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on its four corner-towers, the way up into them being through the towers. Everywhere there are stone pillars, some fluted, some twisted, some many-sided. On the four sides of the upper storey are open galleries enclosing a four-doored hall (chār-dara); their pillars also are all of stone. The raised floor of the building is all paved with stone.

      He made a smaller garden, out beyond Chihil Sitūn and towards Kohik, also having a building in it. In the open gallery of this building he placed a great stone throne, some 14 or 15 yards (qārī) long, some 8 yards wide and perhaps 1 yard high. They brought a stone so large by a very long road.376 There is a crack in the middle of it which people say must have come after it was brought here. In the same garden he also built a four-doored hall, know as the Chīnī-khāna (Porcelain House) because its īzāra377 are all of porcelain; he sent to China for the porcelain used in it. Inside the walls again, is an old building of his, known as the Masjid-i-laqlaqa (Mosque of the Echo). If anyone stamps on the ground under the middle of the dome of this mosque, the sound echoes back from the whole dome; it is a curious matter of which none know the secret.

      In the time also of Sl. Aḥmad Mīrzā the great and lesser begs laid out many gardens, large and small.378 For beauty, and air, and view, few will have equalled Darwesh Muḥammad Tarkhān’s Chār-bāgh (Four Gardens).379 It lies overlooking the whole of Qulba Meadow, on the slope below the Bāgh-i-maidān. Moreover it is arranged symmetrically, terrace above terrace, and is planted with beautiful nārwān380 and cypresses and white poplar. A most agreeable sojourning place, its one defect is the want of a large stream.

      Samarkand is a wonderfully beautified town. One of its specialities, perhaps found in few other places,381 is that the different trades are not mixed up together in it but each has its own bāzār, a good sort of plan. Its bakers and its cooks are good. The best paper in the world is made there; the water for the paper-mortars382 all comes from Kān-i-gil,383 a meadow on the banks of the Qarā-sū (Blackwater) or Āb-i-raḥmat (Water of Mercy). Another article of Samarkand trade, carried to all sides and quarters, is cramoisy velvet.

      Excellent meadows lie round Samarkand. One is the famous Kān-i-gil, some 2 miles east and a little north of the town. The Qarā-sū or Āb-i-raḥmat flows through it, a stream (with driving power) for perhaps seven or eight mills. Some say the original name of the meadow must have been Kān-i-ābgīr (Mine of Quagmire) because the river is bordered by quagmire, but the histories all write Kān-i-gil (Mine of clay). It is an excellent meadow. The Samarkand sult̤ans always made it their reserve,384 going out to camp in it each year for a month or two.

      Higher up (on the river) than Kān-i-gil and to the s.e. of it is a meadow some 4 miles east of the town, known as Khān Yūrtī (Khān’s Camping-ground). The Qarā-sū flows through this meadow before entering Kān-i-gil. When it comes to Khān Yūrtī it curves back so far that it encloses, with a very narrow outlet, enough ground for a camp. Having noticed these advantages, we camped there for a time during the siege of Samarkand.385

      Another meadow is the Būdana Qūrūgh (Quail Reserve), lying between Dil-kushā and the town. Another is the Kūl-i-maghāk (Meadow of the deep pool) at some 4 miles from the town. This also is a round386 meadow. People call it Kul-i-maghāk meadow because there is a large pool on one side of it. Sl. ‘Alī Mīrzā lay here during the siege, when I was in Khān Yūrtī. Another and smaller meadow is Qulba (Plough); it has Qulba Village and the Kohik Water on the north, the Bāgh-i-maidān and Darwesh Muḥammad Tarkhān’s Chār-bāgh on the south, and the Kohik upland on the west.

      Samarkand has good districts and tūmāns. Its largest district, and one that is its equal, is Bukhārā, 25 yīghāch387 to the west. Bukhārā in its turn, has several tūmāns; it is a fine town; its fruits are many and good, its melons excellent; none in Mā warā’u’n-nahr matching them for quality and quantity. Although the Mīr Tīmūrī melon of Akhsī388 is sweeter and more delicate than any Bukhārā melon, still in Bukhārā many kinds of melon are good and plentiful. The Bukhārā plum is famous; no other equals it. They skin it,389 dry it and carry it from land to land with rarities (tabarrūklār bīla); it is an excellent laxative medicine. Fowls and geese are much looked after (parwārī) in Bukhārā. Bukhārā wine is the strongest made in Mā warā’u’n-nahr; it was what I drank when drinking in those countries at Samarkand.390

      Kesh is another district of Samarkand, 9 yīghāch391 by road to the south of the town. A range called the Aītmāk Pass (Dābān)392 lies between Samarkand and Kesh; from this are taken all the stones for building. Kesh is called also Shahr-i-sabz (Green-town) because its barren waste (ṣahr) and roofs and walls become beautifully green in spring. As it was Tīmūr Beg’s birth-place, he tried hard to make it his capital. He erected noble buildings in it. To seat his own Court, he built a great arched hall and in this seated his Commander-begs and his Dīwān-begs, on his right and on his left. For those attending the Court, he built two smaller halls, and to seat petitioners to his Court, built quite small recesses on the four sides of the Court-house.393 Few arches so fine can be shown in the world. It is said to be higher than the Kisrī Arch.394 Tīmūr Beg also built in Kesh a college and a mausoleum, in which are the tombs of Jahāngīr Mīrzā and others of his descendants.395 As Kesh did not offer the same facilities as Samarkand for becoming a town and a capital, he at last made clear choice of Samarkand.

      Another district is Qarshī, known also as Nashaf and Nakhshab.396 Qarshī is a Mughūl name. In the Mughūl tongue they call a kūr-khāna Qarshī.397 The name must have come in after the rule of Chīngīz Khān. Qarshī is somewhat scantily supplied with water; in spring it is very beautiful and its grain and melons are good. It lies 18 yīghāch398 by road south and a little inclined to west of Samarkand. In the district a small bird, known as the qīl-qūyīrūgh and resembling the bāghrī qarā, is found in such countless numbers that it goes by the name of the Qarshī birdie (murghak).399

      Khozār is another district; Karmīna another, lying between Samarkand and Bukhārā; Qarā-kūl another, 7 yīghāch400 n.w. of Bukhārā and at the furthest limit of the water.

      Samarkand has good tūmāns. One is Soghd with its dependencies. Its head Yār-yīlāq, its foot Bukhārā, there may be not one single yīghāch of earth without its village and its cultivated lands. So famous is it that the saying attributed to Tīmūr Beg, ‘I have a garden 30 yīghāch long,401 must have been spoken of Soghd. Another tūmān is Shāvdār (var. Shādwār), an excellent one adjoining the town-suburbs. On one side it has the range (Aītmāk Dābān), lying between Samarkand and Shahr-i-sabz, on the skirts of which are many of its villages. On the other side is the Kohik Water (i. e. the Dar-i-gham canal). There it lies! an excellent tūmān, with fine air, full of beauty, abounding in waters, its good things cheap. Observers of Egypt and Syria have not pointed out its match.

      Though

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<p>376</p>

This remark may refer to the 34 miles between the town and the quarries of its building stone. See f. 49 and note to Aītmāk Pass.

<p>377</p>

Steingass, any support for the back in sitting, a low wall in front of a house. See Vullers p. 148 and Burhān-i-qāt̤i‘; p. 119. Perhaps a dado.

<p>378</p>

beg u begāt, bāgh u bāghcha.

<p>379</p>

Four Gardens, a quadrilateral garden, laid out in four plots. The use of the name has now been extended for any well-arranged, large garden, especially one belonging to a ruler (Erskine).

<p>380</p>

As two of the trees mentioned here are large, it may be right to translate nārwān, not by pomegranate, but as the hard-wood elm, Madame Ujfalvy’s ‘karagatche’ (p. 168 and p. 222). The name qarā-yīghāch (karagatch), dark tree, is given to trees other than this elm on account of their deep shadow.

<p>381</p>

Now a common plan indeed! See Schuyler i, 173.

<p>382</p>

juwāz-i-kaghazlār (nīng) sū’ī, i. e. the water of the paper-(pulping) – mortars. Owing to the omission from some MSS. of the word , water, juwāz has been mistaken for a kind of paper. See Mems. p. 52 and Méms. i, 102; A.Q.R. July 1910, p. 2, art. Paper-mills of Samarkand (H.B.); and Madame Ujfalvy p. 188. Kostenko, it is to be noted, does not include paper in his list (i, 346) of modern manufactures of Samarkand.

<p>383</p>

Mine of mud or clay. My husband has given me support for reading gil, and not gul, rose; – (1) In two good MSS. of the W. – i-B. the word is pointed with kasra, i. e. as for gil, clay; and (2) when describing a feast held in the garden by Tīmūr, the Z̤.N. says the mud-mine became a rose-mine, shuda Kān-i-gil Kān-i-gul. [Mr. Erskine refers here to Pétis de la Croix’s Histoire de Tīmūr Beg (i. e. Z̤.N.) i, 96 and ii, 133 and 421.]

<p>384</p>

qūrūgh. Vullers, classing the word as Arabic, Zenker, classing it as Eastern Turkī, and Erskine (p. 42 n.) explain this as land reserved for the summer encampment of princes. Shaw (Voc. p. 155), deriving it from qūrūmāq, to frighten, explains it as a fenced field of growing grain.

<p>385</p>

Cf. f. 40. There it is located at one yīghāch and here at 3 kurohs from the town.

<p>386</p>

t̤aur. Cf. Zenker s. n. I understand it to lie, as Khān Yūrtī did, in a curve of the river.

<p>387</p>

162 m. by rail.

<p>388</p>

Cf. f. 3.

<p>389</p>

tīrīsīnī sūīūb. The verb sūīmāk, to despoil, seems to exclude the common plan of stoning the fruit. Cf. f. 3b, dānasīnī alīp, taking out the stones.

<p>390</p>

Mīn Samarkandtā aūl (or auwal) aīchkāndā Bukhārā chāghīrlār nī aīchār aīdīm. These words have been understood to refer to Bābur’s initial drinking of wine but this reading is negatived by his statement (f. 189) that he first drank wine in Harāt in 912 AH. I understand his meaning to be that the wine he drank in Samarkand was Bukhārā wine. The time cannot have been earlier than 917 AH. The two words aūl aīchkāndā, I read as parallel to aūl (bāghrī qarā) (f. 280) ‘that drinking,’ ‘that bird,’ i. e. of those other countries, not of Hindūstān where he wrote.

It may be noted that Bābur’s word for wine, chāghīr, may not always represent wine of the grape but may include wine of the apple and pear (cider and perry), and other fruits. Cider, its name seeming to be a descendant of chāghīr, was introduced into England by Crusaders, its manufacture having been learned from Turks in Palestine.

<p>391</p>

48 m. 3 fur. by way of the Aītmāk Pass (mod. Takhta Qarachi), and, Réclus (vi, 256) Buz-gala-khāna, Goat-house.

<p>392</p>

The name Aītmāk, to build, appears to be due to the stone quarries on the range. The pass-head is 34 m. from Samarkand and 3000 ft. above it. See Kostenko ii, 115 and Schuyler ii, 61 for details of the route.

<p>393</p>

The description of this hall is difficult to translate. Clavijo (Markham 124) throws light on the small recesses. Cf. Z̤.N. i, 781 and 300 and Schuyler ii, 68.

<p>394</p>

The Tāq-i-kisrī, below Bāghdād, is 105 ft. high, 84 ft. span and 150 ft. in depth (Erskine).

<p>395</p>

Cf. f. 46. Bābur does not mention that Tīmūr’s father was buried at Kesh. Clavijo (Markham p. 123) says it was Tīmūr’s first intention to be buried near his father, in Kesh.

<p>396</p>

Abū’l-fidā (Reinaud II, ii, 21) says that Nasaf is the Arabic and Nakhshab the local name for Qarshī. Ibn Haukal (Ouseley p. 260) writes Nakhshab.

<p>397</p>

This word has been translated burial-place and cimetière but Qarshī means castle, or royal-residence. The Z̤.N. (i, 111) says that Qarshī is an equivalent for Ar. qaṣr, palace, and was so called, from one built there by Qublāī Khān (d. 1294 AD.). Perhaps Bābur’s word is connected with Gūrkhān, the title of sovereigns in Khutan, and means great or royal-house, i. e. palace.

<p>398</p>

94 m. 6-1/2 fur. via Jām (Kostenko i, 115.)

<p>399</p>

See Appendix B.

<p>400</p>

some 34 m. (Kostenko i, 196). Schuyler mentions that he heard in Qarā-kūl a tradition that the district, in bye-gone days, was fertilized from the Sīr.

<p>401</p>

Cf. f. 45.