23. The Sources of the Akbarnama. 
By H. BEvEeRIDGE. 
_ There is one point in Akbar’s many activities for which, I 
think, he has not received sufficient credit from his biographers. 
in-chief ‘Abdur Rahim, the son of his old guardian Bairam 
Khan, to translate from Turki into Persian the Memoirs of 
Ba He also took pains to procure for Abul Faz] informa- 
tion from various other quarters. It was Akbar who requested 
Gulbadan Begam, one of Babur’s daughters, to write her 
Memoirs, and who ordered J auhar the ewerbearer, and the 
Turkaman Bayazid [Biyat,] the kitchen superintendent, to 
record their recollections of the reign of Humayun. Jauhar’s 
Memoirs were translated by Major Stewart. But the trans- 
lation is imperfect, and has been severely citicised [by Erskine}. 
Stewart too had only one manuscript at his command, and 
officers. There is 
Ethé’s Catalogue No. 223, p. 95]. There is also a MS 
British Museum [ Add. 26.610] which contains a nearly com- 
plete translation by Erskine. I have given some account of 
Bayazid and his book in the A.S.B.J. for 1898, Vol. LXVI, Part 
I, No. 4. One interesting passage in his Memoirs, 1s his finding 
ment to her father’s own Memoirs, and it is muc to be desired 
that a complete copy of them could be found. At present only 
one copy [the B.M. one] is known to exist. It is imperfect and is, 
apparently, only a small fragment of what she wrote, and stops 
in the middle of a sentence. Other works which were probably 
ed 
Nizimu-d-din’s Tabaqat Akbari and Badayuni’s abridgment 
thereof. Neither of these works has been completely translated. 
In Gulbadan Begam’s Memoirs, p. 162 of translation, reference is 
made to a work by Khwaja Kisik, or Kessak, describing Huma- 
iin’s marches in Scinde. This has not yet been found. 
am also inclined to think that Abul Fazl had access to 
some fragments of Babur’s diaries, of his later years which do 
