List or table: ENA 1822a.66

Description

India Book III,20: Accounts, perhaps in the hand of one of Ibn Yijū’s workers; not his handwriting. Similar to India Book III,19 (CUL Or.1080 J95, PGPID 5554 and PGPID 5555). The account was clearly written in India, as the prices are given in Indian coinage, Kūlamī fīlīs, i.e., from the port city Quilon on the Malabar Coast, and in fanam. The writer's anonymous associate, whose account is registered here, was charged for the receipt of various commodities, including both Indian products and items usually imported for personal use from Yemen and the West. He must have been a Yemeni or someone from elsewhere in the West who was staying in India. Commodities: civet, cinnabar, a copper pot, glass vessels, raisins, a lamp (or Indian horse chestnut? qandalī), sugar, honey, myrrh, storax, and Egyptian sugar. One of the important pieces of information to emerge from this document (assuming the merchant was careful with his sums) is that the fanam was not precisely a quarter of a fīlī but slightly less: here, the ratio is 0.236. (Information from India Book and Goitein’s index card.) Not edited in the India Book: an additional list of accounts on verso, written in Arabic script and Greek/Coptic numerals and headed by the glyph. One of the items on that list is zabada (civet), indicating that it is probably connected to the Judaeo-Arabic account. The word "fīlī" in Arabic script may also appear at bottom left.