1710.—"Donna Juliana ... let the Heer Ambassador know ... that the Emperor had ordered the Ammaraws Enay Ullah Chan (&c.) to take care of our interests."—Valentijn, iv. Suratte, 284.
1727.—"You made several complaints against former Governors, all of which I have here from several of my Umbras."—Firmān of Aurangzīb, in A. Hamilton, ii. 227; [ed. 1744, i. 231].
1791.—"... les Omrahs ou grands seigneurs Indiens...."—B. de St. Pierre, La Chaumière Indienne, 32.
OMUM WATER, s. A common domestic medicine in S. India, made from the strong-smelling carminative seeds of an umbelliferous plant, Carum copticum, Benth. (Ptychotis coptica, and Ptych. Ajowan of Decand.), called in Tamil omam, [which comes from the Skt. yamāni, yavāni, in Hind. ajwān.] See Hanbury and Flückiger, 269.
OOJYNE, n.p. Ujjayanī, or, in the modern vernacular, Ujjain, one of the most ancient of Indian cities, and one of their seven sacred cities. It was the capital of King Vikramaditya, and was the first meridian of Hindu astronomers, from which they calculated their longitudes.
The name of Ujjain long led to a curious imbroglio in the interpretation of the Arabian geographers. Its meridian, as we have just mentioned, was the zero of longitude among the Hindus. The Arab writers borrowing from the Hindus wrote the name apparently Azīn, but this by the mere omission of a diacritical point became Arīn, and from the Arabs passed to medieval Christian geographers as the name of an imaginary point on the equator, the intersection of the central meridian with that circle. Further, this point, or transposed city, had probably been represented on maps, as we often see cities on medieval maps, by a cupola or the like. And hence the "Cupola of Arin or Arym," or the "Cupola of the Earth" (Al-ḳubba al-arḍh) became an established commonplace for centuries in geographical tables or statements. The idea was that just 180° of the earth's circumference was habitable, or at any rate cognizable as such, and this meridian of Arin bisected this habitable hemisphere. But as the western limit extended to the Fortunate Isles, it became manifest to the Arabs that the central meridian could not be so far east as the Hindu meridian of Arin (or of Lanka, i.e. Ceylon). (See quotation from the Aryabhatta, under [JAVA].) They therefore shifted it westward, but shifted the mystic Arin along the equator westward also. We find also among medieval European students (as with Roger Bacon, below), a confusion between Arin and Syene. This Reinaud supposes to have arisen from the Ἐσσινὰ ἐμπόριον of Ptolemy, a place which he locates on the Zanzibar coast, and approximating to the shifted position of Arin. But it is perhaps more likely that the confusion arose from some survival of the real name Azīn. Many conjectures were vainly made as to the origin of Arym, and M. Sedillot was very positive that nothing more could be learned of it than he had been able to learn. But the late M. Reinaud completely solved the mystery by pointing out that Arin was simply a corruption of Ujjain. Even in Arabic the mistake had been thoroughly ingrained, insomuch that the word Arīn had been adopted as a generic name for a place of medium temperature or qualities (see Jorjānī, quoted below).
c. A.D. 150.—"Ὀζηνὴ Βασίλειον Τιαστανοῦ."—Ptol. VII. i. 63.
c. 930.—"The Equator passes between east and west through an island situated between Hind and Habash (Abyssinia), and a little south of these two countries. This point, half way between north and south is cut by the point (meridian?) half way between the Eternal Islands and the extremity of China; it is what is called The Cupola of the Earth."—Maṣ'ūdī, i. 180-181.
c. 1020.—"Les Astronomes ... ont fait correspondre la ville d'Odjein avec le lieu qui dans le tableau des villes inséré dans les tables astronomiques a reçu le nom d'Arin, et qui est supposé situé sur les bords de la mer. Mais entre Odjein et la mer, il y a près de cent yodjanas."—Al-Birūnī, quoted by Reinaud, Intro. to Abulfeda, p. ccxlv.
c. 1267.—"Meridianum vero latus Indiae descendit a tropico Capricorni, et secat aequinoctialem circulum apud Montem Maleum et regiones ei conterminos et transit per Syenem, quae nunc Arym vocatur. Nam in libro cursuum planetarum dicitur quod duplex est Syene; una sub solstitio ... alia sub aequinoctiali circulo, de quâ nunc est sermo, distans per xc gradus ab occidente, sed magis ab oriente elongatur propter hoc, quod longitudo habitabilis major est quam medietas coeli vel terrae, et hoc versus orientem."—Roger Bacon, Opus Majus, ed. London, 1633, p. 195.