28 The Initial Coinage of Bengal. [No. 1 



The chronicles of a subordinate and, in those days, but little ac- 

 cessible country were too often neglected by the national historians 

 at the Court of Dehli, even if their means of information as to the 

 course of local events had not necessarily been more or less imperfect. 

 Two striking exceptions to the ordinary rule fortuitously occur, at 

 conjunctions specially bearing upon the present enquiry, in the 

 narratives of Minhaj-ul-Siraj, Juzjani, and the " Travels of Ibn Batu- 

 tah," the former of whom accompanied Tughan Khan to Lakhnauti, 

 in a. h. 640,* where he resided for about two years. The Arab from 

 Tangiers,f on his way round to China, as ambassador on the part 

 of Muhammad bin Tughlak, found himself in Eastern Bengal at 

 the inconvenient moment when Fakhr-ud-din Mubarak was in a 

 state of undisguised revolt against the emperor, to whom they jointly 

 owed allegiance ; but this did not interfere with his practical spirit of 

 enquiry, or his placing on record a most graphic description of the 

 existing civilization and politics of the kingdom, and further compiling 

 a singularly fresh and independent account (derived clearly from 

 viva voce statements) of the immediately preceding dynastio 

 changes to which the province had been subjected. So that, 

 in effect, Ibn Batutah, with his merely incidental observations, has 

 done more for the elucidation of the obscurities of the indigenous 



* The Tabakat^i-Nasiri of Abu Umar Minhaj-ud-dm bin Siraj-ud-din, Juzjani, 

 has been printed and published in the Persian series of the Bibliotheca Indica, 

 under the auspices of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (Calcutta, 1864, pp. 453.) 

 The chapters on Indian and Central Asian affairs, with which the author was 

 more or less personally conversant, have alone been reproduced. The usual 

 Oriental commencement with the history of the world, the rise of Muham* 

 madanism, etc., being mere compilations from secondary sources, have been very 

 properly excluded from this edition. A full notice of the original work will be 

 found in Mr. Morley's Catalogue of the MSS. of the R. A. S., p. 17 (London, 

 1854). Several other works of native historians, bearing upon the subject of this 

 paper, have also been made accessible to the public in a printed form in the same 

 collection, among which may be noted the Tarikh-i^Firuz Shahi (the third king of 

 the name in the Dehli list), by Zia-i-Barni (Calcutta, 1862, pp. 602), and the 

 Muntakhab-ul-Tawarikh of Abd ul Kadir, Buclduni (Calcutta, 1865, pp. 407). 

 The editors have unadvisedly, I think, omitted the early portions of the original 

 relating to India, and commence the publication with the accession of Akbar. 

 An outline of the entire contents of the work will be found in Sir H. Elliot's 

 Historians of India (Calcutta, 1849, p. 305). 



f An English version of Ibn Batutah's Travels (taken from an abridged text), 

 by Dr. S. Lee, was published in the series of the Oriental Translation Fund in 

 1829 (1 vol., 4to , London). A new and very complete edition of his entire 

 Arabic Text, with a French Translation, chiefly the work of the late M. C. 

 Defremery, has been issued within the last few years by the Societe Asiatique of 

 Paris (4 vols. 8vo., Paris, 1853-1858). 



