of the grand vizierate, and in the following year entered the
cabinet of Midhat Pasha as minister of public instruction,
but very soon retired to his seat in the Council of State
and remained out of office until 1875, when he represented
Turkey at the International Telegraphic Conference in St
Petersburg. He was president of the short-lived Turkish
parliament during its first session--March 19 to June 28,
1877--and at its close was appointed vali of Adrianople, where
he rendered invaluable aid to the Red Cross Society. On his
recall, at the beginning of 1878, he accepted the ministry of
public instruction in the cabinet of Ahmed Hamdi Pasha, and
on the abolition of the grand vizierate (February 5, 1878) he
became prime minister and held office till about the middle
of April, when he resigned. Early in the following year he
was appointed vali of Brusa, where he remained nearly four
years, and rendered admirable services to the province. The
drainage of the pestilent marshes, the water-supply from the
mountains, the numerous roads, the suppression of brigandage,
the multiplication of schools, the vast development of the silk
industry through the substitution of mulberry plantations for
rice-fields, the opening out of the mineral springs of Chitli,
the introduction of rose-trees and the production of attar
of roses--all these were Ahmed Vefik's work; and he became
so popular that when in 1882 he was recalled, it was thought
advisable that he should be taken away secretly by night from
the konak in Brusa and brought to his private residence
on the Bosporus. A few days after his return he was again
appointed prime minister (December 1, 1882), but Ahmed Vefik
demanded, as the condition of his acceptance of office, that
he should choose the other members of the cabinet, and that
a number of persons in the sultan's entourage should be
dismissed. Upon this, the sultan, on the 3rd of December,
revoked the irade of the 1st of December, and appointed
Said Pasha prime minister. For the rest of his life Ahmed
Vefik, by the sultan's orders, was practically a prisoner in
his own house; and eventually he died, on the 1st of April
1891, of a renal complaint from which he had long been a
sufferer. Ahmed Vefik was a great linguist. He spoke and
wrote French perfectly, and thoroughly understood English,
German, Italian, Greek, Arabic and Persian. From all these
languages he translated many books into Turkish, but wrote
no original work. His splendid library of 15,000 volumes
contained priceless manuscripts in many languages. In his
lifetime he appreciably aided the progress of education;
but, as he had no following, the effects of his labour and
influence in a great measure faded away after his death.
In all his social and family relations Ahmed Vefik was most
exemplary. His charity knew no bounds. He was devoted to his
aged mother and to his one wife and children. To his friends
and acquaintances he was hospitable, courteous and obliging;
his conversation was intellectual and refined, and in every
act of his private life he manifested the spirit of a true
gentleman. At home his habits, attire and mode of life
were quite Turkish, but he was perfectly at his ease in
European society; he had strong English proclivities, and
numbered many English men and women amongst his intimate
friends. In public life his gifts were almost sterilized
by peculiarities of temperament and incompatibility with
official surroundings; and his mission as ambassador to
Persia and his administration of Brusa were his only thorough
successes. But his intellectual powers, literary erudition
and noble character made him for the last forty years of
his life a conspicuous figure in eastern Europe. (E. W.*)
AHOM, or AHAM, a tribe of Shan descent inhabiting the
Assam Valley, and, prior to the invasion of the Burmese at the
commencement of the 19th century, the dominant race in that
country. The Ahoms, together with the Shans of Burma and
Eastern China and the Siamese, were members of the Tai
race. The name is believed to be a corruption of the word
``A-sam,'' the latter part of which is identical with
``Shan'' (properly ``Sham'') and with ``Siam.'' Under their
king Su-ka-pha they invaded Assam (q.v.) from the East in
the year A.D. 1228, giving their name to the country. For
a century and a half from 1228 the successors of Su-ka-pha
appear to have ruled undisturbed over a small territory in
Lakkimpur and Sibsagar districts. The extension of their
power westward down the valley of the Brahmaputra was very
gradual, and its success was by no means uniform. In the
time of Aurangzeb the Ahom kings held sway over the entire
Brahmaputra valley from Sadiya to near Goalpara, and from the
skirts of the southern hills to the Bhutia frontier on the
north. The dynasty attained the height of its power under Rudra
Singh, who is said to have ascended the throne in 1695. In
the following century the power of the Ahoms began to decay,
alike from internal dissensions and the pressure of outside
invaders. The Burmese were called in to the assistance of one
of the contending factions in 1810. Having once obtained a
foothold in the country, they established their power over the
entire valley and ruled with merciless barbarity, until they
were expelled by the British in 1824-1825. In the census of
1901 the total Ahom population in Assam was returned at 178,049.
The Ahoms retained the form of government in Assam peculiar
to the Shan tribes, which may he briefly described as an
organized system of personal service in lieu of taxation.
Their religion was pagan, being quite distinct from Buddhism;
but in Assam they gradually became Hinduized, and their
kings finally adopted Hindu names and titles. They believed
that there were in the beginning no heavenly bodies, air or
earth, only water everywhere, over which at first hovered a
formless Supreme Being called Pha. He took corporeal shape
as a huge crab that lay floating, face upwards, upon the
waters. In turn other animals took shape, the last being
two golden spiders from whose excrement the earth gradually
rose above the surrounding ocean. Pha then formed a female
counterpart of himself, who laid four eggs, from which were
hatched four sons. One of these was appointed to rule the
earth, but died and became a spirit. His son also died
and became the national household deity of the Ahoms. The
origin of mankind is connected with a flood legend. The
only survivors of the flood, and of the conflagration that
followed it, were an old man and a pumpkin-seed. From the
latter there grew a gigantic gourd. This was split open by
a thunderbolt, the old man sacrificing himself to save the
lives of those who were inside, and from it there issued the
progenitors of the present races of men, beasts, birds, fishes
and plants. The kings claimed independent divine origin.
The religion and language have both died out, being only
preserved by a few priests of the old cult; but even among them
the tradition of the pronunciation of the language has been
lost. The Ahoms had a considerable literature, much of
which is still in existence. Their historic sense was very
fully developed, and many priests and nobles maintained
bu-ran-jis (i.e. ``stores of instruction for the
ignorant''), or chronicles, which were carefully written up
from time to time. A few of these have been translated, but
as yet no European scholar possesses knowledge sufficient to
enable him to study these valuable documents at first hand.
The Ahom language is the oldest member of the Tai branch of
the Siamese-Chinese linguistic family of which we have any
record. It bears much the same relationship to Siamese
and Shan that Latin does to Italian. It is more nearly
related to modern Siamese than to modern ahan, but possesses
many groups of consonants which have become simplified in
both. It is a language of the isolating class, in which every
word is a monosyllable, and may be employed either as a noun
or as a verb according to its context and its position in a
sentence. In the order of words, the genitive follows the
norm it governs, and, as usual in such cases, the relations
of time and place are indicated by prefixes, not by suffixes.
The meanings of the monosyllables were differentiated, as
in the other Tai languages and in Chinese, by a system of
tones, but these were rarely indicated in writing, and the
tradition regarding them is lost. The language had an alphabet
of its own, which was clearly related to that of Burmese.
See E. A. Gait, A History of Assam (Calcutta, 1906).
For the language see The Linguistis Survey of India, vol.
ii. (Calcutta, 1906) (contains grammar and vocabulary);
G. A. Grierson, ``Notes on Ahom,'' in the Zeitschrift
der deutschen morgenlandischen Gesellshaft, vol. lvi.,
1902, pp. 1 ff. (contains grammar and vocabulary, with
specimens), and ``An Ahom Cosmogony, with a translation and
a vocabulary of the Ahom language,'' in the Journal of the
Royal Asiatic Society for 1904, pp. 181 ff. (G. A. GR.)
AHR, a river of Germany. It is a left-bank tributary of the
Rhine, into which it falls at Sinzig, rising in the Eifel
mountains, and having a total length of 55 m. It flows at first
through rather monotonous country, but the latter portion of its
course, from the village of Altenahr, over which tower rhe ruins
of the castle of Ahr, or Are (10th century), is full of romantic
beauty. It is well stocked with trout, and the steep declivities
of the lower valley furnish red wines of excellent quality.
AHRENS, FRANZ HEINRICH LUDOLF (1809-1881), German
philologist, was born at Helmstedt on the 6th of June
1809. After studying at Gottingen (1826-1829) under K. O.
Muller and Ludolf Dissen, and holding several educational
appointments, in 1849 he succeeded G. F. Grotefend as director
of the Lyceum at Hanover, a post which he filled with great
success for thirty years. He died on the 25th of September
1881. His most important work is De Graecae Linguae
Dialectis (1839-1843, new ed. by Meister, 1882-1889),
which, although unfortunately incomplete, dealing only with
Aeolic and Doric, and in some respects superseded by modern
research, will always remain a standard treatise on the
subject. He also published Bucolicorum Graecorum Reliquiae
(1855-1859); studies on the dialects of Homer and the Greek
lyrists; on Aeschylus; and some excellent school-books. A
volume of his minor works (ed. Haberlin) was published in
1891, which also contains a complete list of his writings.
AHRIMAN (Gr. 'Areimanios in Aristotle, or in Agathias; in
the Avesta, Angro Mainyush--``the Destructive Spirit''),
the name of the principle of evil in the dualistic doctrine of
Zoroaster. The name does not occur in the Old Persian
inscriptions. In the Avesta he is called the twin-brother
of the Holy Spirits, and contrasted either with the Holy Spirit
of Ormazd or with Ormazd himself. He is the all destroying
Satan, the source of all evil in the world and, like Ormazd,
exists since the beginning of the world. Eventually, in the
great world catastrophe, he will be defeated by Ormazd and
disappear. The later sect of the Zervanites held that
both were visible manifestations of the primeval principle
Zruvan akarana (Infinite Time). (See ZOROASTER.)
AHRWEILER, a town of Germany, in the Prussian Rhine province,
on the river Ahr and the Remagen-Adenau line of railway. Pop.
5000. It is a town of medieval aspect and is surrounded
by ancient walls, with battlements and four gates in good
