Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
undaysābūr, that of Sūs (Susa) on the
banks of the Kar a, a tributary of the
Du ¡ ayl;
- in the region of Bara, in the 4th/10th
century, according to Bayhaī, who
wrote in the age of al-Mutadir;
- in abaristān to the south of the Cas-
pian, in the region of Mīla;
- in Fārs, Makrān, Kirmān;
- in urāsān, in the region of Bal ;
- in Sind; in Umān;
- in Syria-Palestine, at Kābūl, Tyre (plan-
tations in the hands of the Venetians at
the time of the Crusades), and Beirut;
- in the fi awr of the Jordan valley; and
at Tiberias;
- in Egypt, the cultivation of sugar cane
has been attested there by some papyri
in the 2nd century A.D.; yet, if this
cultivation was not exactly introduced
there by the Arabs, it was in fact they
who developed it, along the length
of the Nile, from Upper Egypt to its
mouth, the best ground being the low-
lying land watered by the branches of
Rosetta and Damietta. Al-Masūdī notes
the great richness of Egypt in sugar and
al-ala ª andī says that production far
exceeded that of the fi awr.
- In Sin ¡ ar, the word aab in al-
Muaddasī really seems to designate the
sugar cane there. According to al-Zuhrī,
a geographer of the 6th-7th/12th-13th
century, edited by Hadj-Sadok, it was
also cultivated in Abyssinia.
sugar cane in a region where it is grown
at present, sc. Cilicia; in Tarsus for exam-
ple, in September, sugar cane is sold in
the streets.
Beyond the regions indicated as belong-
ing properly to the Muslim East, the cul-
tivation of sugar cane was introduced
by the Arabs, or in imitation of them,
not only into the West (North Africa,
Morocco, Spain, see below), but also into
the following countries:
- into Cyprus, where the cultivation of
the cane was highly developed in the
environs of Limassol, in the south of
the island, and at Bafa (Paphos) in the
West. In the period of the Crusades,
the family of Cornaro, the King and
the Knights of St. John had plantations
in the region of Colossi;
- into Rhodes, Crete (Candia) and even
Greece in the Morea;
- into Sicily. The Arab geographers and
al-Idrīsī do not speak of the cultivation
of sugar cane in this land (the asab
fārisī that Ibn awal mentions there
may not be sugar cane, although Lipp-
mann thinks that it does designate sugar
cane). Nevertheless, it is certain that,
towards the middle of the 4th/10th
century, sugar was already being man-
ufactured in Sicily and this sugar was
being consumed in Ifrīiya, for the
Riyā al-nufūs of al-Mālikī, dedicated
to the scholars of Qayrawān, mentions
that a faīh called Abu'l-Fal al-Abbās
b. Īsā, who died between 331/943 and
335/947 in the war against Abū Yazīd,
refused to eat a cake that he believed
to have been made with sugar from
Sicily, as a result of rights conceded by
the (Fāimid) usurper. It is certain that
Roger II and his successors encouraged
the cultivation of sugar cane in Sicily,
and the diploma cited by Amari, show
that this cultivation was flourishing in
the 6th/12th century and that sugar
Sugar cane was cultivated in several of
these regions, not only for the manufacture
of sugar, as was practised in ūzistān and
Egypt, but also to be chewed or sucked,
hence the term aab al-ma . It is this that
al-Muaddasī notes at Tiberias where, he
says, the people spent two months of the
year “playing the flute”, i.e. sucking the
cane ( yazmirūna: yamuūn al-aab ).
It is curious that the Arab geographers
do not mention at all the cultivation of
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