[ Page 246.] ... violate the rights of hospitality
So high an idea of these rights prevails amongst the Arabians, that “a bread and salt traitor,” is the most opprobrious invective with which one person can reproach another.—Richardson’s Dissertation on the Languages, etc., of Eastern Nations, p. 219. See also the Story of Ali Baba and The Forty Thieves, in the Arabian Nights, vol. iv, p. 166.
[ Page 246.] ... narcotic powder
A drug of the same quality, mixed in lemonade, is given to Zobeide, in the Story of Ganem.
[ Page 248.] Funeral vestments were prepared; their bodies washed, etc.
The rites here practised had obtained from the earliest ages. Most of them may be found in Homer and the other poets of Greece. Lucian describes the dead in his time as washed, perfumed, vested, and crowned, ὡραιος ανθεσιν, with the flowers most in season; or, according to other writers, those in particular which the deceased were wont to prefer. The elegant editor of the Ruins of Palmyra mentions the fragments of a mummy found there, the hair of which was plaited exactly in the manner as worn at present by the women of Arabia.
The burial dress from the days of Homer hath been commonly white, and amongst Mahometans is made without a seam, that it may not impede the ceremonial of kneeling in the grave, when the dead person undergoes examination.—Homer, Euripides, etc., passim. Lucian, tom. ii, p. 927. Paschal, De Coron., p. 225. Ruins of Palmyra, pp. 22, 23. Iliad, xviii, 352. Relig. Cerem., vol. vii, p. 117.
[ Page 248.] ... all instruments of music were broken
Thus, in the Arabian Nights: “Haroun al Raschid wept over Schemselnihar, and, before he left the room, ordered all the musical instruments to be broken.”—Vol. ii, p. 196.