Edmund Bosworth - The History of the Seljuq Turks: The Saljuq-nama of Zahir al-Din Nishpuri

THE HISTORY OF THE SELJUQ TURKS

STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF IRAN AND TURKEY

General Editor

Carole Hillenbrand, University of Edinburgh

Editorial Board

Edmund Bosworth, University of Manchester

Paul Luft, University of Manchester

David Morgan, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Donald Richards, University of Oxford

The aims of this series are to make more widely accessible the contribution of Islamic scholars to historiography in this key period. It is hoped that the volumes in this series will be of particular help to scholars in adjacent fields such as Byzantinists who are unable to read Arabic, Persian and Turkish, as well as being of interest to those who can.

From The Jmi al-Tawrkh

An Ilkhanid Adaption of the Saljq-nma of ahr al-Dn Nshpr

Translated and annotated by

Kenneth Allin Luther

Edited by

C. Edmund Bosworth

First Published in 2001

by Routledge

Richmond, Surrey

http://www.Routledge.co.uk

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016

Transferred to Digital Printing 2010

2001 Marjory S. Luther

Editorial matter 2001 C. Edmund Bosworth

Typeset in Plantin by LaserScript Ltd, Mitcham, Surrey

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

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ISBN10: 0-7007-1342-5 (hbk)

ISBN10: 0-4155-8312-8 (pbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-7007-1342-4 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-4155-8312-i (pbk)

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent.

I am extremely grateful to Marjory Luther for giving me the opportunity to publish her late husband Allin Luthers translation of this history. Allin, a noted scholar of Seljuq history, had worked on this translation over a number of years, and this posthumous volume is dedicated to his memory.

Carole Hillenbrand

The present book represents the last major work by the late Kenneth A. Luther (d. 1996), of the Department of History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The history of the Saljuqs, and in particular, that of the later Saljuqs and the Atabeg lines which arose in Western Iran during the course of the twelth century A.D., were a special interest of his, on which he had written in 1964 a Princeton University doctoral dissertation, The Political Transformation of the Seljuq Sultanate of Iraq and Western Iran 11521187, and on which he published several articles. The book seems to have been finished by ca. 1971, since no works published after that date appear in Luthers Bibliography.

There are considerable problems regarding the exact nature of the work and its authorship, questions of which Luther was aware but only addressed in part in his Introduction. This is a very complex matter, and I am grateful to Mr A.H. Morton for elucidating it for me in the light of his own researches (see below).

ahr al-Dn Nshpr seems to have written his Saljq-nma (if this is in fact the original title) during the reign of the last Great Saljuq Sultan, oghrl III b. Arslan (57190/117694), according to what Rwand states, confirmed in the introductory note to the Dhayl of Muammad b. Ibrhm found in Isml Afshrs indifferent edition (Tehran 1322/1953) of what he called the Saljq-nma (p. 85). In the opinion of Mr Morton, what Afshar edited is actually a work by a well-known author, Abu l-Qsim Qshn, who was active in the literary field between the years 1300 and 1316 under the Ilkhanids, writing a substantial treatise on mineralogy, an important history of the reign of the Ilkhanid Sultan ljeyt and a general history, the Zubdat al-tawrkh, and who made additions and alterations to the original text of ahr al-Dn Nshprs Saljq-nma. Qshns work is quite closely related to, yet distinct from, the section on the Saljuqs in Rashd al-Dn Fal Allhs Jmi al-tawrkh, and Rashd al-Dn may have drawn upon his contemporarys work. It must, however, be firmly stressed that this present translation by Luther is in fact taken from Rashd al-Dns compendious history and comprises nothing else.

We do not possess ahr al-Dns original work, and Afshrs attribution of the work which he edited and the title of Saljq-nma which he gave to it are both wholly speculative. Mr Morton is at present producing a critical text based primarily on the Royal Asiatic Societys Ms. Persian 22b, an anonymous history of the Saljuqs dedicated to Sultan oghril. This, he maintains, is a copy of the original work of ahr al-Dn, and his own text, when completed, should be close to ahr al-Dns original, which will be seen to be briefer and more simply written than any of the later works which exploited the Saljq-nma.

My own work as editor has been limited to adding to the Bibliography some of what seem to me the salient works on Saljuq history published since 1971, without making any attempt at completeness here (see pp. 17779 below), plus preparing for publication what was generally a correct and clean typescript and putting it in an appropriate format for the present series of translation of texts on Middle East history, of which this is the first to be published. Hence spelling and orthography have been normalized to British practice. The Introduction has been left entirely as Luther wrote it, except for some remarks on the system of transliteration and references required for the book (p. 21 below). The Translation is likewise almost exactly as Luther left it, except that, when working closely on the editorial work required for this section, certain infelicities of translation and what are possibly typists errors struck my eye. These might well have been spotted and corrected by Luther had he lived to see the book through publication. Thus I have substituted. Exalted Dwn for Dear Office, Dear Divan (pp. 44, 168: dwn-iazz); chief of the attendants for oldest of the roustabouts (p. 54: mihtar-i farrshn); reviving remedies for reviving treacle (p. 58: tiryq-i muy); deviationists for atheists (p. 62 and passim: malida); elegy for eulogy (p. 62: marthiya); Najsh for Nahnas (p. 63: thus Najsh in Ates text of the JT); the abb game with bat or club for the anachronistic tennis (pp. 63, 117: abb zadhan); and administrative centre for mausoleum (p. 95: dawlat-khna). Otherwise, the Translation and Notes are virtually as Luther left them.

The original typescript was conveyed to Dr Carole Hillenbrand by Mrs Marjory S. Luther of Ann Arbor, Michigan; both Dr Hillenbrand and myself are grateful to her for ensuring that her husbands work has not been lost to the scholarly world and to Curzon Press for including it as the first volume of their new series of translations of Islamic texts.