on horses, while the Turks herded both cattle and horses. With the climatic cooling, there was no longer enough vegetation for horses to survive and the Avar civilization crumbled. "David's an interesting guy with a lively imagination. But he's also a hard-headed journalist. I think his theory is within the realm of possibility," Golden concedes. "But the evidence that the Avar defeat was the result of a volcanic eruption is circumstantial. It could have happened that way, but I don't know of any firm evidence that it did happen that way. We don't really know enough. There's no evidence that the Turks, who also were nomads, had more cows than the Avars and why that, in particular, should have been a factor in their military success. We do know that the Turks worked as ironsmiths and had skills in metallurgy, and that might have been a bigger factor." A viewer, however, might not catch Golden's skepticism in the final program. "I was a bit surprised with what they showed on TV. They interviewed me for 45 minutes, and I gave a lengthy talk about migrations and ethnic changes and the differences between the Avars of Europe and those of the Far East, all of which died on the cutting-room floor. Instead, they had me talking about how after a meal the Avar ladies licked the plates clean." Nevertheless, Golden took this first experience with filming in stride. "It was lots of fun to do," he says. "One of the things that was very positive is that Keys is trying to combine history with archaeology, ecology and climate studies, and that's a very valid and useful thing to do, even in popularized form. Yes, they overstate the case, but that's how you get people alerted to these issues. Increasingly, historians are looking in ever narrower boxes. This is opening it all up." -- Phyllis Gottlieb

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