CHAPTER XLI.
[(1.)] “Of these four rivers I have seen three.”—Well versed as Schiltberger was in the Holy Scriptures, he could not but have been aware that the Euphrates and Tigris were included among the four rivers that had their source in Paradise; but he substitutes the Nile and Rison for the Gihon and Pison.
It is noticed elsewhere, that in the time of the Crusades the Nile and Euphrates were mistaken for each other, in consequence of the name by which a part of Cairo was known. When, after a time, the error was discovered, the Indus was substituted for the Euphrates, partly, perhaps, because Koush—Ethiopia—was confounded with the country of the Cossæi, peopled, according to the classic authors, by Ethiopians; and also because it had formerly been mistaken for Κύσσια χώρα of the ancients, known to the Hebrews as Eriz Koush, situated to the east of Babylon (Fürst, Gesch. des Karäerth., 102). Thus was it that Giovanni de’ Marignolli (Reis. in das Morgenl., 18) who passed through China and India soon after Marco Polo, mistook the Gihon of the Bible for the Indus and the Nile. Even De Lannoy (Voy. et Ambass., 88) does not venture to refute the opinion as to the continuity of these two rivers. Being under the impression that the Nile was a continuation of the Indus, Schiltberger calls the two rivers, which he believed were united, the Nile, imagining that they were identical with the Gihon or Sihon, a name that greatly resembles the Hebrew denomination of the Nile.
“Rison” could scarcely have been other than the Pison of the Bible, spelled Phison in the Nuremberg MS. (Penzel edition, 123); this accounts for the statement that gold and precious stones were found in it, produce for which the territory of Khivila, watered by the Phison, was celebrated. Schiltberger adds, that the “Rison” traversed India, whilst he identifies the Indus with the Nile; his fourth river must therefore have been the Ganges, the Phison of Moses of Chorene, who states that the river was at the limits of the two peninsulas of India, although Haythoun, his countryman, believed the Phison to be the Oxus because it divided Persia into two parts: one containing Samarkand and Bokhara; the other, the southern cities of Nishapur, Ispahan, etc. Not satisfied with having reconciled the contradictory opinions of his predecessors, in identifying the Phison with the Ganges, Giovanni de’ Marignolli unites to these two rivers the Hoang-Ho and even the Volga (Raumer, Palæstina, etc., Appendix, vii), and he represents that, after irrigating Evilach in India, the Phison passes, not only into China, where it is called the Karamora (Kara-mouran—Black River—was the name given by the Mongols to the Yellow River of the Chinese), but after disappearing in the sands behind Caffa, again shews itself and forms the Sea of Bakou—Caspian—behind Chana—Tana, now Azoff. We are bound to admit that Schiltberger is nearer the truth in saying that he had never seen the “Rison” at all, than was the bishop of Bisignano who recognised it in too many rivers at one and the same time.—Bruun.