It would be a wearisome and unprofitable task to enume­rate the many Persian historical works composed during Some notable later Persian histories. the last four centuries. Of the histories of special periods the most important have been not only described but freely quoted in the first part of this volume, notably the Ṣafwatu'ṣ-Ṣafá for the life of Shaykh Ṣafiyyu'd-Dín from whom the Ṣafawí kings were descended; the monograph on Sháh Isma'íl described by Sir E. Denison Ross in the J.R.A.S. for 1896, pp. 264-83; the Aḥsanu't-Tawáríkh, completed in 985/1577-8 by Ḥasan-i-Rúmlú; and the Ta'ríkh-i-'Álam-árá-yi-'Abbásí of Iskandar Munshi, composed in 1025/1616. There are other monographs on the later Ṣafawí period, such as the Fawá'id-i-Ṣafawiyya (1211/1796-7) and the Tadhkira-i-Ál-i-Dáwúd (1218/1803-4), which I would fain have consulted had they been accessible to me. For the post-Ṣafawí period we have several excellent European accounts which render us less dependent on the native historians, some of whose works moreover (e.g. the Ta'ríkh- i-Zandiyya * and the Mujmalu't-Ta'ríkh-i-Ba'd-Nádiriyya) * have been published in Europe, while others, such as the Durra-i-Nádirí of Mírzá Mahdí Khán of Astarábád, are easily accessible in Oriental lithographed editions. These monographs contain valuable material and are indispensable to the student of this period, but they are generally badly arranged and dully written, and further marred by the florid and verbose style of which we have just been com­plaining.

For the general histories of our present period, from Khwándamír's Ḥabíbu's-Siyar (929/1523) at the beginning Poor quality of most of the Persian general histories. to Riḍá-qulí Khán's Supplement to the Raw-ḍatu'ṣ-Ṣafá and Lisánu'l-Mulk's Násikhu't-Tawáríkh at the end, with the very rare Khuld-i-Barín (1071/1660-1) in the middle, there is even less to be said, since, though for events con­temporary with their authors they have the same value as the monographs just mentioned, for the earlier periods they are not even good or judicious abstracts of the care­lessly selected authorities from whom they derive their information. They are, moreover, histories not of the Persian people but of the kings, princes and nobles who tyrannized over them and contended with one another for the spoils; wearisome records of bloodshed, violence and rapine from which it is hard to derive any general concepts of value. * Only by diligent and patient study can we extract from them facts capable of throwing any real light on the religious, political and social problems which a historian like Ibn Khaldún would have handled in so masterly a manner.

There are, however, hopeful signs of improvement in recent times. Poor Mírzá Jání of Káshán, though a mer- Signs of im­provement in modern times. chant without much literary training, wrote his Nuqṭatu'l-Káf * on the history of the Bábí sect, of which in 1852 he was one of the proto-martyrs, with violence and passion indeed, but with knowledge, in plain and simple language without that florid rhetoric which we find so intolerable; while the unfinished “History of the Awakening of the Persians” (Ta'ríkh-i-Bídárí-yi-Íráni-yán ) of the Náẓimu'l-Islám of Kirmán, * with its ample documentation and endeavour to estimate personal charac­teristics and influence on political events, seems to me to stand on an altogether higher level than any preceding Persian historical work composed during the last six or seven centuries.

Muslim writers have always evinced a great partiality for biography, which may be general, dealing with the lives of Biography popular with the Muslims. eminent men of all sorts, like Ibn Khallikán's Wafayátu'l-A'yán (“Obituaries of Notable Men”) and the Rawḍátu'l-Jannát, of which I have made such extensive use in the latter part of this volume, the former composed in the thirteenth, the latter in the late nineteenth century, and both in Arabic; and the ambitious but unfinished modern Persian Náma-i-Dánish-warán (“Book of Learned Men”) compiled by a committee of some half a dozen scholars, of which the first volume Different types of biographical works. was lithographed at Ṭihrán in 1296/1879 and the second in 1312/1904-5. * More often such works treat of the biographies of some particular class of men, such as Ministers, Physicians, Poets or Theo­logians; or they follow a geographical or a chronological arrangement, merging on the one hand into geography and on the other into history. Khwándamír's Dastúru'l-Wuzará (“Models for Ministers”), * composed, according to the chronogram implicit in the title, in 915/1509-10, affords us a Persian example of the first type falling at the beginning of the period reviewed in this volume. For the Physicians and Philosophers no Persian work approaches the level of al-Qifṭí's Ta'ríkhu'l-Ḥukamá * and Ibn Abí Uṣaybi'a's 'Uyúnu'l-Anbá fí Ṭabaqáti'l-Aṭibbá, * both composed in the thirteenth century of our era, a period so rich in Arabic biographical works. Biographies of poets, on the other hand, abound in Persian, especially in the later period, since Sháh Isma'íl's son Sám Mírzá set the fashion with his Tuḥfa-i-Sámí (a continuation of Dawlatsháh's “Memoirs of the Poets”) compiled in 957/1550. Eminent representatives of the Shí'a sect, both Arabs and Persians of every category from kings to poets, form the subject-matter of the very useful Majálisu'l-Mú'minín (“Assemblies of Believers”), the author of which, Sayyid Núru'lláh of Shúshtar, was flogged to death in 1019/1610-11 by order of Jahángír at the instigation of the Sunnís, and who is therefore called by his fellow-believers the “Third Martyr” (Shahíd-i-Thálith).*