page_title: Baburnama
section_title: Content
hierarchical_section_title: Baburnama / Content
caption_attribution_description: English: Illustrations from the Manuscript of Baburnama (Memoirs of Babur) - Late 16th Century Bāburnāma is the memoirs of Ẓahīr ud-Dīn Muḥammad Bābur (1483-1530), founder of the Mughal Empire and a great-great-great-grandson of Timur. It is an autobiographical work, originally written in the Chagatai language, known to Babur as "Turki" (meaning Turkic), the spoken language of the Andijan-Timurids. Because of Babur's cultural origin, his prose is highly Persianized in its sentence structure, morphology, and vocabulary,and also contains many phrases and smaller poems in Persian. During Emperor Akbar's reign, the work was completely translated to Persian by a Mughal courtier, Abdul Rahīm, in AH (Hijri) 998 (1589-90). These Paintings, being a fragment of a dispersed copy, was executed most probably in the late 10th AH /16th CE century. It contains 30 mostly full-page miniatures in fine Mughal style by at least two different artists. Another major fragment of this work (57 folios) is in the State Museum of Eastern Cultures, Moscow.
context_page_description: The Bāburnāma is the memoirs of Ẓahīr-ud-Dīn Muhammad Bābur, founder of the Mughal Empire and a great-great-great-grandson of Timur. It is written in the Chagatai language, known to Babur as "Turki", the spoken language of the Andijan-Timurids. During Emperor Akbar's reign, the work was completely translated to Persian, the usual literary language of the Mughal court, by a Mughal courtier, Abdul Rahīm, in AH 998. Translations into many other languages followed, mostly from the 19th century onwards.
  Bābur was an educated Timurid prince and his observations and comments in his memoirs reflect an interest in nature, society, politics and economics. His vivid account of events covers not just his own life, but the history and geography of the areas he lived in as well as the people with whom he came into contact. The book covers topics as diverse as astronomy, geography, statecraft, military matters, weapons and battles, plants and animals, biographies and family chronicles, courtiers and artists, poetry, music and paintings, wine parties, historical monument tours as well as contemplations on human nature.
context_section_description: According to historian Stephen Frederic Dale, Babur's Chagatai prose is highly Persianized in its sentence structure, morphology, and vocabulary, and also contains many phrases and smaller poems in Persian.
  The Bāburnāma begins abruptly with these plain words:
  In the month of Ramadan of the year 899 [1494] and in the twelfth year of my age, I became ruler in the country of Farghana.
  Bābur describes his fluctuating fortunes as a minor ruler in Central Asia – he took and lost Samarkand twice – and his move to Kabul in 1504.  There is a break in all known manuscripts between 1508 and 1519. Annette Beveridge and other scholars believe that the missing part in the middle, and perhaps an account of Babur's earlier childhood, a preface and perhaps an epilogue, were written but the manuscript of those parts lost by the time of Akbar.  There are various points in his highly active career, and that of his son Humayun, where parts of the original manuscript might plausibly have been lost.
  By 1519 Bābur is established in Kabul and from there launches an invasion into north-western India. The final section of the Bāburnāma covers the years 1525 to 1529 and the establishment of the Mughal empire over what was by his death still a relatively small part of north-western India, which Bābur's descendants would expand and rule for three centuries.
  The account of the decisive First Battle of Panipat in 1526 is followed by long descriptions of India, its people, fauna and flora.  Various exciting incidents are recounted and illustrated: Babur jumps off his horse just in time to avoid following it into a river, and when his army has formed its boats into a circle a fish jumps into a boat to escape from a crocodile.
  The original Chagatai language text does not seem to have existed in many copies, and those that survive are mostly partial.  The copy seen in the Mughal Library in the 1620s, and presumably used to base the Persian translation on, seems to have been lost.
caption: Ḥamzah Sulṭān, Mahdī Sulṭan and Mamāq Sulṭān pay homage to Babur
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