The Ornament of Histories: A History of the Eastern Islamic Lands AD 650-1041 ─ The Persian Text of Abu Sa'id 'Abd Al-Hayy Gardizi

`The Zayn al-Akhbar of Gardizi is a major historical source on the eastern Iranian lands during 650-1041 AD. This work is of particular importance for the histories of Samanid and Ghaznawid rule over those regions, including especially Khurasan, Afghanistan and Transoxiana. The purely historical section of this major text for Persian studies, known to and used by orientalists for more than a century now, has never before been translated into English. The present translation not only fills this gap, but it does so in a most praiseworthy manner, and the translator, Professor Bosworth, is amply qualified for the task. Not only has Professor Bosworth been a major contributor to the medieval history of the eastern Iranian world, but he has shown in this and his other translation works a masterful command of the Persian language as used in such works. His elaborate commentaries which explain and contextualize numerous passages and enhance the accessibility of this text, reflect his unrivalled command of the subject matter as well as an excellent understanding of the classical Persian language and its intricacies. All in all, this is an excellent annotated translation of this important historical text by a most qualified scholar.

Abu Sa'id `Abd al-Hayy Gardizi was a Persian author and historian living in the mid-eleventh century at the height of the Turkish Ghazvanid dynasty. His only known work, The Ornament of Histories (`Zayn al-akhbar'), is a hugely ambitious history of the Eastern Islamic lands AD 650-1041, spanning what is now Eastern Iran, Afghanistan and parts of the Central Asian Republics and Indo-Pakistan subcontinent. Gardizi's text is an extremely rare source of primary information about the rise of Islamic faith, culture and military dominance in these regions, and represents a significant contribution to our understanding of the early Islamic world.

Covering the four centuries from the first Arab conquests to his own time, Gardizi's work is a prime source, for some episodes the sole one, for the history of these lands at this time. Thus it is the sole source for events at the end of Sultan Mas'ud's reign, when the Sultan was killed in an army coup, having just lost the whole of the empire's Persian provinces to the incoming Seljuq Turks, and it was the Seljuqs who were now to dominate the central and eastern Islamic lands for a century and a half, almost till the invasion of the Mongols. Writing on the far-eastern fringes of what was then the Eastern Islamic world, in what is now Afghanistan, Gardizi also included important ethnological information on the Turkish tribes of Inner Eurasia and on the religions and philosophies of the Indians. But his prime interest was clearly the Islamic history of his own lands, the eastern Iranian world and its Central Asian and Indian fringes, and here he provides a detailed narrative.

This book provides the first translation into a Western language of this history of the formative period of the Eastern Islamic world and gives an explanatory commentary, detailing the historical, geographical and cultural context, as well as the events and colourful characters mentioned in it.

C. Edmund Bosworth is a Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He was until retirement Professor of Arabic Studies at Manchester University and is now a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Exeter University. He was the British Editor of the second edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, and is the author of numerous books and articles on the history, culture and literature of the Arabic, Persian and Turkish lands of the Middle East and Central Asia in the pre-modern period. He was the recipient of the biennial Giorgio Levi Della Vida Award at the University of California, Los Angeles, in May 2010.
Farhad Daftary is Co-Director and Head of the Department of Academic Research and Publications at The Institute of Ismaili Studies. An authority on Ismaili studies, he is a consulting editor of Encyclopaedia Iranica, co-editor of the Encyclopaedia Islamica as well as the general editor of the Ismaili Heritage Series and the Ismaili Texts and Translations Series.