Note 23 — Chapter V

Note 23.—On one of the Passages in this Work indicating a very late Date. The Ḥabbáneeyeh is the name now applied to a portion of a main street, a little to the west of the lake called Birket el-Feel, in the southern part of Cairo. It is evidently thus applied in the passage to which this note relates; but El-Maḳreezee, writing in the former half of the ninth century of the Flight,330 says, "In this our time, bordering upon it [the Birket el-Feel] is a garden called by the name of the Ḥabbáneeyeh, who were a family of Darmà the son of 'Amr the son of 'Owf the son of Thaạlebeh the son of Baạl the son of 'Amr the son of El-Ghóth the son of Ṭeiyi: so Darmà was a minor family of [the tribe of] Ṭeiyi, and the Ḥabbáneeyoon [or Ḥabbáneeyeh—for the terms are synonymous] were a family of Darmà; and the people have made a road between the garden of the Ḥabbáneeyeh and the lake." He proceeds to say, that on the east of the Birket el-Feel there were gardens; but that houses and streets had been built there.—Now, in the work before us, the tract which was a garden in the time of El-Maḳreezee is mentioned as occupied by houses and streets. Many years must have elapsed since that period before such could have been the case; and surely at least a century before the houses could have presented such an appearance as would lead a writer to imagine them of "ancient times." It may be objected against an argument drawn from this passage, that it is perhaps an interpolation of a copyist; but it agrees with many evidences of a late date, and occurs in at least one other copy (that from which the Breslau edition is printed), with only this slight difference—that "Ḥabbáneeyeh," by the erroneous addition of a point beneath the first letter, is converted into "Jebbáneeyeh;" and it should be remarked that the latter copy varies considerably in other points from that of Cairo. It would imply that Cairo was almost as extensive a city at the time when this work was composed or modernized as it is at present; and would account for its being here called Miṣr, or Maṣr; a name which was retained by El-Fusṭáṭ at least as late as the commencement of the tenth century of the Flight, and probably until the year 1517 of our era or a little later, as I have remarked in a former note.