Among objects of interest are the alleged tombs of Esther and Mordecai in an insignificant domed building in the centre of the town. There are two wooden sarcophagi carved all over with Hebrew inscriptions. That ascribed to Mordecai has the verses Isaiah lix. 8; Esther ii. 5; Ps. xvi. 9, 10, 11, and the date of its erection A.M. 4318 (A.D. 557). The inscriptions on the other sarcophagus consist of the verses Esther ix. 29, 32, x. 1; and the statement that it was placed there A.M. 4602 (A.D. 841) by "the pious and righteous woman Gemal Setan." A tablet let into the wall states that the building was repaired A.M. 4474 (A.D. 713). Hamadan also has the grave of the celebrated physician and philosopher Abu Ali ibn Sina, better known as Avicenna (d. 1036). It is now generally admitted that Hamadan is the Hagmatana (of the inscriptions), Agbatana or Ecbatana (q.v., of the Greek writers), the "treasure city" of the Achaemenian kings which was taken and plundered by Alexander the Great, but very few ancient remains have been discovered. A rudely carved stone lion, which lies on the roadside close to the southern extremity of the city, and by some is supposed to have formed part of a building of the ancient city, is locally regarded as a talisman against famine, plague, cold, &c., placed there by Pliny, who is popularly known as the sorcerer Balinas (a corruption of Plinius). Entry: HAMADAN
BIRUNI [ABU-R-RAIHAN MUHAMMAD AL-BIRUNI] (973-1048), Arabian scholar, was born of Persian parentage in Khwarizm (Khiva), and was a Shi'ite in religion. He devoted his youth to the study of history, chronology, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy and medicine. He corresponded with Ibn Sina (see AVICENNA), and the answers of the latter are still preserved in the British Museum. For some years he lived in Jurjan, and then went to India, where he remained some years teaching Greek philosophy and learning Indian. In 1017 he was taken by Mahmud of Ghazni to Afghanistan, where he remained until his death in 1048. His _Athar ul-Bakiya_ (Vestiges of the Past) was published by C.E. Sachau (Leipzig, 1878), and a translation into English under the title _The Chronology of Ancient Nations_ (London, 1879). His _History of India_ was published by C.E. Sachau (London, 1887), and an English translation (2 vols., London, 1888). Other works of his, chiefly on mathematics and astronomy, are still in manuscript only. Entry: BIRUNI
In the course of that exile the traces of Semitic or Mahommedan influence gradually faded away, and the last of the line of Saracenic thinkers was a truer exponent of the one philosophy which they all professed to teach than the first. The whole movement is little else than a chapter in the history of Aristotelianism. That system of thought, after passing through the minds of those who saw it in the hazy light of an orientalized Platonism, and finding many laborious but narrow-purposed cultivators in the monastic schools of heretical Syria, was then brought into contact with the ideas and mental habits of Islam. But those in whom the two currents converged did not belong to the pure Arab race. Of the so-called Arabian philosophers of the East, al-Farabi, Ibn<b>-Sina and al-Ghazali were natives of Khorasan, Bokhara and the outlying provinces of north-eastern Persia; whilst al-Kindi, the earliest of them, sprang from Basra, on the Persian Gulf, on the debatable ground between the Semite and the Aryan. In Spain, again, where Ibn-Bajja, Ibn-Tufail and Ibn Rushd rivalled or exceeded the fame of the Eastern schools, the Arabians of pure blood were few, and the Moorish ruling class was deeply intersected by Jewish colonies, and even by the natives of Christian Spain. Thus, alike at Bagdad and at Cordova, Arabian philosophy represents the temporary victory of exotic ideas and of subject races over the theological one-sidedness of Islam, and the illiterate simplicity of the early Saracens. Entry: ARABIAN
The Egyptian pilgrim route from Cairo, across the Sinai peninsula and down the Midian coast to El Wijh, joins the Syrian route at Badr Hunen. It also was formerly provided with stations and reservoirs, but owing to the greater facilities of the sea journey from Suez to Jidda it is now little used. Another important route is that taken by the Persian or Shia pilgrims from Bagdad and Kerbela across the desert, by the wells of Lina, to Bureda in Kasim; thence across the steppes of western Nejd till it crosses the Hejaz border at the Ria Mecca, 50 m. north-east of the city. It lies almost entirely in the territory of the amir Ibn Rashid of J. Shammar, who derives a considerable revenue from the pilgrimage. The old reservoirs on this route attributed to Zubeda, wife of Harun al Rashid, were destroyed during the Wahhabi raids early in the 19th century, and have not been repaired. The Yemen pilgrim route, known as the Haj el Kabsi, led from Sada through Asir to Taif and Mecca, but it is no longer used. Entry: A
BURCKHARDT, JOHN LEWIS [JOHANN LUDWIG] (1784-1817), Swiss traveller and orientalist, was born at Lausanne on the 24th of November 1784. After studying at Leipzig and Göttingen he visited England in the summer of 1806, carrying a letter of introduction from the naturalist Blumenbach to Sir Joseph Banks, who, with the other members of the African Association, accepted his offer to explore the interior of Africa. After studying in London and Cambridge, and inuring himself to all kinds of hardships and privations, Burckhardt left England in March 1809 for Malta, whence he proceeded, in the following autumn, to Aleppo. In order to obtain a better knowledge of oriental life he disguised himself as a Mussulman, and took the name of Sheikh Ibrahim Ibn Abdallah. After two years passed in the Levant he had thoroughly mastered Arabic, and had acquired such accurate knowledge of the Koran, and of the commentaries upon its religion and laws, that after a critical examination the most learned Mussulmans entertained no doubt of his being really what he professed to be, a learned doctor of their law. During his residence in Syria he visited Palmyra, Damascus, Lebanon and thence journeyed via Petra to Cairo with the intention of joining a caravan to Fezzan, and of exploring from there the sources of the Niger. In 1812, whilst waiting for the departure of the caravan, he travelled up the Nile as far as Dar Mahass; and then, finding it impossible to penetrate westward, he made a journey through the Nubian desert in the character of a poor Syrian merchant, passing by Berber and Shendi to Suakin, on the Red Sea, whence he performed the pilgrimage to Mecca by way of Jidda. At Mecca he stayed three months and afterwards visited Medina. After enduring privations and sufferings of the severest kind, he returned to Cairo in June 1815 in a state of great exhaustion; but in the spring of 1816 he travelled to Mount Sinai, whence he returned to Cairo in June, and there again made preparations for his intended journey to Fezzan. Several hindrances prevented his prosecuting this intention, and finally, in April 1817, when the long-expected caravan prepared to depart, he was seized with illness and died on the 15th of October. He had from time to time carefully transmitted to England his journals and notes, and a very copious series of letters, so that nothing which appeared to him to be interesting in the various journeys he made has been lost. He bequeathed his collection of 800 vols. of oriental MSS. to the library of Cambridge University. Entry: BURCKHARDT