1 916.] A unique History of Herat. 183 



This Raudat of Mu'in enjoys a wide popularity as a valu- 

 able history of Herat, and Barbier de Meynard has given an 

 account of it, with copious extracts done into French, in the 

 Journal Asiatique, 5e serie, vol. XVI, pp. 461-520. It may 

 however be well to point out here that as an original source for 

 the history of the years a.h. 618-721 = a.d. 122i-1321, Mucin's 

 work is of no value whatever, for he was obliged to depend 

 almost exclusively upon Sayfi. That Sayfi's work was the 

 only available source of Mu'in's history for the aforesaid period 

 seems sufficiently clear from this fact : 



Sayfi's history closes with the year a.h. 721 = a. d. 1321, 

 in which Malik Giyas-ud-Din went on a pilgrimage. In Mu'in's 

 history the next eight years suffer a total eclipse. 



He does not even tell us when this king returned to Herat, 

 although according to the Mujmal-i-Fasihi, he did so in the 

 same year, but suddenly jumps to a.h. 729 = a. d. 1328 and the 

 death of the said Giyas-ud-Din and other events connected 

 with the king's successors and descendants. The substance 

 of Sayfi's history for the period a.h. 618-721 = a.d. 1221-1321 

 has simply been bodily transferred to Mu'in's Raudat. In bor- 

 rowing Mu'in has abridged some portions and copied others 

 verbatim. In the former case he is apt to be extremely brief, 

 thus omitting a good many important facts of which, but for 

 Sayfi, all memory would have perished. For example, the his- 

 tory of the first four kings of the Kurt race, which is the largest 

 section of Sayfi's work, it fills 225 large folios, each containing 

 25 lines to the page. In the Asiatic Society's copy of the Rau- 

 dat it fills but 57 folios, each with 17 lines to a page. The 

 writing of both is of the same size. Again and again, Mu'in 

 copies passages and even entire pages verbatim from Sayfi with 

 hardly a new word. For instance, the passage relating to the 

 murder of Manktai and Abu Bakr, and the destruction of the city 

 of Herat for the second time, which I have quoted from Sayfi 

 earlier in this report (p. 6.), runs thus in Mu'in's Raudat : 



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