Suchergebnisse

The Ottoman biographer, historian and former career military officer Kātib Çelebi (d. 1067/1657), better known as Ḥājjī Khalīfa, completed his Taqwīm al-tawārīkh in Istanbul in 1058/1648. Begun as an excerpt of his earlier history Fadhlakat aqwāl al-akhyār , he expanded it to cover personalities and events up to the days in which it was written. Composed in a mixture of Ottoman Turkish and Persian, it became a popular 'desk reference' that received various upgrades by different eighteenth-century authors. The work was printed for the first time in Istanbul by İbrahim Müteferriqa in 1146/1733. The Taqwīm al-tawārīkh was translated into Latin, Italian and French, besides the anonymous Persian translation contained in this volume, completed in 1075/1664, well before any of the other translations. It is one of the rare historical works in Persian to have the form of a chronology, most of them being histories of dynasties or general histories

To know a culture, is to know its written tradition. Before the coming of the printing press, books were transmitted in manuscript form. When texts started to get printed rather than copied, earlier works that until then had only existed in manuscript, came to be printed too. Until the early nineteenth century, a fair copy of a handwritten text would be all that was needed to turn an older work into a printed book. Today, all this has changed and most ancient texts are now published on the basis of a commonly accepted methodology. In the Islamic world, where we have thousands of works in manuscript that still await a proper edition, these modern methods are not always accessible to local scholars and uncritical editions still abound. This Persian guide to the publication of manuscripts is meant to change that situation. As such, it is an important statement on the advances in scholarship in Iran