THE RUBRIC OF MOSQUES.* EVERY one who has visited Cairo
has admired the decorative effect of the Arabic inscriptions which form friezes above the arches, and margins to the marble dados, and, with their enlaced letters shining in gold on red or blue grounds, seem to furnish the rubric explanation of what is going on beneath them. Sometimes these long borders of inscriptions are merely decorative ; that is, they contain passages from the Koran,—like the famous carved wooden frieze in the mosque of Ibn-Tulun, which is supposed to present the whole of the sacred text, though in reality it does not contain much more than one-twentieth part of it. Such texts are beautiful to behold, when drawn with the exquisite skill of a real calligrapher, but they are monotonous to read, and the repetitions of the famous " Throne-Verse " from Sum a IL are as frequent as the favourite texts at Christmas or Easter over our own rural altars and pulpits. But a large proportion of the inscriptions in a mosque are of a much more interesting character, and are really informing. These were inscribed by order of the founder or the re- storer of the building, and it is often easy to trace the whole history of a monastic, collegiate, or sepulchral mosque by the series of inscriptions set up in its various parts at different times by the Kings or nobles who wished to pre- serve the venerated shrine. It is not uncommon to find bar or five inscriptions recording restorations or additions made at intervals of several centuries, all dated, with the names and titles of the restorers ; and an examination of the structure will generally reveal clearly enough where the restorations began and left off. There are not a few cathedrals and churches in England where we should be grateful for the like precise records. Sometimes the actual title-deed of a mosque is engraved on its walls, as in the case of the collegiate mosque of Bars-Bey, where an inscription enumerates all the houses, shops, mills, lands, &v., which that Sultan had constituted a trust for the endowment of the " medresa.," and directs the mode of their appropriation. Such inscriptions are full of topographical data. But even the most ordinary among • Mafi:riaux pour un Corpus Inscriptionum rabicarum. Par Max van Berchern. 3 rob. Paris : Ministkre de l'Instruction publicue at (Up Be tux-Arts. [76 fr.]
these invaluable documents tells us something about the founder or the restorer, and often about the people he employed in the work. A very commonplace inscription is found, for example, in the mosque of the Emir Jany- Bek ; it runs (after the usual Koranic flourish by way of preface) : "The construction of this holy mosque was ordered by his Excellency Seyf-ed-din Ja.ny-Bek, the secretary and mamluke of the sultan the king el-Ashraf, God send him victorious : dated in the year 830" [1426-7 A.D.] Here we have not merely a date, but the full name and title, the office, and the master, of the Mamluke noble of slave origin who built the mosque. Sometimes the string of titles and offices stretches over many lines, and takes no little skill to unravel; but every title and epithet has its meaning and derivation in the complicated system of Mamluke names, and the Court offices are all known and defined in certain books of cere- monies. If there were enough mosques, and all the great officers of Court had been anxious about their souls, and con- sequently prone to church-building, we should have a com- plete series of all office-bearers. As it is, we have a much larger body of historical data than most people imagine. Indeed, if all the Arabic inscriptions on mosques and other buildings, and all the Arabic data supplied by coins, were pub- lished, there would be a wonderfully complete and exact chronological and genealogical skeleton on which to build up the flesh and blood of history. For a good many years Professor Lane - Poole has been preparing a corpus of Arabic coin inscriptions from every known source, which will when completed form a kind of Fasti Arabici for Mohammedan history ; and meanwhile the even more important mural inscriptions have been taken in hand by M. Max van Berchem, of Geneva, who is probably the finest Arabic epigraphist on the Continent, and who joins to a remarkable skill in decipherment sound Arabic scholarship and a wide acquaintance with the his- torical literature bearing on his subject.
The "Corpus of Arabic Inscriptions" which is growing out of M. van Berehem's labours will be one of the most important aids to the historian of the mediaeval East that has ever been produced. So far the compiler —though he has already made some preliminary journeys in Syria, very fruitful in results—has confined his detailed publication of texts to Egypt, and principally Cairo. Professor Mehren, of Copenhagen, was the first to attempt a collection of these inscriptions some fifty years ago, and his work, incomplete as it was, is still of great value, since it describes some texts that have since dis- appeared. M. van Berchem, however, has discovered a number of inedited documents, and the total number of inscriptions in Cairo alone published in the three volumes of his " Corpus " considerably exceeds four hundred. The learned editor does not limit his task to reproducing each inscription in Arabic text and French translation; he illustrates it with an elaborate commentary, historical, epigraphic, and grammatical, and offers minute and exceedingly instructive explanations of the precise meaning, relation, and sequence of the official titles that abound in these Mamluke texts. The subject is too technical to be pursued here, but it may be stated that M. van Berchem throws new and important light upon some specially obscure points. The whole work is a marvel of conscientious labour and finished scholarship. We gather that the author ends his collection of Cairo inscriptions at the Ottoman conquest in 1517. There are few documents of later date that present much interest, and those that do are usually inscribed in older mosques, and consequently appear in their proper place in the Ccrpus. A volume of addenda and a most necessary index will, we believe, complete the Cairo section. It is to be hoped that the addenda will include all inscriptions stolen from mosques and now in various museums and private collections, of which a great many are blown. Further, when the in- scriptions of the rest of Egypt are catalogued (there are a few texts, by the way, in the present volume which do not belong to Cairo), it is essential that the whole series of Arab grave- stones from the Aswan cemetery, now in the Cairo Museum, should be registered, though there is no necessity in most cases for copying more than the dates and names. But M. van Berchem may be trusted to carry out his colossal work in the most thorough manner. Possibly he may be attracted to Syria, where so much valuable material awaits the epigraphist, before finishing the rest of Egypt, where not
much remains to be done; and if so, we shall not blame him. In Syria the monuments are less safe than in Egypt, and it may be necessary to lose no time in rescuing their docu- ments from perishing altogether. They will amply repay the labour, and some will add to the existing Crusading materials.
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