11G Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. [July, 



of weights and values, is it possible to reconcile the exaggerated 

 estimates we find in Major Price's text, with sound sense. But Mr. 

 Morley, on the contrary, considers the authenticity of this latter work 

 placed beyond the limit of doubt, by the fact that the MS. of it in 

 the Koyal Asiatic Society was written A. H. 1040 (A. D. 1630) or 

 only three years after the death of the imperial author, and he reason- 

 ably assumes that " a work transcribed so soon after the author's 

 death could scarcely have been foisted on the public, if a forgery." 

 Anderson's and Gladwin's text is a very much larger work than the 

 text of Price, the style is more elaborate, and it has been furnished 

 with a lengthy introduction, by Mohammad Hadi, who has also con- 

 tinued the biography from the beginning of the 19th year of the 

 Emperor's reign, to his death in A. H. 1137. This text Mr. Morley 

 distinguished, by calling it the second edition of the memoirs, the 

 first, he ventured to conjecture, being a sketch made prior to the 

 preparation of the more enlarged work. From the great discrepancy 

 between the two, however, he was disposed to think that Jahangir, 

 like Timur and Babar, wrote his autobiography in the Chaghatai 

 language, and that the versions we now possess, are more or less 

 perfect translations from the original. M. Garcin de Tassy on the 

 other hand, with his natural bent for every thing Hindustani, thinks 

 that the Mulfuzdt-i-Jahdngiri or the version of the memoires in that 

 language should be considered the work of the emperor, because it is 

 not stated that they are translated from the Persian. But I do not 

 attach much weight to either of these conjectures, for born in India 

 of a Hindustani mother, I think it highly improbable that Jahangir 

 was acquainted with Chaghatai Turki, and in the time of Jahangir, 

 if such a language as Hindustani can be said to have been current, 

 court memoires were not written in it. 



It is apparent then, that considerable uncertainty exists as to which 

 of these works, which following Mr. Morley, I shall intelligibly 

 still distinguish by designating the first and second editions, of the 

 memoires was written by the emperor himself. Of the first no text 

 has ever been published ; but we have the translation of Major Price 

 which is a very good one, and of the second the complete text, with 

 the preface and continuation by Mohammad Hadi, has just been very 

 creditably edited by Sayid Ahmad. But it is not in the matter of 



