I. Description of the Province of Fārs, in Persia, at the beginning of the Twelfth Century a.d

In the Journal for the year 1902 a summary was given of the description of Persia and Mesopotamia found in the Nuzhat-al-Qulūb , a geographical and cosmographical work written by Ḥamd-Allah Mustawfi in 740 (1340). In the course of next year I hope to publish (in the series of the E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Fund) the Persian text of the geographical chapters of this work, and this will be followed by a full translation, with notes to elucidate geographical questions. Ḥamd-Allah, who is our earliest systematic geographer writing in Persian, collected his materials from the works of the earlier Arab geographers, and from various Persian monographs which had been written each to describe a single province of the Moslem Empire; and it is found that the texts of some of these monographs, thereto adding somewhat of his own knowledge, after much curtailment and a rearrangement of the order in the articles, he has transcribed almost verbatim, to form the various chapters of the Nuzhat . A good instance of this method of writing a new book is the chapter describing the provinces of Fārs and Sh abānkārah, which in truth is little but a shortened transcript of the Fāre Nāmah , a work written two centuries before the time of Ḥamd-Allah, and of which the British Museum possesses an excellent MS

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• The Political and Dynastic History of the Iranian World (a.d. 1000–1217)

  Open Access•C Edmund Bosworth•The Cambridge History of Iran…•1968

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