The Army of the Indian Moghuls: Its Organization and Administration c13.6

c13.6

3) *Shutarnāl*, 4) *Zambūrak*, 5) *Shāhīn*. These words seem all three to refer to the same weapon, what we should call a swivel-gun or wall-piece. *Shutarnāl* is literally “camel-gun barrel”, and denotes the fact that they were sometimes carried and fired from camels’ backs. *Zambūrak* is derived from *zambūr*, a bee or wasp, with a diminutive added, and thus means “a little wasp”, probably in allusion to its sound when fired, or its power of stinging or wounding. *Shāhīn*, literally “falcon”, seems a later name for the same thing; a name which was brought into India by Nādir Shāh (1738—9) or Aḥmad Shāh, Abdālī (c. 1760). Horn, 28, refers to it, quoting from Dowson’s Elliot, viii, 398, a passage in *Nigārnāmah-i-Hind* of Sayyad Ghulām ʿAlī. See also W. Egerton, 29. An anonymous Indian writer (*Waqāʾi-i-diyār-i-maghrib*) describing the Durrānī empire in 1212 H. (1797-8), writes of “the *shāhīn-khānah*, which are also called *zambūrak*”. The name *shāhīn* may have been a translation of the European “falconet”. Colonel F. Colombari “Les Zemboureks”, Paris, 1853, p. 28, says it was the Afghans of Qandahār who first fixed the *zambūrak* or falconet to the saddle by a moveable pivot. This mode was in use by them when they invaded Persia in 1722. Up to that time the camel had been used for transport only; the weapon when in use being placed on a rough wooden carriage, on the ground.