Tabaqat-i-nasiri English Translation
Tamela
IN 1865 I was led to read the printed text of the Tabakat- i-Nasiri, published at Calcutta in 1864, in search of materials towards a history of the Afghans and their country, which is very much mixed up with that of India.
Having gone through a great portion of it, and Ending it defective in many places, and full of errors, I thought it advisable to examine the India Office Library MS., No. 1952, from which the printed text was said to have been taken, went through the whole of that work, and found that it also was defective, and contained numerous errors. I found nothing, however, respecting the Afghans, except in' one place, and there they were briefly mentioned in a few lines, but very characteristically.
Soon after, I obtained a very old copy of the work; and, on comparing it with the I. O. L. M5. No. 1952, I found such considerable and important differences to exist, that I determined to begin anew, and translate the whole work. The Society having accepted my offer, and the defective, state of the printed text being well known, Mr. Arthur Grote, to whom I am very greatly indebted for assistance in many ways, advised that, in making this translation, I should avail myself of any other copies of the text that might be procurable in Europe. or instituting inquiry the following were found, and have been already referred to in my report to the Society, published in the Proceedings " for February, 1873, and have been used by me in my task. I must here give a brief description of them, and notice and number them according to their apparent age and value, which arrangement, however, will be somewhat different from that in the notes to pages 68 and 77 of the translated text.
This, probably, is the most ancient of the copies collated. It is not written in an elegant hand, by any means, although plainly and correctly, but in the style in which Mullas usually write. The dals are marked with diacritical points, and other letters are written in a peculiar manner, denoting considerable antiquity. It is, however, imperfect, and does not comprise much more than half the work.
2. The British Museum M S. No. Add. 26, 189. This copy is considered by Doctor Rieu, whose experience is sufficiently great, and authority undoubted, to be pa MS. of the fourteenth century. It is clearly written and correct, and has been of the utmost use to me. It wants a few pages at the end; hence the date on which it was completed, and by whom written, which generally are inserted at the end, cannot be discovered.
To judge from the writing and paper, I should suppose it to be about the same age as No. 2. It is clearly written, but wants several pages at the end, consequently, the date of its completion likewise cannot be discovered. One pretty good proof of its age, however, is that the whole, from beginning to end, has been cut close to the illuminated borders of each leaf] and inlaid on other paper, which also appears to be of considerable age. Whoever did this turned a number of leaves the wrong way, and misplaced several pages, which took me some time to put in their places again.
This is a. well and correctly written M.S., which has also been of the greatest use to me in my work. It wants about two leaves at the end, and, consequently, the date on which it was copied does not appear. I should say, comparing it with the others above described, that it is a JMS, of the sixteenth century, possibly, still earlier. It has an unreadable name on the last leaf, with 1218 H. [1803 A.D.] upon it.
This, as previously mentioned, is a modern copy, of the latter part of the seventeenth century possibly, and is either a copy of No. 5, or copied from the same MS. that that was copied from. It is pretty plainly but carelessly written, in, by no means, a good hand; but, like the others referred to, is very defective, and the proper names of persons and places are often without any points.
I have already noticed how incorrect the Printed Text is. In the Preface to it, Colonel W. N. Lees, LL.D., says: When I commenced the work, we had three copies, one belonging to the Ro. Asiastic Soc., one in the India House Library, and one belonging to the High Priest of the Parsis at Bombay. A little while afterwards, Colonel Hamilton, in reply to a circular of the Society, forwarded a copy from Delhi. These MSS. are all apparently good old copies, and are written in very different hands; It was supposed, then, that we had four distinct copies to collate ; but, before long, it became apparent that the four had been copied from two MISS.} so, in reality, we had only two .... The Society had issued hundreds of circulars to all parts of India, and had failed to draw out more than two copies; and the fact, that the four old copies I had had been copied from two MSS., seemed to indicate so clearly the great scarcity of MSS. of this work, that I decided to go on." From these remarks its defectiveness is not to be won- dered at, but, at the same time, as I have shown in my notes, there are numerous errors in it which are not to be found in these MSS., and a little historical and geographical discrimination on the part of the editors might have corrected many of them.
The time and labour required for simply translating a book, especially if but one or two copies be used for collation, is not very great; and this translation could have been accomplished in a tithe of the time I have devoted to it. But, as this History is one of the four most important works with respect to the early rulers of India, and that part of Central Asia upon which all eyes have been lately turned, and are likely to be turned in the future, I thought it advisable not to spare any pains on it, although it has occupied some years longer than I anticipated. I have collated nine copies of the text word for word; and all doubtful passages have been collated for me from the other three. Although this has occupied a great deal of time, and entailed much labour, a still greater amount of both has been expended on the notes, which I deemed necessary to illustrate our author` s often brief, sometimes erroneous, but generally valuable, statements, to point out the errors which he has sometimes fallen into, and to point out some of the legion of lamentable mistakes, and misleading statements, contained in compilations purporting to be "`Histories of India," "Histories of Afghanistan from the Earliest Times," and similar Histories of other Eastern states and peoples ; and to show the exact value of the compilations, turned out by the yard by raw hands, for the Public of the news- papers and reviews, and the general reader.
It will be observed that I have really commenced the Translation from Section VII.; and from that point it embraces the whole work. The first six, with the exception of the History of the early kings of I-ran, are not of much importance by reason of their brevity. The account of the I-rani dynasties, which would require a volume to illustrate them, I have treated as a separate work, which, ere long, may see the light. To make the Translation in effect complete, however, I have given an abstract of the first six Sections.
One may point sentences very much or very little, but whatever is done should be upon one system. Accordingly here, for the most part, the minute plan of what may seem to some over much stopping is adopted, though not always, but no such absurdity is allowed to appear as a divorce of the verb from its subject by a single comma, and other errors of that sort, which come of printers attending entirely to pause and forgetting grammar.
This book, the text and notes together, will be found to be a very thesaurus of the most varied and often recondite historical material for the periods of which it treats, and many time-honoured historical errors have been pointed out and rectified. It wants but one thing to make it still more accept- able to the Student, and that is an Index. The Reviewers are tolerably sure to point this out for fear nobody else should see it. So the Translator begs to say, once for all, that he is too weary, and his time too valuable, to take up any such work. Meanwhile, The Index Society will have here a capital tough subject for their charitable exertions.
In terms of medieval sources, the evidence for this claim usually falls to two thirteenth-century writers; Juzjanī (d.c. 1260) and Rashid al-Dīn (d.1318), two Islamic writers who interacted with the Mongols, but never of whom ever saw Chinggis Khan directly. We will examine both of their claims below.
He also compares the Turks in physiognomy to people in the mountains south of Tibet. It seems Juzjanī intends cat-eyed as a reference to the epicanthic fold of Turkic and Mongolic populations of Central and Northern Asia. This description is still used (in somewhat non-politically correct ways) in Azerbaijani and Farsi. Juzjanī is not the only medieval author to make this description of Chinggis: a 15th-century anonymous Persian work, the Kitab-Jamasp, also refers to Chinggis as cat-eyed.
In the two main English translations by John Andrew Boyle and Wheeler Thackston, Chinggis specifies that all of his children are of a ruddy complexion, while Khubilai is swarthy like his maternal uncles. Ruddy does not mean red hair, but reddish face, while swarthy refers to darker, more tanned-looking skin.
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For, while the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) recognised a tomb near Deli Turqman Gate as the 13th century Sultanate empress's final resting ground, the Haryana government has spent Rs 58 lakh developing a tomb believed to be Raziya's in Kaithal.
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