Account of Chinggis Khan and Timur (Daftar-i Chingiz-nama)
A seventeenth-century Volga Tatar collection of legends about Chinggis Khan, Timur, Bulghar and Kazan.
Full title Account of Chinggis Khan and Timur the Lame: seventeenth-century manuscript of the Tatar ‘Daftar-i Chingiz-nama’ cycle (tribal legends with tamgha figures, history of Timur, Kazan and Bulghar legends), the text later printed at Kazan (1819/1822)
احوال چنگیز خان و اقساق تمور (دفتر چنگیز نامه)
Anonymous Volga-Tatar compiler
An anonymous Volga Tatar compiler put together, in the mid-1600s, tribal legends of Chinggis Khan's people (with their tamghas, war cries and trees), a history of Timur, and lore about Kazan and Bulghar. The card says it abridges Rashid al-Din and Abu'l-Ghazi, and includes Timur's destruction of Bulghar. The text was later printed at Kazan in 1819 and 1822. The atlas does not hold the text: the corpus knows a manuscript (BnF Supplément turc 143) only through Gallica catalogue records.
- How they knew
- Legends
- Who “Tartar” means here
- The Volga Tatars' own tradition. The card calls it the popular Tatar memory of Tartary, set against the Persian court histories, and names Volga Tatars, Bulghars, Chinggisids and Nogays.
- Why read it
- How Volga Tatars remembered Chinggis Khan, Timur and the fall of Bulghar, in their own folk history.
- Watch out
- The BnF cataloguer judged it of no historical value, a nineteenth-century verdict the atlas records rather than adopts. The atlas quotes nothing from this work.
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 oral and written legend (Chinggisid tribal origins with tamghas, uran and tree, abridged from Rashid al-Din and Abu'l-Ghazi according to the catalogue; Timur's destruction of Bulghar; Kazan lore); retrospective, not historical in the modern sense (the BnF cataloguer calls it 'sans valeur historique')
Research notes
- Anonymous; tribal chapter abridges Rashid al-Din and Abu'l-Ghazi (catalogue); the BnF cataloguer's dismissal of its historical value is itself a nineteenth-century judgement to be recorded, not adopted. The Kazan 1819/1822 print (Daftar-i Chingiz-nama) and Ivanics and Usmanov's 2002 edition were not found online.
- | Also recorded independently by the russian pass: Open web text retrieved (vostlit.info/Texts/Dokumenty/M.Asien/XVIII/172…).
- Further copies: vostlit.info/Texts/Dokumenty/zolotoord.html
Why it matters
The Volga-Tatar folk-historical tradition on Chinggis Khan, Timur and the fall of Bulghar; this is the popular Tatar memory of 'Tartary' as opposed to the Persian court histories, and the Kazan 1822 print made it one of the first Tatar-language printed histories.
Places named
Volga-Kama (Bulghar, Kazan); Dasht-i Qipchaq; Central Asia (legendary)
Peoples named
Volga Tatars; Bulghars; Chinggisids; Timur; Kazan khanate; Nogays