22. A Letter from the Emperor Babur to his son 
amran. 
By H. Beveripes, I.C.S8. (retired). 
The world owes its knowlege of this letter to Julius von 
Klaproth, the oriental scholar and pioneer of Chaghatai studies. 
He published it in the original Turki in his Memoires Relatifs 
a l’Asie, Vol. Il, pp. 148-151, Paris, 1826. Previously to this 
he had published at St. Petersburg in 1810 in his Archiv for 
Asiatic Literature, Vol. I (all that ever appeared), an article on 
Babur’s Memoirs, and had given there a translation of Babur’s 
description of Ferghana. Another German scholar, Dr. George 
Jacob Kehr, saw the letter to Kamran, nearly a hundred years 
before Klaproth did: see the R.A.S.J. for 1909, p. 454. Kehr, 
apparently, was the first European scholar who studied Babur’s 
Memoirs, and the work he did upon them was most important. 
1731 he became Professor of Oriental languages at St. Peters- 
burg. In 1737 he made a complete copy of a Turki MS of 
the Memoirs, and as his original has disappeared, this copy is 
the only source of Ilminsky’s edition of 1857, and of the 
French translation by Pavet de Courteille. Two years later 
(1739), Kehr made a Latin translation of the Memoirs as far as 
908 A.H. (1502-03). Presumably this is now in St. Peters- 
burg. (R.A.S.J. for 1908, p. 828). It is bound up in two 
volumes, and apparently, ‘in Kehr’s time it contained some 
mother-in-law (see R.AS.J., p. 830). Perhaps, however, this 
is because the passage only exists in Kehr’s Latin translation. 
Both Kehr and Klaproth give the note describing how the 
Baburnama came into the possession of an unknown owner in 
957 A.H. (May 1550). 
Of the two articles of Klaproth’s dealing with the Babur- 
nama, the second, that 1 is the article of 1826, is much the most 
existing MS. of the Babur-Memoirs. A Turki note at p. 135 
of Klaproth’s article shows that the Bokhara MS. was at least 
as old as May 1550, i.e. only about twenty years after Babur’s 
death, for on that date. it was given to an ‘unnamed traveller of 
