1866.] Notes on the Topography Sc. of Delhi. 213 



names and localities of the various portions of a large and straggling 

 city like Delhi. Turning to Ferishta, we find that Tinrur crossed the 

 Jumna on the 18th January A. D. 1898, and on the 15th fought and 

 conquered Mahmud Togluck. On the 24th, when the first outbreak 

 in the city took place, we learn that, " according to his custom after 

 a success, he was busy in camp celebrating a grand festival," — the 

 nature of which was such, that for five days they could not convey to 

 him any intelligence of the outbreak, and it is to be presumed that 

 this scene of debauchery had been going on for some days. On the 

 29th he was sufficiently recovered to enter the city and take part in 

 the carnage, which lasted for fifteen days more, when he marched out 

 to Firuzabad and so home to Samarcand. Amid such a scene of 

 constant riot, murder and debauchery, it is absurd to suppose that the 

 principal actors in it could settle down quietly to topograph the city ; 

 and any statements made by them, which are unsupported by 

 other evidence, or which are opposed to the assertions of better 

 informed writers, must be received with extreme caution. It is true 

 that Khondemir, in his Habibu-s-siyar, refers to Siri as one of the 

 three cities of Delhi plundered by Tinrur ; but this writer also was a 

 foreigner, and passed the first forty -eight years of his life under the 

 rule of Timur's descendants, residing for the greater portion of the 

 time at Herat, where he wrote his history,* the facts for which he 

 must of course have derived from Mogul and not from Indian sources. 

 His statements therefore are mere echoes of those in Sharif-u-din, and 

 with them must stand or fall.f We are thus I conceive, fairly war- 

 ranted in assuming that Timur and his secretaries were in error. We 

 know that the city around Ghaiaspoor never had any specific name ; 

 what more likely then that, finding here a mosque, palace and other 

 buildings of Ala-u-din, and being told that that monarch built 

 a city or fort called Siri, they confounded the two, and misapplied 

 the name of the Kutb citadel to the city on the banks of the 

 Jumna ? 



* Begun A. D. 1520. 



f It is true that Khondemir came to India in A. D. 1528 and, whilst with 

 Baber in Bengal, is said to have revised his work (see Elliott's Historians of 

 India, page 123,) bnt it is donbtful whether he had then seen Delhi and, if he 

 had, his visit must have been a hurried one. 



