Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ Lane vii 1885: ‘he macerated, steeped, soaked it (dates, medicine, bread) in water, and mashed it with the hand, he rubbed and pressed it until it became soft’.
▪ Hava1899: ‘to dilute and mash (a medicine)’.¹

1. Also: to suck (his fingers: child); to wipe o.'s (hands) (bi‑ with). But these values seem to belong to another theme.

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▪ Akk marāsu A ‘to stir into a liquid’, marsu ‘mixed, mashed’ (said of malt steeped for beer), mirsu (also mersu, mirisu) ‘a confection made of dates, oil, butter, etc.’ (CAD), Syr mras (2) ‘contudit’ (Brockelmann1895).
▪ ? Cf. also Akk marāsu B ‘to squash’ (CAD), Syr mras (1) ‘pressit’ (Brockelmann1895), ‘zerrühren’ (Zimmern1914), ‘to crush, bruise, steep’, maršā, maršətā, məraštā ‘pestle, mortar’ (PayneSmith1903). – Cf. also Ar marāsaẗ ‘strength, power, vigour’ ?
▪ ? Dozy1881-II: Ar ^†marīs ‘kind of thin bread, kneaded (yumras) together with butter and dates’¹ .

1. Accord. to Ibn Ḫallikān, darb al-marīs was the name of the street in Baghdad where this confection was prepared.

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▪ MSA has preserved only the value ‘to soak (in water), macerate’. Little more than a century ago, however, Hava1899 still mentions also the notion of ‘mashing, rubbing, pressing’ in addition to that of ‘soaking’, i.e., the application of some kind of force, and in ClassAr both come together, cf. SemHist section (with Lane vii 1885).
▪ For Akk marāsu, CAD distinguishes a value A ‘to stir into a liquid’ and a value B ‘to squash’. The latter is said to be a loan from Aram.
▪ Information in dictionaries of Syr vary. For Syr mras, Brockelmann1895 gives both ‘to soak’ and ‘to press’ as two distinct values, while in PayneSmith1903 they are seen as one: ‘to crush, bruise, steep’. In translating Akk marāsu as ‘zerrühren’, Zimmern1914 too merges ‘soaking’ and ‘mashing’.
▪ Ar ^†marīs ‘kind of thin bread, kneaded (yumras) together with butter and dates’, mentioned by Dozy1881, is obviously akin to (or even taken from?) Akk mirsu, var. mersu, mirisu ‘a confection made of dates, oil, butter, etc.’, as given in CAD. So, here too the ‘mixing’ is combined with a kind of ‘smashing’ and the use of force.
▪ Besides mras, Syr has also mraš ‘pestle, mortar’, but this is said to be from √RŠ ‘to bray, pound, decorticate’.
▪ The question is whether the application of ‘strength, power, vigour’ (↗marāsaẗ) is etymologically dictinct from that of ‘soaking’ (and perhaps came in addition to it) or whether it was inherent in it from the beginning. In the latter case, ‘strength, power, energy, vigour’ has to be interpreted as a specialisation. And then also ↗marasaẗ ‘rope’ (as *‘the thing that is twisted strongly’) is perhaps related. For the whole picture, cf. ↗MRS.

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► marīsaẗ, n.f., a kind of beer: could be a quasi-PP from marasa, so that the beer would be ‘(the drink made of) soaked (barley, etc.)’. But other etymologies have been suggested, see ↗s.v..

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