Ẓafarnāmah

Ẓafarnāmah (Book of victory) by ʻAli Yazdi (circa 1390-1454) is a biographical work dealing with the life of the central Asian conqueror Timur (reigned 1370-1405). Completed in around 1424, Yazdi's work is based in part on an earlier work, also entitled Ẓafarnāmah, by Nizam al-Din ʻAli Shami (who completed his work in 1404). A poet and scholar, Yazdi wrote works on numerology, astrolabes, and a variety of other topics, and he was renowned for his knowledge of ʻūlūm-i gharība (the esoteric sciences). He was summoned to the provincial capital of Shiraz around 1419 by Timur's grandson, Ibrahim Sultan (1394-1435), and asked to compile and codify the records related to the life of Timur. The present copy of the Ẓafarnāmah is the first volume of a two-volume edition, published under the aegis of the Asiatic Society at the Baptist Mission Press in Calcutta in 1887. The editor, Maulawi Muhammad Ilahdad, was a professor in the Arabic department at the Calcutta Madrasah. Ilahdad notes that the decision to publish this work in two volumes was made in order to avoid a bulky single volume. The first volume of this edition covers the events of Timur's life to 1397 and the conclusion of Timur's five-year campaign in the west that resulted in the conquest of Kurdistan, Southern Persia, and Georgia, and in the fall of Baghdad. World Digital Library.