PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Having completed, after some eight years’ work on it, my translation of and commentary on Bayhaqī’s Tārīkh-i Masՙūdī (see below, pp. 9–10), it seemed to me worthwhile attempting a similar task – one fortunately less arduous – for the other contemporary source for the sultanates of Masՙūd and his immediate successors in Ghazna, the Zayn al-akhbār of Gardīzī. Gardīzī’s section on the Ghaznavids actually forms part of an extended history of the successive rulers in Khurasan and the Islamic East from early caliphal days until the author’s own time. The translation given here is accompanied by a commentary, one which is, however, on a less detailed scale than that provided for the Bayhaqī translation; nevertheless it will, I trust, be adequate for the comprehension of Gardīzī’s narrative and its place in the general history of the Eastern Islamic lands. Ideally, the task of making available in translation the contemporary sources on the early Ghaznavids should be completed by a version of al-ՙUtbī’s recounting of the origins of the Ghaznavid dynasty and the first two-thirds of Maḥmūd’s reign, in his al-Ta’rīkh al-yamīnī; but tackling al-ՙUtbī’s florid and discursive Arabic must be left to a future labourer in the Eastern Islamic vineyard.

It is especially fitting that this book should appear in the publication series of the British Institute of Persian Studies, for whose journal Iran I have acted as Co-Editor for over forty years (surely a record in journal editorship!), and I am grateful for the encouragement of colleagues at the Institute in putting the present book together.

Various other colleagues have helped me by providing items of information, sending me copies of books and articles, etc.; I am much indebted to them all. They include: Mr Mel Dadswell (Chudleigh Knighton, Devon); Dr Farhad Daftary (Institute of Ismaili Studies, London); Professor Geert Jan Van Gelder (Oxford University); Professor Peter Golden (Rutgers University, N.J.); Dr Pavel Lurye (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna); Professor Nicholas Sims-Williams (School of Oriental and African Studies, London); Dr Luke Treadwell (Oxford University); and M. Étienne de la Vaissière (ENS Laboratoire d’archéologie, Paris). These are specifically thanked in the appropriate places, but I am especially obliged to Dr Daftary and to Mr François de Blois (School of Oriental and African Studies, London) who have advised on certain problematic words and passages of Gardīzī’s text. But as always, the buck stops with the author himself, to whose account any imperfections must be laid.

C. Edmund Bosworth

Castle Cary, Somerset

February 2009

ABBREVIATIONS OF JOURNALS, BOOKS, ETC. CITED

Introduction

The author of the ‘Ornament of Histories’, Abū Saՙīd ՙAbd al-Ḥayy b. al-Ḍaḥḥāk b. Maḥmūd Gardīzī, is a most shadowy figure. He must have been connected with the early Ghaznavid court or bureaucracy, and he claims to have been present at many significant events involving the military exploits of his masters (see below), although it is strange that neither of his fellow-historians, Abū Naṣr ՙUtbī (who was admittedly of an older generation, probably dying in the last decade of Sultan Maḥmūd’s reign), nor Abu ’l-Faḍl Bayhaqī (who died in 470/1077, hence may well have been a fairly exact contemporary of Gardīzī) mentions him. It seems very improbable that he did not know Bayhaqī at least, working as Gardīzī obviously did at the Ghaznavid court.¹ Our Gardīzī may perhaps have been a relative of the Abū Mursil b. Manṣūr b. Aflaḥ Gardīzī who brought back to Nishapur from the caliph al-Qādir’s court at Baghdad an investiture patent for Sultan Masՙūd b. Maḥmūd (see below, p. 99). He presumably stemmed from Zābulistān, the Ghazna–Gardīz region of what is now eastern Afghanistan, as indicated not only by his nisba but perhaps also by the name of his father (if al-Ḍaḥḥāk is here an arabisation of (Azhi) Zahāka, the tyrant who in Iranian legend overthrew Jamshīd, nevertheless popular in the lore of the far eastern fringes of Khurasan). The only rough dates that we have for Gardīzī’s life are those of the reign of Sultan ՙAbd al-Rashīd b. Maḥmūd (r. ?440–43/?1049–52), whom Gardīzī mentions in the historical section of his book as his sovereign, to whom he was dedicating the work; but when Gardīzī was actually born and died is unknown. The book’s title Zayn al-akhbār is apparently a kināya or allusion to ՙAbd al-Rashīd’s honorific title Zayn al-Milla ‘Ornament of the Religious Community’. The only contemporary personal and intellectual connection one may suggest with some confidence is with the great Abu ’l-Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī and his Taḥqīq mā li ’l-Hind and al-Āthār al-bāqiya, since Gardīzī states that he heard information directly from him² and the material for his chronological tables stems largely from the Khwarazmian scholar.³

The ‘Ornament of Histories’ is a mélange of information, historical, geographical and ethnographical such as would be of interest to the ruling official and scholarly classes of the Eastern Iranian world; if for nothing else, it would be noteworthy as the first work in New Persian to combine general history with specifically dynastic history. The Turkish ethnic origins of the house of Sebüktegin and the raids into northern India of the Amirs would explain Gardīzī’s appending sections on the Turkish tribes of Inner Asia and Eastern Europe and on the festivals and religious and philosophical sects of the Indians to the more strictly historical part of the book. This historical part plunges in medias res, since a presumed preface or exordium has been lost from the manuscripts (on which, see below), with the legendary Persian kings, the Arsacids and the Sasanid emperors. It continues with a sketchy account of the Islamic caliphs up to Gardīzī’s contemporary al-Qā’im (acceded in 422/1031) until the author gets to what obviously interested him most, the history of the Arab governors in the East from ՙAbdallāh b. ՙĀmir (governor of Basra and the East 29–44/649–64) onwards and the subsequent rulers there, still nominally agents of the caliphs but in practice increasingly independent. After dealing in some detail with the events surrounding the fall of Umayyad rule in Khurasan, the rise and career of Abū Muslim, and the establishment of the ՙAbbasid Revolution there, the story of the successive governors continues till the time of the civil war between Hārūn al-Rashīd’s sons al-Amīn and al-Ma’mūn, with the latter’s eventual victory organised from his base in Khurasan. Al-Ma’mūn’s rule merges into sections on the Tahirid governors in Khurasan, the Saffarid brothers Yaՙqūb and ՙAmr b. Layth, the Samanid amirs of Transoxania and Khurasan, and the early Ghaznavids.

Gardīzī is thus essentially concerned with the Mashriq, the Greater Khurasan which, as Bert Fragner has stressed, emerged in the early Islamic period as a region in its own right, as against the Western Persia of the ‘two Iraqs’, sc. the old Media, Persis and Azerbaijan which formed ՙIrāq-i ՙAjam, ‘Persian Iraq’, and the Mesopotamian lands of the preceding Persian empires from the Achaemenids to the Sasanids forming ՙIrāq-i ՙArab.⁴ This Greater Khurasan straddled the Oxus – now no longer seen as a separating and dividing boundary, and never in any case a serious obstacle for the movement of peoples and armies – and included not only eastern Persia and what is now modern Afghanistan, but also Transoxania, with its heartland of the former Sogdia, and regions connected with it culturally, ethnically and linguistically such as Khwarazm and the Syr Darya provinces like Chāch, Īlāq, Ushrūsana and Farghāna.

Gardīzī’s account of the history of the Mashriq, and especially that of the Samanids up to ca. AD 950, is particularly valuable in that it apparently enshrines material from the lost Ta’rīkh Wulāt Khurāsān of Abū ՙAlī al-Ḥusayn al-Sallāmī, a protégé of the Muḥtājids of Chaghāniyān (flor. in the middle decades of the fourth/tenth century), judging by the material common both to Gardīzī and the chronicle of Ibn al-Athīr;⁵ though both these historians’ sources for the last decades of the fourth/tenth century and the demise of Samanid rule towards its end remain unclear.⁶ It is also conceivable that Gardīzī took some information from another lost work, a Kitāb Kharāj Khurāsān by Ḥafṣ b. Manṣūr al-Marwazī, a secretary of Hārūn al-Rashīd’s governor in Khurasan ՙAlī b. ՙĪsā b. Māhān (in post there 180–91/796–807), although nothing whatever is known about this treatise on the tax system of Khurasan apart from Gardīzī’s mention of its name.⁷

In recounting the earliest history of Islam, Gardīzī deals with the four Patriarchal Caliphs only cursorily, and gives a neutral and dispassionate treatment of ՙUthmān and ՙAlī (without even a mention of the controversial topic of ՙUthmān’s murder by the rebel Egyptian troops), accounts of these two reigns being normally a touchstone of an Islamic author’s personal religious and sectarian attitudes. ՙUthmān is accorded the tarḍiya, ‘May God be pleased with him’, after his name, the normal convention for caliphs (it is, however, true that Gardīzī gives a conventional imprecation after the name of the Umayyad Yazīd b. Muՙāwiya, in whose reign the Third Imam of the Shīՙa, al-Ḥusayn b. ՙAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, was killed). Gardīzī is in general respectful towards the ՙAlids, but not particularly enthusiastic about them, and his retelling of episodes in which they figure, such as the numerous revolts of ՙAlid pretenders, is set forth in a non-partisan tone. The reigns of the four Patriarchal Caliphs are described as khilāfats, but those of the Umayyads as wilāyats only, and the term khalīfat reappears only with the first ՙAbbāsid al-Saffāḥ; whether Gardīzī is echoing here the attitudes and practices of a post-ՙAbbasid period writer like al-Sallāmī is unknown but seems possible. The story of the ՙAbbasid caliphs is continued, in very summary fashion for the period of less-and-less effective caliphs between al-Ma’mūn and al-Muՙtaḍid, up to Gardīzī’s own time, hence ending with the reign of al-Qā’im (succeeded in 422/1031).

Julie Meisami has noted that a general thread running through Gardīzī’s History is the transfer of power in the Islamic East.⁸ This starts with the overthrow of the Sasanids, whose emperors had in general been arrogant and tyrannical, by the Arabs. It proceeds through the replacement of the Umayyads, whose rule is implicitly characterised as a mere mulk and not a divinely buttressed khilāfat, by the ՙAbbasids, with detail on the role of the Umayyad governors in Khurasan, in particular with that of the last governor, Naṣr b. Sayyār, and the tribal conflicts and animosities which heralded the downfall of Umayyad rule there. Gardīzī’s thus far matter-of-fact narrative takes on an accelerated, livelier tone when he deals, at considerable length, with the role of Abū Muslim al-Khurāsānī in the planning and eventual success of the ՙAbbasid daՙwa in Khurasan, and then with his fall and execution at the hands of the jealous and suspicious second ՙAbbasid caliph al-Manṣūr; the narrative here includes many references to prophetic and apocalyptic lore prefiguring these events. The next cataclysmic event in the history of the Islamic East, the transfer of the caliphate from the hedonistic, lightweight al-Amīn to his serious and virtuous brother al-Ma’mūn, is dealt with in less detail, though there is an account of the attack on Baghdad by al-Ma’mūn’s general Ṭāhir b. al-Ḥusayn and the subsequent killing of al-Amīn which casts the latter, founder of the subsequent line of Tahirid governors in Khurasan, in a neutral light.

Meisami has further noted that Gardīzī seems to have a special interest in recounting the messianic and heterodox movements which occur so frequently in the course of Persian history, beginning with brief mentions of the movements of Mani and Mazdak in Sasanid times and going into some detail with certain of the early Islamic outbreaks, such as those arising in the wake of Abū Muslim’s meteoric career and violent death: those in Khurasan and Transoxania of Bihāfarīd, Ustadsīs, al-Muqannaՙ and various anti-ՙAbbasid ‘Wearers of White’. As with other historians showing a similar concern, Gardīzī’s motive was doubtless to emphasise the good Islamic ruler’s duty to God in upholding the true faith and in suppressing false prophets and religious dissidence; it may also be, as Meisami suggests, that Gardīzī was consciously providing a background for the depiction of Maḥmūd of Ghazna as the suppressor of heresy within his own empire and as the great ghāzī and hammer of infidels in the Indian subcontinent.⁹

Apart from the fairly brief, atypical interlude of Saffarid domination in the East, whose short-lived control of Khurasan was ended by the more virtuous Samanid Ismāՙīl b. Aḥmad, Gardīzī’s narrative moves on from the Tahirids to the penultimate stage of power transfers there, the century or so of the Samanids in Transoxania and Khurasan, before the culmination of the History is reached in the Ghaznavids. Gardīzī has little on the general history of the Samanid dynasty that is not found in other sources like the local historian of Bukhara, Narshakhī, and the later Ibn al-Athīr, but he is, with al-ՙUtbī (see below), the main contemporary or near-contemporary source on the mounting chaos in Khurasan and the rivalries of the various contenders for power there, as the Samanid amirate disintegrated under both internal and external pressures, with the Ghaznavids emerging as a new dawla or change in the succession of dynasties and as bringers of a new order in the lands south of the Oxus.

Gardīzī has no information on the Turkish ghulām predecessors of Sebüktegin in Ghazna after the Samanid commander Alptegin’s withdrawal from Bukhara to the far eastern periphery of the empire in 351/962, and his material on the career of Sebüktegin is fragmentary and is interwoven with the story of the last Samanid amirs. His connected, chronological account of the Ghaznavids really begins with Maḥmūd b. Sebüktegin’s victory in 388/998 over his brother Ismāՙīl after a succession struggle and his investiture with the governorship of Khurasan by the caliph al-Qādir in 389/999, the beginning of the de facto independent Ghaznavid state. In the preface to his account of Maḥmūd’s reign, Gardīzī sets out his qualifications for his task as historian, prominent amongst which is the fact that he had been a first-hand observer of many of the events concerned. He avers that the greater part of his chronicle here is based on what he saw with his own eyes, including the Amir’s campaigns in India, in Sistan, in Khurasan and in Western Persia, but that he has nevertheless been selective in what he has set down, aiming at concision and hoping to avoid longwindedness.¹⁰

Given this last aim, it is not surprising that Gardīzī’s account of the early Ghaznavids, running from the rise to power of Maḥmūd to the opening of his grandson Mawdūd’s reign, hence spanning less than five decades, is mostly a bare chronicle of events, although he does expatiate on a lavishly staged event like the meeting of Maḥmūd with his ally, the Qarakhanid Great Khān Yūsuf Qadïr Khān, with such corroborative detail that one surmises that the author was either himself present or had first-hand information from someone who was there (see below, pp. 91–2). It may thus be said that, in general, Gardīzī’s historical narrative lacks the enlivening comments on events and the analyses of human motivation regarding the sultans, their Turkish commanders and their Persian bureaucrats, that we find in the extremely detailed, gossipy, often day-to-day account of Sultan Masՙūd’s reign found in Bayhaqī, but Gardīzī shares with Bayhaqī an aversion from fantastic and legendary adornments to his narrative. Virtually nothing of Gardīzī’s own personality or attitude to events comes through, beyond such occasional conventionalities and hypocrisies, unavoidable for a servant of the regime, as eulogies of the sultans (he praises Maḥmūd’s ascent to power as an effortless rise, achieved without any deceitfulness, trampling on people or bloodshed!), and his referring to Masՙūd (whose being killed through an army coup could be taken as one of the normal hazards of rulership in medieval Islam) as the ‘Martyr Sultan’.

Nevertheless, his account of Ghaznavid history is in certain places quite detailed, as when he describes, at considerable length and with much circumstantial detail, Maḥmūd’s crossing in 415/1024 of the Oxus north of Balkh by means of a bridge of boats chained together and the Sultan’s subsequent meeting to the south of Samarqand in 416/1025 with Yūsuf Qadïr Khān b. Bughrā Khān Hārūn or Ḥasan, and the subsequent exchange of luxurious presents (see below, pp. 91–2); it is likely that Gardīzī accompanied the Ghaznavid army and was a first-hand witness to these events. The Zayn al-akhbār is liberally provided with dates, often with month and day specified, most of which appear in fact to be accurate. For the first two-thirds of Maḥmūd’s reign it supplements, in a much more judicious, straightforward and readable manner, the ornate and often opaque Arabic account of al-ՙUtbī in his al-Kitāb al-yamīnī, which was probably completed in its present form, Peacock has suggested, at some point between 413/1022 and 416/1025, certainly before the fall from office of Maḥmūd’s vizier Aḥmad b. Ḥasan Maymandī in 416/1025.¹¹ Gardīzī’s account of Masՙūd’s reign deals with the new sultan’s administrative and military changes, the replacement of men of the former regime, the Maḥmūdiyān or Pidariyān, with ‘new men’, the Naw-khāstagān or upstarts, Masՙūd’s own creatures; and also with his Indian campaigns and the suppression of Aḥmad [b.] Ināltegin’s rebellion there. These merge into the crisis of the latter part of his reign, the story of the growing ascendancy of the Seljuqs in Khurasan and their ultimate victory at Dandānqān. Naturally, his account of these happenings cannot compare with Bayhaqī’s enormously detailed treatment of the events, yet there is a special value in Gardīzī’s story of the two brief reigns of Muḥammad b. Maḥmūd (421/1030 and 432/1041), for the extant books of Bayhaqī’s Mujalladāt only deal with the first reign as the curtain-raiser for Masՙūd’s reign, and break off before the killing of Masՙūd by his mutinous troops and their raising to power Muḥammad for his momentary, second reign.

It is regrettable that Gardīzī’s extant narrative ends with Mawdūd’s accession and triumphal avenging of his father in 432/1041, so that we do not possess accounts from him of the reign of Mawdūd and of those of his two ephemeral, shadowy successors Masՙūd (II) b. Mawdūd and ՙAlī b. Masՙūd (II), or of his own patron ՙAbd al-Rashīd, especially as these reigns are not well documented in the other historical sources.¹² The narrative of the manuscripts ends abruptly with Mawdūd’s execution of those involved in his father’s death; it is possible that Gardīzī carried it on for another ten years or so up to ՙAbd al-Rashīd’s reign, or he may have been prevented from achieving this by the usurpation of the slave commander Ṭoghrïl and the violent end of his sovereign in 443/1051–52;¹³ all this, however, is speculation.¹⁴

Gardīzī’s Persian style is simple and straightforward, even dry, though not without difficulties in a few places, whose resolution is probably rendered more hazardous by the absence of any early manuscripts. The two surviving ones of the Zayn al-akhbār, both probably copied in India, are not very satisfactory. The date of the first and better one, that of King’s College, Cambridge, is uncertain but is very probably sixteenth or seventeenth century. The Bodleian, Oxford, one bears the incontestable late date of 1196/1781. It is inferior to the Cambridge one in accuracy, and it seems that either the Oxford ms. was copied from the Cambridge one or else both were copied from a now-lost common source.¹⁵ In effect, we are dependent on a unique manuscript, which itself has lacunae in various places, the most serious ones being the loss of the preface or exordium and the historical section’s ending (see above). We have in any case a gap of some four centuries or more between the time when Gardīzī wrote and the oldest extant manuscript was made (a gap comparable to that existing for the more numerous manuscripts of Bayhaqī). The extreme paucity of extant manuscripts of Gardīzī’s work must be a reflection of the fact that, produced as it was on the far eastern fringes of the Islamic world, it seems to have been little known to subsequent generations of historians and udabā’ in the Persian and Indo-Muslim lands of later times, hence it was not until E.H. Palmer in 1868 published a catalogue of the oriental manuscripts of King’s College, Cambridge, that either Western or modern Persian scholars began to be aware of its existence.¹⁶

By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Persian or, more likely, Indo-Muslim copyists had lost familiarity with the Persian vocabulary and style of half-a-millennium before, and inevitably could only guess at the correct forms of many Turkish and Indian names.¹⁷ Gardīzī’s style was described by Malik al-Shuՙarā’ Bahār as ‘very mature and flowing’ (bisyār pukhta wa rawān), and he attached it to an earlier period of New Persian style than that discernible in Bayhaqī, one more closely resembling that of the Samanid vizier and translator Balՙamī in the previous century.¹⁸ Gilbert Lazard has noted that the conditions under which the text was transmitted are not favourable to the analysis of the Zayn al-akhbār for its linguistic content, but that the text nevertheless does not seem to have been subjected systematically to what its scribes thought was a modernisation (as is clearly the case with the manuscripts of Bayhaqī’s History, also only known from late manuscripts). There remain archaic features of vocabulary and rare expressions. Forms like hamī as the verbal prefix for continual or habitual action; the preposition andar for dar; and the use of mar . . . rā before complements of verbs, with a resultant meaning often much wider than that of simple direct and indirect object, are frequently to be found.¹⁹ Gardīzī’s vocabulary is largely Persian, with few Arabic words, and those mainly of an Islamic religious and cultural nature; it is indeed more strongly Persian than the vocabulary of Bayhaqī. God is always Khudā or Īzad and never Allāh; Muḥammad is almost always the Payghambar, and only occasionally the Rasūl [Allāh]. In the stylistic field, one notes touches like the frequent use of more euphemistic terms for death, e.g. farmān yāft ‘he received the Divine Summons’ and wafāt ‘fulfilment of one’s life span’ for rulers and other exalted figures, whereas more ordinary persons just ‘die’ (murdan).²⁰ Gardīzī’s use of the conventional pious phrases after person’s names (the taṣliya, taslīm, the tarḥīm, the tarḍiya, etc.) is restrained.²¹ Interesting is his occasional use of phrases which show the beginnings of the penetration of basically Arabic expressions into the vocabulary of standard Persian, such as sana-yi hādhihi for ‘this present year’.²² A further notable feature of Gardīzī’s sober style is the absence from his narrative of poetical citations, in contrast to the more expansive and literary style of his contemporary Bayhaqī; the extant portion of Bayhaqī’s History has no fewer than 473 lines of Arabic and Persian verse.²³

The present translation has been made essentially on the basis of Ḥabībī’s text, the first edition of Gardīzī approaching completeness (but see below). The first scholar to publish any part of the Zayn al-akhbār was Wilhelm Barthold/V.V. Bartol’d in his Otchet o poyezdkye v Srednyuyu Aziyu (St. Petersburg, 1897), pp. 78–103,²⁴ and in the volume of texts to accompany his chef d’oeuvre, Turkestan v epokhu mongolskago nashestviya (St. Petersburg, 1900), Vol. 1, pp. 1–18 (these last texts are not included in Sir E. Denison Ross’s English translation in the Gibb Memorial Series, Turkestan down to the Mongol Invasion [London, 1928]). A substantial section of the historical part of the work, covering the rulers in Khurasan from the Tahirids to the Ghaznavids, was edited by Muhammad Nazim (E.G. Browne Memorial Series, 1, Berlin-Steglitz, 1928). Nazim’s work had a certain virtue in that it emanated from an Indo-Muslim editor who was able to interpret and make sense of many place and personal names in the accounts of the Indian campaigns of Maḥmūd and Masՙūd, and he used Gardīzī’s information here for his book of three years later, The Life and Times of Sulṭān Maḥmūd of Ghazna. His version of the text was, however, far from adequate from the philological point of view, and was the target of savage criticism by the Persian scholar Mīrzā Muḥammad Qazwīnī, who characterised its editor as stupid (aḥmaq), unlettered (bīsawād) and ignorant (nādānā). Qazwīnī himself produced his own edition of this same section of Gardīzī at Tehran in 1315/1937, and in 1333/1954 Saՙīd Nafīsī published at Tehran his text of the historical section of Gardīzī from the Sasanids up to the beginning of the Samanids; these two publications marked a significant advance in achieving a reliable text for this section.

But a critical edition of the greater part of the work was only secured by the Afghan scholar, the late ՙAbd al-Ḥayy Ḥabībī, who produced a text, in elegant taՙlīq calligraphy, at Tehran in 1347/1968, with various appendices, including the texts of the prefaces by Qazwīnī and Nafīsī to their editions. For the historical section of the book, Ḥabībī built on Nafīsī’s work and often cites it in his apparatus criticus; in a few places, Nafīsī’s reading has nevertheless seemed to the present writer to be the better of the two.²⁵ As both K. Czeglédy and A.P. Martinez have observed in their valuable studies concerning Gardīzī’s information on the Turks of Inner Asia, Ḥabībī’s text is a most meritorious work based on a careful, critical examination of the two manuscripts, although the editor was often defeated by non-Arabic or non-Persian geographical, ethnic and tribal names through his failure to consult Barthold’s printed texts (see above) and subsequent translations of these sections by scholars like Count Géza Kuun, Josef Marquart/Markwart and C.A. Macartney.²⁶ Ḥabībī did with profit consult Minorsky’s Ḥudūd al-ՙālam translation and commentary, and he added materials from this to his knowledge of the historical geography and topography of his native Afghanistan, and also used Minorsky’s article, ‘Gardīzī on India’, in BSOAS XII (1947–9), pp. 625–40. However, he did not apparently have access to Sharaf al-Zamān Ṭāhir Marvazī on China, the Turks and India (London, 1942), in which Minorsky edited and translated the sections on these Inner Eurasian peoples and regions from the Ṭabā’iՙ al-ḥayawān of the Seljuq period, late fifth/eleventh and early sixth/twelfth century author Sharaf al-Zamān Ṭāhir; this writer made considerable use of Gardīzī in these sections but also derived material from other, unspecified sources. Nor did Ḥabībī consult the geographical section which survives of Ibn Rusta’s al-Aՙlāq al-nafīsa (probably written between 290/903 and 300/913) and which contains important sections on the Byzantines, the Slavs, the Rus, the Magyars, the Turkish lands, India, etc. These caveats apart, Ḥabībī’s work (reprinted at Tehran in 1363/1984 but now with the calligraphic section set up in type) was a solid, scholarly achievement, and over the last forty or so years it has formed a firm basis for utilisation of the Zayn al-akhbār by Islamic historians and by researchers on the ethnogenesis of the Turks and other steppe peoples, the religions of India, questions of festivals, dating and chronology, etc.

However, in 1384/2005, a fresh edition of the whole work by Raḥīm Riḍāzāda Malik appeared at Tehran under the auspices of the Anjuman-i Āthār wa Mafākhir-i Farhangī (pp. 72 + 636).²⁷ This has a substantial Introduction which inter alia surveys previous work on Gardīzī’s text. The editor then provides for the first time a complete edited text (Ḥabībī had omitted opening sections on the creation of the world and on the prophets and also a brief amount of matter at its end, and had inserted his own arbitrary renumbering of the work’s sections and subsections),²⁸ with an attempted restoration of contemporary orthography, e.g. with intervocalic and post-vocalic dh for d. There are detailed and useful indices, with biographical details for prominent personages, and some taՙlīqāt on certain specific topics or citing parallel passages, such as the account from Muḥammad b. al-Munawwar’s Asrār al-tawḥīd fī maqāmāt al-Shaykh Abī Saՙīd on the coming of the Seljuqs to Bāvard and Mayhana. However, there is virtually no apparatus criticus (the essential work here having been admittedly done by Ḥabībī and not requiring repetition), and this means that many small discrepancies of Riḍāzāda Malik’s text with Ḥabībī’s – involving changes of words, different interpretations of consonant ductus and even additional or missing words and phrases – are unsupported and their rationale unexplained. Occasionally, Riḍāzāda Malik’s interpretation has been adopted in the present translation (this being stated in the notes), but on the whole, and certainly for this historical section of the Zayn al-akhbār, his text does not replace that of Ḥabībī.

A rough English ms. translation by Major H.G. Raverty (who must have been the first Western scholar ever to utilise Gardīzī’s work) of nearly the whole work, as preserved in the Cambridge ms., is mentioned by Storey, by his time deposited in what was the India Office Library (now incorporated within the British Library, London). Raverty presumably made this in connection with his magnum opus, his translation of and very discursive and idiosyncratic commentary on the History by an author from the period of the first Slave Kings of Delhi, Minhāj al-Dīn Jūzjānī’s Ṭabaqāt-i nāṣirī.²⁹ A Russian translation of the section of Gardīzī’s work concerning the history of Khurasan, from the first governorship of ՙAbdallāh b. ՙĀmir b. Kurayz to the demise of Sultan Masՙūd of Ghazna, was made by A.K. Arends (already known as the translator into Russian of Bayhaqī’s History). Arends, however, died in 1976 with the bare translation that he had made, essentially from Saՙīd Nafīsī’s edition (see above) still unpublished and with only an incomplete introduction. The Uzbek Academy of Sciences gained possession of Arends’s manuscript and commissioned a former student of his, L.M. Epifanova, to put this into publishable form. She checked his translation against Ḥabībī’s text, completed the introduction and added some notes, so that the complete work was at last published as Zain al-akhbar. Ukrashenie izvestiy. Razdel ob istorii Khorasana (Uzbekistan Academy of Sciences, Tashkent, 1991).³⁰ However, the rarity of copies of this book in Western libraries, published as it was in the Uzbek Republic in a limited number of copies, and the inaccessibility of works written in the Russian language to many scholars and researchers anyway, have seemed to the present writer ample justification for the present work, one which has been made independently of its Russian predecessor.

In the historical section of his work whose translation is the subject of the present book, Gardīzī and his copyists were dealing with a section of eastern Iranian history whose personal and place names were largely familiar to them, except when they came up against the Turkish names of various military slave commanders and against Indian geographical names and personal names and titles, prominent in the recounting of Ghaznavid raids into the subcontinent. Nazim’s efforts towards the elucidation of these last has already been noted, but of more recent importance have been the work of Minorsky mentioned above and that of S.H. Hodivala, even though the latter does not deal specifically with the Zayn al-akhbār (as implied above, not known to the scholarly world when Elliot and Dowson put together in the mid-nineteenth century their collection of English translations bearing on the history of the subcontinent). The usefulness of the work of Nazim and Hodivala may be supplemented by the more recent study, specifically of Masՙūd’s campaigns into India, by Nazir Ahmad.³¹

The notes which accompany the present translation are not intended to provide a thoroughgoing commentary on the text and its historical background; such a commentary on four centuries of Eastern Islamic history could well be of an enormous size. The notes here are meant merely to render the period and its events intelligible in a summary fashion; and in general, studies and translations are given rather than the primary sources, which may be traced from the historical works mentioned below. Ḥabībī’s edition has a detailed apparatus criticus, and variants are only noted here when they affect the meaning of the passage in question and when they concern the correct forms of personal or place names, for which Ḥabībī did not always have the best information. The studies of various scholars on the history of Khurasan and the East during the four centuries or so covered by this section of Gardīzī (Wellhausen, Marquart, Barthold, Gibb, Nāẓim, Shaban, Sharon, Daniel, Kaabi, Bosworth, etc.) are well known, and these works are all thoroughly documented; moreover, a more recent generation of scholars like Patricia Crone, Matthew Gordon, Étienne de la Vaissière, Luke Treadwell and Deborah Tor is adding new insights into particular, under-researched aspects of the period. Reference will be made to such studies, but without repetition of the primary sources on which they are based. For the end of the Samanids and the early Ghaznavid period, a very detailed commentary on the greater part of the relevant events – since Bayhaqī has many anecdotal flashbacks to what happened before Masՙūd assumed the throne from his brother Muḥammad, with stories on aspects of Samanid history, on the seizure of power in Khurasan by Sebüktegin and Maḥmūd during the last years of Samanid rule, on Maḥmūd’s annexation of Khwarazm, etc. – is given in the translation by the present author of the The History of Beyhaqi (The History of Sultan Masՙud of Ghazna, 1030–1041) by Abu ’l-Fazl Beyhaqi, 3 vols. (New York, 2009), and reference may be made to this, to the commentary that forms vol. 3 and to the extensive bibliography given at vol. 3, pp. 399–420.