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PREFACE
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xxxix
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For a title suiting its contents is " Babur Padshah's Book-pile," because it is fashioned of itern after item of pen-work done by many men in obedience to the dictates given by his book. Unlike the cairn, however, the pile of books is not of a single occasion but of many, not of a single year but of many, irregularly spacing the 500 years through which he and his autobiography have had Earth's immortality.
Part I. The MSS. themselves.
Preliminary. Much of the information given below was published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society from 1900 onwards, as it came into my possession during a search for reliable Turki text of the Babnr-nama. My notes were progressive ; some MSS. were in distant places, some not traceable, but in the end I was able to examine in England all of whose continued existence I had become aware. It was inevitable that some of my earlier statements should be superseded later ; my Notes {see s.n. JRAS.) need clearing of transitory matter and' summarizing, in particular those on the Elphinstone Codex and Klaproth's articles. Neither they nor what is placed here makes claim to be complete. Other workers will supplement them when the World has renewed opportunity to stroll in the bye-paths of literature.
Few copies of the Babur-nama seem to have been made; of the few I have traced as existing, not one contains the complete autobiography, and one alone has the maximum of dwindled text shewn in the Persian translation (1589). Two books have been reputed to contain Babur's authentic text, one preserved in Hindustan by his descendants, the other issuing from Bukhara. They differ in total contents, arrangement and textual worth; moreover the Bukhara book compiles items of divers diction and origin and date, manifestly not from one pen.
The Hindustan book is a record now mutilated of the Acts of Babur alone; the Bukhara book as exhibited in its fullest accessible example, Kehr's Codex, is in two parts, each having its preface, the first reciting Babur's Acts, the second Humayun's.
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