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Ahmet Bican: Durr-i Meknun: (The hidden Pearls) (d1454) Turkey

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Ahmed Bican Yazıcıoglu (? – c. 1466) was an Ottoman author most noted for the cosmography Durr-i Meknun. He translated and compiled from Arab into Turkish. The Durr-i Meknun approaches the world from the Creation according to cosmographic tradition: the heavenly bodies, tales of ancient peoples, prophecies and divine punishments, discourses on stones, images, medicinal plants, mythical creatures, faraway countries, seas and islands. His remarks about Zanzibar do not learn us anything new.

 

Taken from: Durr-i meknun  by Ahmet Bican, Necdet Sakaoglu

 

P52

(In the story of Iskander travelling and concurring the world)

…..If you see it soon, your bones will stay in that country. He even saw a well, and forty kinds of sacrifices to come, and he spoke forty languages. If the escaping rain falls, those devils will rule. Rain rises again. He even saw a well in Zengibar…….

P60

Where is the source of the Nile, the place is in a gigantic mountain. It starts in the Kuh-i Kaf (mountain of Camphor). And ends in the sea of Oman. The Nile comes out of twelve sources………...There are three divisions. One section comes out in Habash, it is poured into Bahr-i Uman and a division goes to the Maghrib, and a division comes to Egypt…..

P68

……No one ever gets in there. Alexander wanted to enter anyhow. They came to a warrior who said: Do not enter, or you will be destroyed! Do not enter, they say there is a province, called Zengibar, and there are many elephants, monsters, and hundreds of elephants. Abyss (Habash=Ethiopia) is the great province, and the apostle of the Messenger of Allah has not reached the end of Habesh……..

P71

(When talking about the southern part of the earth)

….In the mountains. The elephant and the rhinoceros are there. There is the giraffe and various kinds of monsters in the climate that is outside the climate zones.

P90

…..The elephant lives for a century. Lion lives seven hundred years. The giraffe lives for three centuries.

 P104

(when talking about miracles) 

Even in the sea of Zengibar it sometimes appears (the smiling face of the Prophet)