Barus, Sumatra, in a Medieval Egyptian Text
For Christmas last year, I was given an excellent book as a gift: selections from Shihāb al-Dīn Ahmad b. ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Nuwayri’s
نهاية الأرب في فنون الأدب, or ‘The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition’, written in Egypt in the early fourteenth century and translated from the Arabic by Elias Muhanna for Penguin Classics (2016).
The book is quite slim — about 360 pages including index and introduction — but according to Muhanna’s introduction, al-Nuwayri’s original encyclopaedia was two million words long and consisted of thirty-three volumes of eclectic but well-organized material. ‘Ambitious’ isn’t the word: the encyclopaedia was an attempt to comprehensively account for everything in the world known to the people of Mamluk Egypt — including, among other things, the hyena, an animal
‘…like the rabbit, which changes its sex. Its names include the Shitter, the Soiled One, Marrow-Slurper, Long-Mane, the Lame, and the Limper.’
And the sweet mulberry,
‘…which resembles the fig in its manner of ripening, except that it is less nutritious, more corrupting and less productive of blood, and worse for the bowels.’
Such vivid and occasionally disturbing descriptions abound in the book. There are so many superb nuggets, especially in the section entitled
‘ON THE MEDICINES THAT PROMOTE SEXUAL POTENCY AND MAKE COITUS PLEASURABLE, AND ON THE RELATED SUBJECTS OF MEDICINES FOR THE PENIS, MEDICINES THAT AID CONCEPTION AND PREVENT IT, AND SO ON.’
It is endlessly fascinating to dip into — as fascinating now as it must have been for al-Nuwayri’s original readership. I strongly recommend it as a glimpse into the odder side of medieval Arabic scholarship
In any case, a small number of products and places in or of the Indo-Malaysian archipelago are mentioned in al-Nuwayri’s work and can be found in Muhanna’s abridged version. I don’t think any of them are explicitly labelled as Indonesian in the notes, though the original text does use place names that aid in the identification (e.g. Zābaj — see below).
One of these Indonesian products is camphor (pronounced /ˈkæmfə/), which al-Nuwayri calls ‘the most noble of all the resins’.
Camphor is a waxy white substance that people across Afro-Eurasia once put in their food and medicine. These days it’s used in decongestant balms and rubs, but apparently it was formerly used to make sweets and as a spice in sauces, and early Indonesian sources sometimes refer to betel quids flavoured with camphor as well. I suppose in principle this is no stranger than the culinary use of Chios mastic in Greece and western Turkey — which I happen to think is quite tasty, especially in ice cream.
Camphor can be derived from the wood of several tree species that grow across southern China, Taiwan, mainland Southeast Asia, and the Indo-Malaysian islands, but the best camphor in the world was said to come from Barus, a port in Sumatra near the present-day town of Sibolga. The European, Arabic, Chinese, and Indonesian sources all concur on this point: indeed, it’s rare to come across a mention of kapur (camphor) in an early Indonesian text that isn’t kapur Barus.
Here’s what al-Nuwayri says about the provenance of this honoured substance:
There are certain places where camphor is typically found. Among them is Fanṣūr, which is an island that is seven hundred farsakhs in perimeter and is known as the Land of Gold. The camphor that comes from there is the finest of all types. Another place that camphor is found is Arbashīr, and also al-Zābaj. The camphor from there is the worst kind.
The toponyms are frankly a bit of a jumble. Fanṣūr is clear enough: it was the Arabic name for Barus, and it was also the appellation by which European travellers like Marco Polo tended to know it. You will note, though, that Barus is not an island but rather a place on the island of Sumatra.
That makes the final place name a little troublesome, as al-Zābaj (الزابج) almost always refers to Śrīvijaya (or its successors), a kingdom also on the island of Sumatra. You may note the similarity between Zābaj and the word ‘Java’; you may also recall that Sumatra and Java were routinely confused in medieval western Eurasian texts. This is probably not coincidental.
Al-Nuwayri was certainly not unique in the medieval world in failing to accurately distinguish between islands and kingdoms in Southeast Asia. The Polo texts also label Malaiur an island (ille) even though the name probably referred to the city-based kingdom of Malayu on the east coast of Sumatra. Sumatra, it seems, abounded in islands. Interestingly, in some early Indonesian texts — like the fifteenth-century Old Sundanese poem Bujangga Manik that I’ve mentioned several times on this blog — the words for ‘island’, ‘continent’, and ‘country’ are not often explicitly distinguished (the name for all three in BM is nusa, from a Malayo-Polynesian root of the same form meaning ‘island’). Whether these phenomena are related is an open question.
The ‘Land of Gold’ is an old name for Southeast Asia — whether mainland or maritime or both. It is also (kind of) the name for Bangkok International Airport. To explain this particular name would take several blogposts, but suffice it to say for now that the Land of Gold is in no way identical with Barus and seldom features as such in medieval geographic texts, whether in Arabic, Latin, Old French, Sanskrit, Chinese, or the Indonesian languages.
Finally, the name Arbashīr is not clear to me, and if you have any idea about it do leave a comment. Context suggests that it’s in Southeast Asia, but it might not be.
The peculiar variation in such toponyms is important in its own right; it suggests that geographical understanding was not evenly distributed even among elite medieval scholars and encyclopaedists in the Middle Ages. In my view this means that philologists working on medieval geographical material ought to focus on the variants in preference to recreating the constitutio textus, as the variants allow a better view on what people in England and Egypt and Venice actually knew, or thought they knew, about the world. But that’s really a topic for another time.
Al-Nuwayri’s description of the camphor trade is more lore than geographical science, and his description of the collection of camphor is, as with much of his encyclopaedia, full of romantic and fantastical images. If you want to read the full account then I’m afraid you’ll have to buy the Penguin Classics edition. I’m quite sure you won’t regret it.
