The King's Dictionary: The Rasulid Hexaglot: Fourteenth Century Vocabularies in Arabic, Persian, Turkic, Greek, Armenian and Mongol.

• Author: Dankoff, Robert
• Position: Review

The King's Dictionary: The Rasulid Hexaglot: Fourteenth Century Vocabularies in Arabic, Persian, Turkic, Greek, Armenian and Mongol. Translated by TIBOR HALASI-KUN, PETER B. GOLDEN, LOUIS LIGETI, and EDMUND SCHUTZ, with Introductory essays by PETER B. GOLDEN and THOMAS T. ALLSEN. Edited with Notes and commentary by PETER B. GOLDEN. Handbook of Oriental Studies, section 8: Central Asia, vol. 4. Leiden: BRILL, 2000. Pp. xiii + 418, plates.

The term "Rasulid Hexaglot" applies to several vocabularia or word lists covering twenty manuscript pages of a 542-page Arabic anthology drawn up by the sixth Rasulid sultan of Yemen, al-Malik al-Afdal (d. 1377). The anthology also includes medicinal and astronomical texts, treatises on politics and warfare, and short texts on many other topics. It was published in facsimile by Daniel Martin Varisco and G. Rex Smith for the E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Trust in 1998.

The volume under review represents the collaborative effort of several leading scholars over twenty-five years. Initiated by Halasi-Kun, it has finally been brought to completion by Peter B. Golden after the deaths of the latter's three collaborators. Golden has published an analysis of the Greek material elsewhere (Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 5 [1985]: 41-166). The original plan also called for monographic treatment of the Turkic (by Tibor Halasi-Kun), the Mongol (by Louis Ligeti) and the Armenian (by Edmund Schlitz), and there is hope that at least the first two of these will soon be published. The present volume is enhanced by a wonderfully informative essay, "The Rasulid Hexaglot in its Eurasian Cultural Context," by Thomas T. Allsen. Golden also provides a good deal of information about the sources, the languages, and the organization and transcription of the text, plus complete indices of the six languages as well as an English index. The facsimile is slightly clearer than the corresponding pages in th e Varisco and Smith publication, but the latter occasionally shows some details that have been cut off in the former.

The centerpiece of the volume is an edition of the word lists. Each entry includes: a reading of the word or phrase in Arabic script--frequently a restoration or reconstruction based on philological principles, since the original is greatly defective; a Latinized transcription; and an English gloss or translation--invariably for the Arabic which is taken as the "control" language, often for the other languages as well, when the meaning is not precisely the same as the Arabic.

The edition of this unwieldy hodgepodge of lexical items is a marvel of...