Blowguns and Cannons in Medieval Greek
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As I mentioned in the previous post, ‘camphor’ is one of only a handful of words of Indo-Malaysian origin to have found their way to the Middle East and Europe prior to the sixteenth century. The others include ‘junk’ — the type of enormous ocean-going ship attested in several travellers’ accounts, from Old Javanese joṅ — and words in various languages for ‘blowgun/blowpipe’, including French sarbacane and Spanish cerbatana.
Blowguns
These French and Spanish words ultimately derive, if you can believe it, from the Malay word for ‘blowgun’, sumpitan, by way of Tamil ceṅkuttāṉ (செங்குத்தான்), and Arabic zarbaṭānah (زربطانة) (see Hornell 1924 for an early presentation of this theory).
The blowgun — a long thin tube out of which a dart, often poisoned, is propelled by the force of the breath — was invented in prehistory somewhere in island Southeast Asia, perhaps in Borneo, where blowguns are still made and used. The Malay word goes back to the Malayo-Polynesian protoform *sumpit, reflexes of which can be found in other languages in the archipelago; a related term, pañu(m)pit ‘blowgunner’, can be found in the Old Sundanese encyclopaedic text Sanghyang Siksakandang Karesian, a manuscript of which in the National Library of Indonesia bears a colophon dating it to 1518 CE (1440 Śaka) (Figure 1):
(I should point out that this is a pretty early date for a surviving Southeast Asian manuscript.)
The concept of the blowgun spread across Afro-Eurasia over the course of the Middle Ages, and the word appears to have followed the concept on its way west — being distorted at each step en route, as you can see above. The first evidence of its arrival in Europe is from the fourteenth century, and there are occasional pre-sixteenth-century manuscript illustrations depicting the weapon. The oldest Southeast Asian reliefs portraying blowguns appear considerably earlier than this, of course (Figure 2):
This means, by the way, that Portuguese sources on the conquest of Melaka in 1511 use a word to refer to Malay blowguns, zarabatana, that itself had Malay roots — an early example of a Southeast Asian Wanderwort circling back on itself (much like the example I mentioned last time — the modern Malay use of the word kamper to mean ‘camphor’, a word which is derived from the English word ‘camphor’, which is in turn ultimately from the Malay word kapur).
Cannons
In any case, by the fifteenth century these ‘blowgun’ words were being applied around the Mediterranean to a type of long-barrelled cannon. This name appears in Greek — as ζαροβοτάνας (Romanised: zarobotánas) — in an episode in The Histories (Book 7.37), a world history written by an Athenian named Laonikos Chalkokondyles in around 1465, some time after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. Describing John Hunyadi’s Hungarian and Wallachian army of 1448, which made extensive use of Hussite-style war wagons (Figure 3 below), Chalkokondyles says (2016[~1465]:II:129):
TEXT
Ἐφ’ ἑκάτης δὲ ἁμάξης δύο ἤστην ἄνδρε πεζώ, πελταστής τε ἅμα καὶ τηλεβολιστής. ᾿Εφέροντο δὲ καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν ἁμαξῶν τηλεβόλους ζαροβοτάνας καλουμένας, πολὺ τὸ πλῆθος. Οὗ μὲν οὖν οὕτω παρασκευασάμενοι [ἐσ] τὸν Ἴστρον διέβησαν.
TRANSLATION by ANTHONY KALDELLIS
‘On each wagon were two infantrymen, a regular soldier, and an artilleryman. The wagons also carried a large number of cannons called zarobotane. They had prepared for war in that way and had crossed the Danube.’
It is likely the word was introduced to Greek from Italian. The Chalkokondyles family had longstanding links with Italy — Laonikos probably died in Italy, in fact — and similar forms of the word are found in Italian texts of a similar period. (The word zarobotane appears in one of the early Italian manuscripts of Antonio Pigafetta’s account of the first circumnavigation of the world, for instance, there describing a true blowgun and not a cannon. This is admittedly several decades after Chalkokondyles was writing.)
Anthony Kaldellis, who edited and translated Chalkokondyles’s Histories, describes these cannons as ‘[s]ome kind of long barrage cannons or firelocks that fired leaden balls’ (p.498, n.42). Treccani defines cerbottana, the standard Italian version of the same word, as ‘[a f]irearm consisting of a long metal tube, used in the fifteenth century like an arquebus or musket; it was called cerbottana ambulante if mounted on a four-wheeled trolley’. These weapons were presumably inspired in some way by the shape and length of the blowgun. Either way, the name is derived from a Malay antecedent.
Incidentally, it’s entirely possible that the gunpowder used in these long thin cannons contained camphor, the Indonesian tree product we looked at in the last post. It could certainly be found in Central European gunpowder recipes in the fifteenth century, as I’ve noted before. Two (probable) Indo-Malaysian links in one!
I was going to write about medieval Greek words for spices in this post as well, but I’ll save that for a separate post. There’s another intriguing Greek connection with island Southeast Asian vocabulary that I’ll discuss in a later post too. I still don’t know the language properly but that’s fine for my purposes. One day I might get round to learning Greek…
A. J. West — Leiden, 2021
REFERENCES
Chalkokondyles, Laonikos. 2014 [~1465]. The histories. Two volumes. Anthony Kaldellis (ed and trans). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cranstone, B. A. L. 1949. The blowgun in Europe. Man. 49: 119.
Hornell, James. 1924. South Indian blow-guns, boomerangs, and crossbows. Journal of the royal anthropological institute of Great Britain and Ireland. 54:316–346.
