Note 242 — KHUDADAD AND HIS BROTHERS.

The onager, confounded by our older travellers with the zebra, is the Gúr-i-khár of Persia, where it is the noblest game from which kings did not disdain to take a cognomen, e.g. Bahrám-i-Gúr. It is the “wild ass” of Jeremiah (ii. 24: xiv. 6). The meat is famous in poetry for combining the flavours peculiar to all kinds of flesh (Ibn Khallikan iii. 117; iii. 239, etc.) and is noticed by Herodotus (Clio. cxxxiii.) and by Xenophon (Cyro. lib. 1) in sundry passages: the latter describes the relays of horses and hounds which were used in chasing it then as now. The traveller Olearius (A.D. 1637) found it more common than in our present day: Shah Abbas turned thirty-two wild asses into an enclosure where they were shot as an item of entertainment to the ambassadors at his court. The skin of the wild ass’s back produces the famous shagreen, a word seemingly derived from the Pers. “Saghrí,” e.g. “Kyafsh-i-Saghri” = slippers of shagreen, fine wear fit for a “young Duke.” See in Ibn Khallikan (iv. 245) an account of a “Júr” (the Arabised “Gúr”) eight hundred years old.