Promotion of Learning in India during Muhammadan Rule (by Muhammadans) c3.19

c3.19

Scottish case in the days of Protector Somerset, they thought to themselves that they liked the marriage, but not the fashion of the wooing. Mr. Law has in this part of his work done full justice to Fīrūz Shāh. At p. 55 he refers to Fīrūz Shāh’s contrivance of a Ṭāsi-gharyāl, or water-clock. This really is the Clepsydra, of which Abul Faẓl gives a description in vol. iii. of the *A’īn* (Jarrett, iii. 15). The historian Shams Sirāj claims that Fīrūz Shāh invented the water-clock, but this cannot be correct, for it was known to the Hindus at a much earlier period. (See Mr. Fleet’s article in the *J.R.A.S.* for April last.) Nor does Fīrūz Shāh claim it as his invention in his *Fatuḥāt*. The translation of the Ṭāsi-gharyāl passage in Elliot, p. 338, is very brief. The Persian text, Bib. Ind. ed., p. 254, is much longer, but does not add to our knowledge of the machinery. Fīrūz Shah did not confine himself to the building of mosques and theological colleges. He also dug canals, and it was an incident of this work that the fossils of the Sivaliks were first discovered. It is said that Fīrūz Shāh founded Jaunpūr (Elliot, iii. 307). It is also said that he called it Jaunānpūr after Jaunān, one of the names of Sulṭān Muḥammad b. Tughlaq. But is it not more probable that Sulṭān Muḥammad’s name was Jūna or Jona? We find that Jūna was the name of the Tughlaq who transferred the capital from Delhi to Daulatābād. It is interesting, at all