Note 235 — ARAB REFERENCES.1

According to Ibni Haukal (a.d. 170) from Kambáya to Saimúr the villages lay close to one another and much land was under cultivation.235 At the end236 of the eleventh century trade was brisk merchandise from every country finding its way to the ports of Gujarát whose local products were in turn exported all over the east.237 The Ráshṭrakúṭa dominion was vast, well-peopled, commercial, and fertile.238 The people lived mostly on a vegetable diet, rice peas beans haricots and lentils being their daily food.239 Al Idrísi speaks of certain Hindus eating animals whose deaths had been caused by falls or by being gored,240 but Al Masúdi states that the higher classes who wore the “baldric like yellow thread” (the Janoi) abstained from flesh. According to Ibni Haukal (a.d. 968–970) the ordinary dress of the kings of Hind was trousers and a tunic.241 He also notices that between Kambáyah and Saimúr the Muslims and infidels wear the same cool fine muslin dress and let their beards grow in the same fashion.242 During the tenth century on high days the Balhára wore a crown of gold and a dress of rich stuff. The attendant women were richly clad, wearing rings of gold and silver upon their feet and hands and having their hair in curls.243 At the close of the Hindu period (a.d. 1300) Rashíd-ud-dín describes Gujarát as a flourishing country with no less than 80,000 villages and hamlets the people happy the soil rich growing in the four seasons seventy varieties of flowers. Two harvests repaid the husbandman, the earlier crop refreshed by the dew of the cold season the late crop enriched by a certain rainfall.244