The second marginal entry is the curiously placed rubd'i, which is now the only one on the page, and now has no signature attaching to it. It has the character of a personal message to the recipient of one of more books having identical contents. That these two entries are there while the text seems so clearly to be written by a scribe, is open to the explanation that when (as said about the colophon, p.lx) the rectangle of text was made good from a mutilated archetype, the original margin was placed round the rifacimento ? This superposition would explain the entries and seal-like circles, discernible against a strong light, on the reverse of the margin only, through the rifacimento page. The upper edge of the rectangle shows sign that the margin has been adjusted to it [so far as one can judge from a photograph]. Nothing on the face of the margin hints that the text itself is autograph ; the words of the colophon, tahrir qildim (i.e. I have written down) cannot hold good against the cumulative testimony that a scribe copied the whole manuscript. The position of the last syllable [ni] of the rubd'i shows that the signature below the colophon was on the margin before the diagonal couplet of the rubd'i was written, therefore when the margin was fitted, as it looks to have been fitted, to the rifacimento. If this be the order of the two entries [i.e. the small-hand signature and the diagonal couplet], Shah-i-jahan's " blessed name " may represent the small-hand signature which certainly shows minute differences from the writing of the text of the MS. in the name Babur (q.v. passim in the Rampur MS.).
d. The Bdburi-khatt (Bdbur's script).
So early as 91OAH. the year of his conquest of Kabul, Babur devised what was probably a variety of nakhsh, and called it the Bdburi-khatt (f. 144^), a name used later by Haidar Mlrza, Nizamu'd-din Ahmad and 'Abdu'l-qadir Baddyuni. He writes of it again (f. 179) s.a. 911 AH. when describing an interview had in 912 AH. with one of the Harat Qazls.'at which the script was discussed, its specialities (mufraddt) exhibited to, and read by the QazI who there and then wrote in it.1 In what remains to us
The Qazl's rapid acquirement of the mufradit of the script allows the inference that few letters only and those of a well-known script were varied. Mufradat was translated by Erskine, de Courteille and myself (f. 357<5)as alphabet but reconsideration
