Gardizi's Ornament of Histories (Zayn al-akhbar)
An eleventh-century Persian history whose famous chapter on the Turks is not in this edition.
Full title Ornament of Histories: the section on the Tahirids, Saffarids, Samanids and Ghaznavids, Persian text ed. Muhammad Nazim (E. G. Browne Memorial Fund no. 1, Berlin: Iranschahr, 1928)
زین الاخبار
Gardizi (fl. c.1050)
Gardizi wrote this Persian history around 1050 at Ghazna, drawing on earlier writers rather than on his own travels. The full work has a well-known chapter on the Turks of the steppe (Kimek, Kirghiz, Qarluq, Pechenegs, Khazars, Bulghars), but Muhammad Nazim's 1928 Berlin edition prints only a middle section on the Tahirids, Saffarids, Samanids and Ghaznavids. A scan of that edition sits in the corpus, but this guide has not read it and quotes nothing from it. The profile rests on the catalogue card.
- How they knew
- Compiled from others
- Who “Tartar” means here
- Not recorded. Gardizi wrote around 1050, long before the Mongol empire, so Tartar would not mean the Mongols here.
- Why read it
- The Turks chapter of Gardizi is a core eleventh-century Persian description of the steppe, though it must be read in other editions such as Barthold's.
- Watch out
- Nazim printed only part of the work for lack of funds, and the Turks chapter is not in this edition. The atlas quotes nothing from it.
What it says
No quotes from this one yet. Its text is out of reach for now, or the scan could not be read.
The fine print
How we know
compilation Assembled from earlier sources. The author did not observe it directly.
compilation of earlier sources (Jayhani, Ibn al-Muqaffa, Ibn Khurradadhbih) written c.1050 at Ghazna; not firsthand
Research notes
- IA date 1050 is the composition date. Nazim printed only ff. 1-101 of the middle of the work for lack of funds (stated in the preface). Barthold's 1897 edition of the Turks chapter (Otchet o poezdke v Sredniuiu Aziiu) and Habibi's full Tehran text were not found scanned.
Why it matters
Gardizi's chapter on the Turks (Kimek, Kirghiz, Qarluq, Yaghma, Pechenegs, Khazars, Bulghars) is a core eleventh-century Persian ethnography of the steppe; this edition gives the adjacent Samanid-Ghaznavid narrative, and the Turks chapter is available in Russian through Barthold (below).
Places named
Khorasan; Transoxiana; steppe north of the Syr Darya
Peoples named
Samanids; Ghaznavids; Turks (chapter on the Turks not in this edition)