The lexicology of jia 家
But the LORD was with Joseph, and shewed him mercy, and gave him favour in the sight of the keeper of the prison. (Exodus 39:21)
In Ferdowsī’s Šahnama, a work that I highly recommend everyone to read in translation at least once, the prince Siyāvaš is exiled to Tūrān by his father, the foolish and egotistical Iranian šāh Kay Kāvus. There are several reasons for this, but in short, Siyāvaš is hated by his stepmother Sudaba for having delicately rejected her advances, and she makes the same accusations against him that Potiphar’s wife made against Joseph. Siyāvaš rides through a mountain of fire in order to prove his innocence, but the suspicion lingers and the damage to his reputation is done. In addition, when on campaign against Tūrān, Siyāvaš had captured several Turkish and Chinese prisoners. Kay Kāvus orders his son to slaughter them, but Siyāvaš refuses the order. As a result, Siyāvaš is forbidden to return to Iran.
The Emperor of Tūrān, Afrāsiyāb, at first makes Siyāvaš welcome as a guest. He invites Siyāvaš into his court, and even agrees to marry his daughter Farigīs to him, and agrees to give him a plot of land on which to build a town and castle, called Siyāvašgerd. This gerd گرد, by the way, derives from the same Indo-European element *gʰerdʰ- ‘enclosure, fence’ that produces the Hittite word gurtas ‘citadel’, the English words ‘yard’ and ‘garden’, as well as the Slavic words го́родъ ‘city’ and градъ ‘castle’, and the Albanian word gardh ‘fence’. So Siyāvašgerd is patterned on the same linguistic structure which produces the Serbian Beograd or the Russian Stalingrad.
Yet Siyāvaš knows that Siyāvašgerd is not his home. Rostam warns him, and he has premonitions, that he will not be safe in Tūrān. Siyāvaš goes into his exile in awareness that the walls of the gerd will not protect him from the jealousy and intrigues of his wicked Tūrāni father-in-law. And indeed, after some time Siyāvaš through no fault of his own becomes unpopular at the Tūrāni court. Afrāsiyāb, seeing him as a political threat, sends an army against Siyāvašgerd. Siyāvaš, innocent of any crime, is captured and beheaded on Afrāsiyāb’s orders, despite the impassioned entreaties of Farigīs.
Although the story of Siyāvaš belongs to traditional Persian folklore, it comes to us through the written work of Ferdowsī, who undoubtedly gave it his own interpretation. Ferdowsī wrote during a time when the Iranians were essentially exiles in their own home, which was ruled successively by Arabs from the West and by Turks (and later Mongols) from the East. Ferdowsī was certainly interested in preserving and transmitting the linguistic, historic and folkloric legacy of the pre-Islamic dynasty of Sāsān. Yet Ferdowsī was not a nationalist in the modern sense: he was a Muslim, and moreover, one who took the logic of the Qur’ān seriously, and sought to reconcile it with the older Mazdean concept of kingly glory (farr فر). He does not praise Siyāvaš so much as an exemplar of Persian-ness, and certainly not as a story of political triumph, but rather holds him up as an example of the fate (nāmus-e rūzgār ناموس روزگار) of those who actively choose God’s justice over the decrees of earthly rulers. It is the same fate that awaits everyone: he dies. But his reward is in the clean name (nām-e pāk نام پاک) that he leaves behind him, and in the bright-red imperial fritillaries that bloom over his grave.
In the semi-mythical Kayāni Iran in which the tale of Siyāvaš is set, though, and even up through Sāsāni times, such an enclosure as Siyāvašgerd might well have been a temporary stockade, fortified on three sides with a gate in the fourth. Even the Haḫāmaneši—Persia’s first empire-builders, immortalised in the Kǝtubîm and Greek-historical Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes (Ahasuerus)—used such temporary forts on military expeditions. Ferdowsī’s elaborate descriptions—ornate palaces bedecked with jewels, gardens brimming with sweet herbs—are likely not literal but serve a double purpose: to remark on the irony of Siyāvaš’s foreign exile and the ‘beautiful prison’ he’d been ensconced in, and to heighten the contrast between Sāsāni refinement and Tūrāni ‘barbarism’. Yet literarily, Siyāvašgerd is framed as transient—a ‘home’ as fleeting as its master’s safety. Inside this, there would have been various pavilions and tents which could be struck down, packed up and moved. Such enclosures in the nomadic eastern reaches of Iran would likely be similar to the 5th- and 6th-century AD Ak-Dag complex (probably belonging to the proto-Turkic Tujue 突厥 or the proto-Mongolic Xianbei 鲜卑) which was uncovered in 1961 in the Tuva SSR in the southeastern part of the Soviet Union.
Just such an enclosure would have been pictographically (xiangxing 象形) represented in the Chinese character mian 𰃦, which shows the floor plan of a courtyard with three walls, an open gate facing north (down), and a main residence, tower or tent in the south (top). This character mian 𰃦 is attested in oracle-bone script of the Shang Dynasty and in the bronze inscriptions of the Zhou Dynasty, showing how common and important these structures were in Eurasian antiquity. However, it is no longer commonly used in modern Chinese, except as an element in the character xiang 向 ‘towards’, and in an abbreviated size as the semantic component in characters such as lao 牢 ‘pen, sheepfold, stockade, prison’; bin 宾 ‘house-guest’; zhai 宅 ‘residence, to dwell, homebody’; an 安 ‘to rest, calm, ease, contentment’ and jia 家 ‘house, home’.
The word jia 家 is of particular interest, because its functionality in modern Chinese is so broad. It can mean ‘house’ or ‘home’ on its own, but in compounds it has a number of other uses. It can be used to mean ‘family’, as in jiaren 家人 ‘family (member)’ or jiating 家庭 ‘family’. By extension, it could be used to refer to the jiazhang 家长 ‘head of a clan’ or the possessions pertaining to him. In modern usage as well, it can refer to a guojia 国家 ‘nation’, or also to a zhuanjia 专家 ‘expert (in a given subject)’. By extension, it can refer to a person who is a master in a given discipline: a zuojia 作家 ‘writer’; a kexuejia 科学家 ‘scientist’; a wanjia 玩家 ‘athlete, sportsman’; or an yishujia 艺术家 ‘artist’. It could thus also be used to refer to a ‘school’, including a school of thought: Daojia 道家, Fajia 法家, Rujia 儒家, Yinyangjia 阴阳家, Mojia 墨家, Nongjia 农家, Mingjia 名家, Bingjia 兵家, Zonghengjia 纵横家 and so on were all part of the Zhuzi Baijia 诸子百家 ‘Hundred Schools of Thought’. This is the reason that I refer to ‘Daoists’ in a Classical context as the Matrical School, the ‘Legalists’ as the Legal School, and the ‘Confucians’ as the Ritual School. They weren’t ‘-isms’ yet; that is to say, they didn’t become ideologies until much later. They were groups of scholars who studied under the same master or who followed the same texts or corpuses. Yet the Chinese language itself attests to the understanding that, however he might pretend otherwise, a zhexuejia 哲學家 ‘philosopher’ is really no more than a domesticated swine in a pen.
The word jia 家 is a phono-semantic glyph (xingsheng 形声) derived from the aforementioned mian 𰃦 ‘enclosure’ and a phonetic xia 𢑓 or jia 豭 ‘boar, male livestock’; Xu Shen gives it as synonymous with ju 居 ‘to dwell, to reside’. In Zhou-era bronze inscriptions in particular, it is especially evident that young Wilbur is doing hoof-stands and backflips inside Homer Zuckerman’s enclosure. This would have signified a pronunciation in Old Chinese of /*kˤra/. The phonetics are particularly interesting because cognate terms are attested in other Sinitic languages (Tibetan mkhar མཁར ‘castle, fortress’) located geographically to the west, and these bear a marked consonantal resemblance to the Indo-European /*gʰerdʰ-/ which gave us the Persian gerd گرد! This hints at another possible borrowing across the Eurasian continent in deep antiquity.
In the Chinese Classics, the lexeme jia 家 has several functions. It can indeed function, either by itself or as the compound shijia 室家 as the concrete noun ‘house’: 謂爾遷于王都、曰予未有室家。 ‘I say to you, “Remove to the royal capital,” and ye say that you have not got houses there.’ (Book of Odes 《詩經》, Decade of Qi Fu 祈父之什, ‘Nothing Right with the Rain’ 雨無正 7) It can be extended to the sense of ‘family’ or ‘clan’: 子游問喪具，夫子曰：「稱家之有亡。」 ‘Ziyou asked about the articles to be provided for the mourning rites, and the Master said, “They should be according to the means of the family.”’ (Book of Rites 《禮記》 3.88) From there, it can be taken to connote the ‘clan head’: 日宣三德，夙夜浚明有家。 ‘When there is the daily display of three [of these] virtues, their possessor could early and late regulate and brighten the clan [of which he was made chief].’ (Book of Documents 《尚書》, Book of Yu 虞書, ‘Counsels of Gao-Yao’ 皋陶謨 2) Jia 家 is also used in the Classics as a verb, ‘to betrothe’ a woman into a different family: to ‘house’ her, so to speak. ‘Who can say that you did not get me betrothed? How else could you have urged on this trial?’ (Odes, Odes of Shao and the South 召南, ‘Road Dew’ 行露 2, 3) This verbal sense was clarified in post-Classical clerical-script texts by the addition of the semantic radical nü 女 into jia 嫁 ‘to marry off (a girl), to give a bride to’.
It can be used, either by itself or in the compound bangjia 邦家, as ‘state’ (a step up in organisation from ‘clan’ and prefiguring the modern sense of guojia 国家 ‘nation’): 維予小子、未堪家多難。 ‘I am [but as] a little child, unequal to the many difficulties of the state.’ (Odes, Decade of Min Yu Xiao Zi 閔予小子之什, ‘Inaugural Counsel’ 訪落 1) It is also used in the compound pengjia 朋家 in the function of ‘political faction’: 淫酗肆虐，臣下化之，朋家作仇，脅權相滅。 ‘Dissolute, intemperate, reckless, oppressive, his ministers have become assimilated to him; and they form combinations and contract animosities, and depend on their power to exterminate to one another.’ (Documents, Book of Zhou 周書, ‘Great Declaration II’ 泰誓中 2) The sense of jia 家 as ‘school of thought’ appears to be a rather late Classical development. It doesn’t appear in the Five Classics themselves, though it follows quite naturally from its usages as ‘clan’ and ‘state’ and even ‘faction’, with the teacher as the ‘head of the family’. But we can already see it being used metaphorically in the Nanhuajing: 因百家之知，窮眾口之辯。 ‘I studied painfully the various schools of thought, and made myself master of the reasonings of all their masters.’ (Zhuangzi 《莊子》17.10)
The Semitic letter bet ב actually has a similar pictographic origin as mian 𰃦, being derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph Pr 𓉐 with the function of ‘house’. Indeed, the Arabic letter bā’ ب is still formed like an upside-down mian radical, and it’s noteworthy that by itself this letter is prepositional and locative in function (‘at, by, with’)! In any event, the Egyptian hieroglyph it’s based on also represents the outlay of a walled enclosure with an open doorway.
What’s more, the term bayit בית (cognate with Arabic bayt بيت, Aramaic and Syriac bayta’ ܒܝܬܐ, Ge’ez bet ቤት, South Arabian byt 𐩩𐩺𐩨) follows a trajectory that parallels that of the Chinese jia 家 very closely… to an extent. It can refer to an enclosed yard, but also to a tent: ראשׁית בּכּוּרי אדמתך תּביא בּית יהוה אלהיך ‘The first of the first fruits of your ground you shall bring into the house of the Lord your God’ (Exo 23:19) where clearly said ‘house’ refers to the Tent of Meeting. The bayit YHWH בית יהוה ‘house of the Lord’ can also be taken to refer specifically to the Temple (as in 2 Kgs 11:10). The same term can also refer to a built house, a palace: ותּקּח האשּׁה בּית פּרעה ‘and the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s house.’ (Gen 12:15) Note the implicit parallel functionality here with jia 嫁 ‘to wed’! As with the Chinese jia 家, bayit בית can also serve in the function of ‘household, family’: ויּצא המּלך וכל־בּיתו בּרגליו ‘And the king went out, and all his household after him.’ (2 Sam 15:16) Note that a sedentary palace cannot ‘go out’ after its owner! The term can also denote the family, the members of the household of a particular patriarch, as in בּית עבד אדם ‘the house of Obededom’ (1 Par 13:14).
Another function which is of particular interest here in Semitic, is the use of bayit בית as ‘tomb, prison, dungeon’. After his attempted seduction and framing by Potiphar’s wife, Joseph goes from a position of relative comfort as a servant in bêt ’ādōnāyû hamMiṣrî בית אדניו המּצרי ‘the house of the Egyptian’, and even overseer over all his household (Gen 39:2-5), to the bêt hassōhar בית הסּהר ‘prison’ (Gen 39:20-23). And once Joseph’s gift from God of interpreting dreams proves useful to the Pharaoh, the Pharaoh puts Joseph in his bêt בית ‘palace’ (Gen 41:40)! Note that throughout the Joseph cycle, the main character is always a slave in a certain house, whether the highest palace or the lowest dungeon. Yet the point of these incredible turns of fortune is that none of the house-owners (whether Potiphar or the prison warden or Pharaoh) is actually Joseph’s true master. Genesis is insistent in the repetition that whatever Joseph does well, it is because the Lord causes it to flourish.
And this brings us full circle to Siyāvaš. In the Šahnama, Siyāvaš’s key trait, for which he is most praised, is that he is begonah بیگناه ‘without blame, innocent’ despite the consistent invitations to his father’s palace or sarāy سرای and the persistent attempts by his father’s wife Sudaba to seduce him. This is parallel to how Joseph is described in the Qur’ān, despite his temptation to sleep with Potiphar’s wife fi baytihā في بيتها ‘in her house’ (12:23), as being preserved by God as a muḫlaṣīn مخلصين, an ‘innocent one’, a ‘sincere person’ (12:24). Just as Joseph is thrown into prison, Siyāvaš is forced into a mountain of fire. And just as Joseph becomes the head of Pharaoh’s palace, so Siyāvaš is given a gerd by the Emperor of Tūrān. The martyrdom of Siyāvaš, and the reconciliation of Joseph with his brothers, both point to the same Semitic wisdom: despite whatever (and whosever!) ‘house’ you are found in, you are constantly offered an active choice, between obeying God and obeying some other reference.
