Download PDF | Beyhaqi History, (The History of Sultan Mas‘ud of Ghazna, 1030-1041)
By Abu'l-Fazl Beyhagi, Vol. 1-3
Vol. I , 547 Pages
Vol.II , 408 Pages
Vol.III , 479 Pages
About the Translator
C. Edmund Bosworth graduated in Modern History from Oxford University and in Arabic, Persian and Turkish from Edinburgh University, and was until his retirement Professor of Arabic Studies in the University of Manchester; he is at present Visiting Professor at the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the University of Exeter. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He was for almost thirty years British Editor of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, new edition, was Co-Editor of the Journal of Semitic Studies and edited two volumes of the UNESCO History of the Civilizations of Central Asia. He is Co-Editor of Iran, Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies, and consultant on medieval Islamic history and historical geography for the Encyclopaedia Iranica. The subjects of his many books range over Arabic literature, Arabic social history, Islamic chronology and dynastic history, Iranian and Turkish history, and seventeenth-century British travellers to the Middle East. He has contributed extensively to the Encyclopaedia of Islam and the Encyclopaedia Iranica, and several of his very numerous articles have been collected together in three Variorum Collected Studies volumes.
About the Reviser
Mohsen Ashtiany, Associate Editor of the Encyclopaedia Iranica, has studied at the Universities of St. Andrews and Oxford and has held research fellowships at the Universities of Harvard and Princeton. He has also taught Persian literature and history at the Universities of Oxford, Manchester, and California at Los Angeles. He is the author of a number of articles in the field of Persian studies and is well known for his extensive knowledge of Persian history and culture as well as for his bibliographical scholarship and his elegant English style. He is currently working on a book on the twelfth-century Persian poet Nezami of Ganjeh. The Center for Iranian Studies would like to thank the Ilex Foundation for their generous grant which enabled him to carry out a major part of the revision during his year’s Fellowship at Princeton in 2002-3.
Foreword by Ehsan Yarshater
Beyhaqi’s History, arguably the best known and most liked of all Persian histories, stands out among other Persian chronicles for its objectivity, its analytical approach to reporting events, its attention to detail, the skill displayed in weaving the rich texture of its narrative with its often ironic implications—all contributing to the highly dramatic quality which is its hallmark. No other Persian history, with the possible exception of Rashid al-Din’s thirteenth-century universal history, Jame‘-al-tavarikh, has been the subject of more scholarly studies in either Western languages or Persian.
The author, Abu’! Fazl Beyhaqi (995-1077), a court secretary of a number of Ghaznavid rulers in eastern Persia and Afghanistan, was born in Beyhag (modern Sabzevar) in Khorasan. He studied in Nishapur, at the time an important cultural centre. As a young man he joined the Secretariat of the Ghaznavid Sultan Mahmud (998-1030), where for almost two decades he worked under the chief secretary Abu Nasr Moshkan. He continued working under Mahmud’s successors, observing at close quarters the reigns of eight successive kings in the course of some fifty-five years, and was involved in the preparation of important documents and diplomatic correspondence with neighbouring sovereigns. He was promoted under Sultan ‘Abdal-Rashid (1049-52), became the head of the Secretariat and then he retired from court service and settled down in Ghazna, the capital of the early Ghaznavids, to write his History. His proximity to the centre of power at the court gives his chronicle a sense of immediacy, reinforced by frequent accounts of his own direct observations during his years in office.
Throughout his long career, Beyhaqi had made copious notes, which he later used in compiling his History. The result was a voluminous opus, comprising some thirty “books,” covering the dynastic history of the Ghaznavids and the life and times of its major players. Only five “books” (books 5—10) have survived, the rest having disappeared as a result of political upheavals in which most of his manuscript and notes were pillaged and destroyed. However, the extant volumes in themselves amount to a substantial corpus, with the printed text running into almost a thousand pages in the critical edition by ‘A.-A. Fay yaz (Tehran, 1971; repr. 2004).
The History has been translated into Arabic by Yahya al-Khashshab and Sadeq Nash’at (Cairo, 1956), and into Russian with notes as /storiya Mas‘uda by A.K. Arends (Tashkent, 1962; 2nd ed. Moscow, 1969).
A collection of essays entitled, Yad-name-ye Abu’l Fazl Beyhaqi (Abu’l Fazl Beyhaqi’s Memorial Volume, Mashhad, 1971), contains a number of important studies in Persian and English on various aspects of Beyhaqi’s History, including for example, Nazir Ahmad’s “A Critical Examination of Baihaqi’s Narration of the Indian Expeditions during the Reign of Mas‘ud of Ghazna,” pp. 34-83 (also in Afghanistan 24/4, 1972, pp. 68-92), Kenneth Allin Luther’s “Bayhaqi and the Later Seljuq Historians: Some Comparative Remarks” (pp. 14-33), and Roger M. Savory’s “Abo’! Faz] Bayhaqi as an Historiographer,” pp. 84-128.
Several monographs have been devoted to a discussion of Beyhaqi’s magnum opus; R. Gelpke, Sultan Mas‘ad I. von Gazna, Die drei ersten Jahre seiner Herrschaft (421/1030-424/1033) (Munich, 1957); Marilyn Waldman, Toward a Theory of Historical Narrative: A Case Study in Perso-Islamicate Historiography (Columbus, Ohio, 1980); Filippo Bertotti, L’Opera dello storico persiano Bayhagi (Istituto Italiano Orientale, Naples, 1991).
The History is also discussed at length as an essential document in recent works on historiography. Stephen Humphreys examines Beyhaqi’s History as the most representative specimen of Persian historiography in a chapter entitled “Bayhaqi and Ibn Taghribirdi: The Art of Narrative in Islamic Historical Writing during the Middle Periods” in his perceptive work: Islamic History: A Framework for Inquiry (Princeton, 1991, pp. 128-47). Julie Scott Meisami’s “Bayhagqi’s History of Mas‘td of Ghazna” in her Persian Historiography to the End
of the Twelfth Century, (Edinburgh, 1999, pp. 79-108) re-examines the implications of Beyhaqi’s narrative methods in their historical context.
Among numerous other essays and articles on Beyhaqi, one may mention the authoritative overview of Beyhaqi’s life and work and various editions of his History by Gholam-Hoseyn Yusofi in the Encyclopedia Iranica (under “Bayhaqi, Abu’! Fazl,” Vol. III, pp: 889-94; 1988); Mujtaba Minovi, “The Persian Historian Bayhaqi,” in B. Lewis and P.M. Holt, eds., Historians of the Middle East (London 1962, pp. 138-40); C.E. Bosworth’s “Early sources for the First Four Ghaznavid Sultans (977-1041),” in Islamic Quarterly (7/1-2, 1963, pp. 10-14, reprinted in idem, The Medieval History of Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia, London, 1977); idem, “The Poetical Citations in Baihaqi’s Ta’rikh-i1 Mas‘ndi,” in XX. Deutscher Orientalistentag
. 1977 in Erlangen, Vortrage (ZDMG, Suppl. IV, Wiesbaden, 1980, pp. 41-56); and Gilbert Lazard, “Un mémorialiste persan, Beyhaqi,” in Mélanges Labande (Poitiers, 1974, pp. 471-78); and Houra Yavari, “Some thoughts on the Narrative Structure of Bayhaqi’s History and the Role of Added Narratives” (in Persian), in Iran-shenasi, XIII/1, Spring 2001, pp. 117-38.
Essentially, the History is devoted to the narration of the events and the description of the personalities of the reign of Mas‘ud (1030-41) and his brother Mohammad, whom he defeated as successor to the throne, and, by extension, those of his father, Mahmud, the most powerful of all the Ghaznavid sultans. However, as a backdrop to Mas‘ud’s reign, Beyhaqi frequently introduces accounts of past events and relates in flashbacks the important occurrences, not only of Sultan Mahmud’s reign, but also of Sebiiktegin, the founder of the Ghaznavid dynasty. There are also accounts of earlier dynasties, notably the Samanids (819-1005), which preceded the Ghaznavids in Central Asia and Eastern Iran, and the Buyids (932-1062) in central and western Persia, as well as a number of events related to the ‘Abbasid and Fatimid caliphs. He also provides a valuable history of Chorasmia, a Central Asian kingdom, occasioned by Sultan Mahmud’s conquest of it.
What distinguishes Beyhaqi’s History from other medieval Persian histories is his concept of history and his avowed notion of his task as a historian, encapsulated in frequent asides in his narrative. Thus in an often quoted passage as a critique of other chronicles (see e.g. Stephen Humphreys, op.cit, p. 128) Beyhaqi writes,
One usually reads that a certain king sent a certain general to such and such a war, and that on such and such a day they made war or peace, and that this one defeated that one or that one this one, and then proceeded somewhere else. But I write what is worthy to be recorded.
What is to Beyhaqi worthy of recording is not merely the narration of events but also the elucidation of their circumstances and their underlying context and the motives of the protagonists involved in them, which he attempts to unravel and explain. Furthermore, to him “events” do not consist of only political occurrences, conflicts and wars, peace agreements and treaties; he has a much broader view of history. His panoramic view embraces and integrates political and diplomatic events, social phenomena, court customs and ceremonial, and administrative structure and processes. His invocation of the general decline of a reign, as refracted in the abeyance of ceremonies and neglect of decorum, is an obvious example.
Beyhaqi’s evocation of scenes and his enlivening the interest of his readers with subtle ironical innuendoes, are buttressed by a strong sense of morality and a firm belief in justice and ethical conduct. Without being explicitly judgmental, his History can also be seen as a vehicle for the moral education of the reader; it shows the virtues of justice and simple piety and the banality and the ultimate futility of spiteful intrigues and blind ambitions at the court. Frequently he uses an indirect way to impart his criticism of royal conduct or the greed, vengefulness, and thoughtlessness of the officials in charge by citing parallel events from other times and other regimes. A case in point is his dramatic description of the downfall, arrest and impaling of Hasanak, a capable vizier of Sultan Mahmud. He describes a number of events to serve as a moral pointer for the injustice done to Hasanak and the complicity and culpability of Sultan Mas‘ud in his execution.
As already suggested above, it is neither possible nor desirable to separate the “matter” of this masterpiece from its “manner.” Nevertheless, setting aside the considerable literary and stylistic merits of the work, it must be pointed out that no other historical work in Persian contains so much information about the administrative divi- sions of a government (the Divans), diplomatic negotiations and correspondence, the place of the military in the dynastic rule, the siege of cities and imposition of tolls and tributes, collection of taxes, management of royal domains, the working of tribunals, relations of local dynasts with the ‘Abbasid court in Baghdad, the rivalries in the bipolar Islamic world of the time between the Fatimid caliphs in Egypt and North Africa and the ‘Abbasid caliphs in the eastern lands of Islam, the position of slaves and their training as soldiers or servants or companions, the daily life at court (important in an autocratic royal system of government), the relation between the king and his courtiers, court ceremonies, celebrations and mournings; the patronage of poets and authors by the royal court and the notables, secretarial lore, and the machinations and intrigues among the court dignitaries and ofhcials. Here indeed is God’s plenty.
It should be noted that the administrative apparatus of the Ghaznavids, as one of the most powerful dynasties of the ‘Abbasid realm, was inherited from their predecessors, the Samanids, which had been modelled on that of the ‘Abbasids, itself influenced to a certain extent by the practices of the Sasanians (224-651). The system thus established was continued in its basic features in Persia and Central Asia until the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century and even beyond up to pre-modern times. No other source furnishes such detailed information about this administrative system as does Beyhaqi. His History is indispensable for the knowledge of the Divan system (administrative divisions) in Iran and Central Asia.
About the Present Annotated Translation
More than forty years ago when I started the Persian Heritage Series, which consisted of the translation of Persian classics into major Western languages and Japanese, more particularly into English, one of my strong desires was to have Beyhaqi’s History translated into English. Some thirty-five years ago, I approached Professor C.E. Bosworth, the well-known historian and the outstanding expert on the Ghaznavid dynasty, to see whether he could spare necessary
time for such a translation. But at the time and for many years afterwards, he was busy not only with teaching but also with carrying the major burden of editing the second edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, apart from writing frequent entries for it and for the Encyclopaedia Iranica as well as for a variety of learned journals. Therefore, his reluctance to commit himself to a very time consuming task was understandable.
In the years that followed, I could not find a satisfactory translator for this gem of Persian historiography until 1997, when Professor Bosworth was nearing retirement and the second edition of Encyclopaedia of Islam was approaching its completion, I thought I had a better chance of persuading him to undertake the task. Much to my delight, he agreed, but as befits the integrity of his scholarly character he said that he would need the cooperation of a scholar of Persian literature to check his translation and help him with some of the obscure or difficult passages, especially some of the poems that Beyhaai cites.
To respond to his request, first I approached Professor Heshmat Moayyad of Chicago University for the purpose and he cooperated with the project by checking the first fifty pages of the translation. In the meantime, I sent a request to the National Endowment for the Humanities for financial support of the project—a request that was approved in due course.
The arrangement with Professor Moayyad, however, did not work out. As a result, I persuaded my colleague Mr. Mohsen Ashtiany, a scholar with a vast knowledge of Persian literature and history and with an exceptional mastery of the English language and style to collaborate with Prof. Bosworth in his task and serve asa reviser of Prot. Bosworth’s translation. In practice, Prof. Bosworth would regularly send batches of his translation and annotation to me, or to Mr. Ashtiany who would go over them and check them against the original and return them to Prof. Bosworth with his comments and corrections. As a rule, Prof. Bosworth in his translation paid meticulous attention to the wording and turn of phrases of the original, and Mr. Ashtiany tried to make the translation read more smoothly and fluently, while registering at the same time his comments on the translation of difficult passages and notes. I often benefited by the scholarship of the erudite translator and reviser while keeping the process uninterrupted and steady.
The translation proceeded with considerable speed. Prof. Bosworth had decided early that a translation of Beyhaqi without historical, geographical, and philological explanatory notes could not be thoroughly understood or appreciated by those readers who might not be familiar with the context of the events and their venues. Therefore, he embarked on not only full explanation of all the proper names and philological points, but also on commenting on the events and their historical contexts with reference to parallel passages in other sources when necessary. He also placed at the head of his translation a full Introduction in which he discussed the history of the Ghaznavid domains in Iran, Central Asia, and Northwestern India as well as delineating the method of Beyhaqi’s historiography and the characteristics of his style as a historian.
As the notes grew copious, amounting to about half the translation, I suggested that a separate volume be devoted to the publication of the Notes, of use mostly to researchers and scholars, with a Glossary of Terms to be placed after the Introduction. This was agreed upon and this is how the annotated translation of this classic of Persian historiography and literature is presented to its readers.
It is a distinct pleasure to see one of my old wishes realized. This is the only translation of Beyhaqi’s History that exists in Western languages except Russian. It is hoped that it will prove of assistance to all the students of Islamic history and the history of Iranian lands during the tenth to the twelfth centuries in a broad sense.
Acknowledgements
It is my pleasant duty to thank first of all, Professor Bosworth and Mr. Ashtiany for their several years of arduous and dedicated work on Beyhaqi’s translation, as well as Professor Moayyad for his initial cooperation. I should like to express also a profound gratitude to the National Endowment for the Humanity for their encouragement and support, and The Persian Heritage Foundation for its providing the needed matching funds. I am particularly grateful to Dr. Helen Agiiera, the Senior Officer at the National Endowment’s Division of Preservation and Access and Mr. George Farr, the former head of the Division, for their support and their facilitating the progress of the project. Iam also grateful to the Alavi Foundation for their support of the project through Columbia University. I am thankful to Ms. Dina Amin and Dr. Mahnaz Moazami of The Center for Iranian Studies and of The Persian Heritage Foundation, respectively, who have been of great help with the administrative aspects of the Project. My thanks are due also to Mr. Claudius Naumann of the Freie Universitat Berlin who was responsible for the careful layout and the choice of the fonts with admirable taste, and to Mr. Alex Popovkin for his meticulous preparation of the Index.
Preface and Acknowledgements
The present translation, having been begun in 1999, represents the work of several years. Its genesis lies in an invitation from Professor Ehsan Yarshater to produce an English version of Beyhaqi’s History for his Persian Heritage Series, and I am very grateful to him for his encouragement and support during the protracted period of this book’s gestation. It is over four decades ago that the late Professor V.F. Minorsky suggested to me, while I was visiting him in his welcoming house in Bateman Street, Cambridge, and near the end of his long and richly-fulfilled life, that I should undertake this work. At that stage of my academic life I felt that I lacked both the considerable amount of time and concentration required and also the maturity of experience and knowledge necessary for embarking on such a massive work. But Professor Yarshater’s invitation, coming as it did over thirty years later, in the later nineteen-nineties, was timely in that, having retired from full-time University life, I was then able to devote much of my time to what was obviously going to be a complex and lengthy undertaking.
Such an English translation represents the first rendering of this masterpiece of early Persian historiography, the Tarikh-e Mas‘udz, into a Western European language (for details of existing texts and other translations, see below, Introduction, section 3). It appeared to me, however, that a bare translation of the Persian text would be of very limited value when dealing with a work of such significance for the history of the Islamic lands to the east of the Arab heartland. Beyhaqi’s History is not only valuable for the light that it throws on the dynastic, diplomatic and military history of the Eastern Islamic world in the later tenth and early eleventh centuries ap, with the Iranian principalities there faced with incoming waves of Turkish military adventurers and tribesmen from the Inner Asian steppes who were to transform that world, but valuable also for its uniquely illuminating picture of the working of a medieval Islamic chancery and its personnel. It has, moreover, long been recognized as a key text—not least because of its great length—in the development of early New Persian prose style during what the historian of Persian prose writing, Malek al-Sho‘ara’ Bahar, has described as its second period. It displays significant pointers to the linguistic usages of the time when it was written (ca. AD 1060), despite the regrettable normalisations of the text by later copyists that probably took place over subsequent centuries (see below, Introduction, section 5).
For all these reasons, I felt that the work would bear a detailed commentary, predominantly historical and geographical, but with some note of literary and linguistic questions, and that it would not, indeed, be properly intelligible without it. This commentary I have accordingly endeavoured to supply, and it forms Volume III of the present work. The reader of the translation can accordingly consult this commentary for detailed, specific information on historical, literary and linguistic points, but the translation will be intelligible to him as it stands provided he or she first reads section 1 of the Introduction, which delineates the historical background of Beyhaqi’s work, and utilizes the Select glossary of names of significant persons, places, dynasties and peoples occurring in the History and the Glossary of technical terms given below.
It is a bold modern Westerner who tries to understand the personality of a Persian bureaucrat working in what is now eastern Afghanistan almost a millennium ago. Much of the mindset of such a person as this, nurtured as he was in an alien religious and cultural world, must be inevitably closed for us and be incapable of full recovery after such an long expanse of time; we can only observe from outside the culture and over a great temporal distance and then hope in part to comprehend. And if the Persian language has changed less in a thousand years than say English, in its transition during a comparable period from the Early English of late Anglo-Saxon times to Modern English, it nevertheless has inevitably developed, so that Beyhaqi’s style and linguistic usages are not always easy for modern Persians fully to grasp.
Hence I have been fortunate in having Mr Mohsen Ashtiany, with his profound knowledge of all periods of New Persian language and literature, and his sense of English literary style, to review and correct my translation and to make many valuable contribution to the notes and commentary, these last being marked thus [M.A.]. He has corrected erroneous translations; has made sense of many difficult passages, ones which may well have been corruptly transmitted by copyists; and has made many modifications to my original translation in the direction of lightening its style. For there is always a tension between the aim of providing a literal translation, one which is as faithful as possible to the original and which displays the fact that the translator has understood, as far as is possible with the lapse of centuries, the original, and the aim of producing a version which is smooth-reading and has a modicum at least of literary attractiveness. Moreover, the necessity for having a scholar of ethnically Persian origin like Mr Ashtiany undertake such a work of review is especially pressing with regard to the Persian poetry which Beyhaqi quotes frequently and at length. Citations from Samanid period authors like Dagiqi and Rudaki are relatively straightforward—insofar as any Persian poetry is straightforward to the outsider—but the historian gives the texts of four substantial odes by a contemporary of his in Ghazna during the middle decades of the eleventh century, one Abu Hanifa Eskafi (see below, Introduction, sections 1, 4). The style of these poems is far from easy and, since Beyhaqi is the sole author to preserve their texts, we have no check on whether they have been correctly transmitted over the centuries. Various other Persian scholars whom I have consulted here have offered differing translations and interpretations for many of the verses, so that the translations given here are tentative and cannot be regarded as definitive; Mr Ashtiany has in fact come to the conclusion that the received text is so corrupt in certain places that no intelligible translation of it there can in fact be given. Clearly, more work needs to be done on the poems by experts in classical Persian poetry.
An enterprise on the scale of the present work has required input and help from specialists on a wide range of subjects. In addition to Mr Ashtiany’s wide-ranging contribution, acknowledged above, I am grateful to Professor Heshmat Moayyad (University of Chicago) for checking my translation of the first forty or fifty pages of Beyhaqi’s text. Dr Ebrahim Nura’i (University of Isfahan), Dr Leonard Lewisohn (University of Exeter) and Mr Mohammad Reza Jowzi (Institute of Ismaili Studies, London) made valuable comments on translating the Persian poetry. Professor Geert Jan Van Gelder (University of Oxford) gave advice on aspects of the rendering of the Arabic poetry. Professor Rudolf Sellheim (University of Frankfurt) gave especially copious and detailed information on the many Arabic proverbial sayings and adages, identifying these in the classical collections wherever possible. Professors Christopher Shackle (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) and Irfan Habib (Aligarh Muslim University) answered queries about Indian names and terms used by Beyhaqi and about points of Indo-Muslim history. Professor Michael Fedorov (Karlsruhe, Germany) shared with me his specialist knowledge of medieval Islamic Central Asian numismatics. Dr Benedek Péri (University of Budapest) and Professor Peter B. Golden (Rutgers University, N.J.) were sources of enlightenment on points of Turkish onomastics and philology. For linguistic information on the older Iranian languages, the late and lamented Professor D.N. MacKenzie (University of Gottingen) showed his customary helpfulness. For certain architectural terms used by Beyhaqi but of obscure significance today, I derived help from the encyclopaedic knowledge of Persian art and architecture of Professor Robert Hillenbrand (University of Edinburgh). Other scholars who have been helpful in supplying information and help with bibliographical materials include Professor Iraj Afshar (University of Tehran); Dr Mohammed Ben Madani (London); Professor A. D. H. Bivar (SOAS, University of London); Professor Claude Gilliot (University of Aix-en-Provence); and Professor Edmund Herzig (University of Oxford) and Professor G.R. Smith (University of Manchester).
C. Edmund Bosworth Castle Cary, Somerset April 2008
I would like to thank Dr. Adel Adamova and Ms. Olga Novoseltseva of The State Hermitage Museum for their kind assistance in providing the illustration for the cover. I am also indebted to my friends at the ex Foundation, Niloo Fotouhi and Chris Dadian, for overseeing the final stages of the publication of these volumes.
Mohsen Ashtiany
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