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Narshakhī wrote his History of Bukhara in Arabic and presented it to the Samanid amir Nūḥ ibn Naṣr in 943 or 944.[1] The Arabic original is lost. The book survives in a Persian version of 1128 and in later revisions. It is the principal local source for Bukhara and its oasis before and during the Arab conquest.[2]

Author and transmission

Nothing is known of Narshakhī’s life except that he came from the village of Narshakh near Bukhara. The History seems to have been the only work he wrote.[1] The Persian version names him Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Jaʿfar al-Narshakhī. It says that he composed, in elegant Arabic and in the year 332 (943), a book for the amir Nūḥ ibn Naṣr on Bukhara, its qualities and villages and the traditions in praise of the city.[3] Abū Naṣr Aḥmad al-Qubāwī says that most people did not wish to read an Arabic book and that friends asked him for a Persian one. He finished it in Jumada I of 522 (May 1128).[3] He left out unimportant matter that tired the reader.[4] The history is carried down to 365 (975).[1]

In 574 (1178–9) Muḥammad ibn Zufar ibn ʿUmar read an abridgement to the chief of the Hanafites of Bukhara, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Burhān al-Dīn.[4] The chief was governor of Bukhara for the Qara Khitai. The abridger added matter from other works, notably the Treasury of the Sciences (Khazāʾin al-ʿulūm) of al-Nishapuri.[1] Someone later still added to the text after the Mongol invasions, since the Mongol conquest of Bukhara is mentioned in chapters 8 and 16.[1] The text that exists has therefore been translated, abridged and enlarged.[1]

The Persian text names some of its sources. Al-Nishapuri is cited five times. A work by Ibn Ṭalūt al-Hamadhani is cited for the learned Abū Ḥafṣ al-Kabīr. Muḥammad ibn Ṣāliḥ al-Laythī and al-Madāʾinī are cited for the rise of the Samanids. For the false prophet Muqannaʿ, the text cites Tabari and an “Account of Muqannaʿ”.[5] The author drew on local tradition for much of the rest.[6] In the form that has come down it is difficult to say which source the author used, which the translator and which a later reviser.[1] Each notice is therefore best read as local tradition of the twelfth century at the latest, and not as the testimony of a tenth-century eyewitness.

Contents

The Persian version has thirty-seven chapters.[7] After the introduction and a chapter on the judges of Bukhara come the regent Khatun and her descendants, the villages of the oasis, the textile workshop, the bazaar of Makh, the names of Bukhara, the building of the citadel, the clan of the Kashkathan, the canals and walls, and the minting of coin.[7] Chapters 18 to 23 tell of the Arab conquest and the settlement of the Arabs in the city. Chapters 24 to 26 turn to the house of Saman, to the killing of Tughshada, the Bukhar Khuda of his day, under Naṣr ibn Sayyār, and to the story of Shank ibn Shaykh al-Mahri. Chapters 27 and 28 turn to Muqannaʿ and the “White Raiments”. Chapters 29 to 37 give the Samanid amirs, down to Nūḥ ibn Manṣūr.[7]

The oldest layer is a legend. A section inserted from al-Nishapuri inside the chapter on the judges tells that the site of Bukhara was a swamp silted up by the river of Sughd and that settlers came from Turkistan. Their lord Abrui became a tyrant. The tale ends with the arrival of a Turkish lord’s son, Shir-i Kishvar, who built the city proper.[8] The text says itself that Narshakhī did not put this section in his book.[9] The article on the tale sets it out. A passage from the same al-Nishapuri tells that Siyavush son of Kaikaus, fleeing his father, built the citadel while he lived at the court of Afrasiyab.[10] The text goes on to say that Bidun, the husband of Khatun, rebuilt it.[11] The citadel was the residence of the rulers, a prison and a chancellery.[12]

The chapter on the minting of coin names a ruler, Kana Bukhar Khuda. He ruled Bukhara thirty years and was the first to strike silver there, with his image and a crown, in the time of the caliph Abu Bakr, 632 to 634.[13] According to one account, the legend of Abrui has no date and the History becomes datable only at this caliphate, where Kana is named.[14] The same account identifies Kana with the Göktürk prince Jiana Shad of the Tang histories.[15] The article on the title sets this account out.

From the regency of Khatun the narrative has dates and names. ʿUbaydallāh ibn Ziyād reached Bukhara at the end of 53 (673) and the beginning of 54 (674).[16] Khatun held the city for her young son Tughshada. She asked the Turks for help against him.[16] Qutayba ibn Muslim crossed the Oxus in 88 (706) and took Baikand, the later Paykent, after a siege of fifty days. He came to Bukhara four times, and at the fourth he held it.[17] The article on Qutayba tells the conquest.

Reliability

The oasis legend has no year.[8] For the sixth century, the time of the Göktürk war against the Hephthalites, it offers a legend and no event. The translation names neither the Hephthalites nor the Göktürk khaganate. Nothing in it speaks of a battle at Bukhara.[18] It names Bahram Chobin once, as the forefather of Saman Khudah, the ancestor of the Samanids, who fled from Balkh. It has nothing of his march across the Oxus.[19][14] The Turks that do appear are helpers and raiders of the seventh to ninth centuries. The text gives none of them a khaganate.

Khatun asks the Turks for help in 673. An army of Turks arrives.[20] In the 680s Bidun comes from Turkistan to help her against Muslim ibn Ziyād. He is killed.[21] In the years of Qutayba’s war the lords of Bukhara and Sughd gather with Kur Maghanun, a Turk who has come with forty thousand hired men. They break up when Haiyan al-Nabati persuades the lord of Sughd that the Turks will take his land once the Arabs have gone.[22] Kur Maghanun has been identified with the man whom Tabari calls Kūr-i Baghānūn the Turk, a sister’s son of the emperor of China. He is also taken for a Türgesh.[23] The text itself does not say to which people he belonged. In 830 the people of Bukhara built a wall round the oasis against the Turks who kept coming without warning. The lord of Sughd recalls that in ancient times a woman ruler of Sughd had walled her country against them.[24]

The translator calls much of the local history legendary or deliberately falsified.[25] One anecdote shows how far the book can be checked. The Persian version has Warqaʾ ibn Naṣr killed at Baikand, and another source has him alive in 720–1.[26] The conquest account has the Kashkathan, traders of foreign origin and not dihqans, give all their houses and build seven hundred villas outside the town. Survey in the oasis confirms the villas.[27] The book is little Muslim in spirit. Knowledge of the town’s Sogdian past may have been fading. Narshakhī may have written to keep it before the last witnesses were gone.[28]

The History names the festival of the idols at the bazaar of Makh, the Magians’ New Year and the villas of the Magians. It names the lamentation for Siyavush that the Bukharans sang and the pagoda that a Chinese princess is said to have brought to Ramitin.[29] Paikent stands in it as an older seat than Bukhara. Every ruler of the oasis once lived there.[30]

Editions and translations

The English translation rests on the Tehran edition of Raḍawī, which the translator judges the best edition of the text. He also collated the Bukhara lithograph of 1904, the Paris edition of Schefer and several manuscripts.[31] The manuscripts fall into two families, one from Central Asia and one from Iran, which differ only slightly in detail.[32] A Russian translation was made in Tashkent in 1897.[33]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g Frye 1954, xii
  2. ^ Frye 1954, xi-xii
  3. ^ a b Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 3
  4. ^ a b Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 4
  5. ^ Frye 1954, xii-xiii
  6. ^ Frye 1954, xiii
  7. ^ a b c Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 169-170
  8. ^ a b Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 6-8
  9. ^ Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 6
  10. ^ Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 22-23
  11. ^ Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 23
  12. ^ Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 24
  13. ^ Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 35
  14. ^ a b Markwart 1938, p. 145
  15. ^ Markwart 1938, p. 151
  16. ^ a b Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 37
  17. ^ Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 43-44, 47-48
  18. ^ Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 3-101
  19. ^ Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 59
  20. ^ Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 37-38
  21. ^ Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 41-43
  22. ^ Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 45-47
  23. ^ Frye 1954, p. 133-134
  24. ^ Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 33-34
  25. ^ Frye 1954, p. 135
  26. ^ Frye 1954, p. 133
  27. ^ Frye 1954, p. 126
  28. ^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 290
  29. ^ Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 8, 18, 20-23, 31
  30. ^ Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 18
  31. ^ Frye 1954, xv
  32. ^ Frye 1954, xiv
  33. ^ Frye 1954, xi, xiv

Literature

  • Richard N. Frye (trans.), The History of Bukhara. Translated from a Persian Abridgment of the Arabic Original by Narshakhi (1954)
  • Richard N. Frye, Early Bukhara (1998)
  • Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History (2005)
  • Josef Markwart, Wehrot und Arang. Untersuchungen zur mythischen und geschichtlichen Landeskunde von Ostiran (1938)

Articles resting on this source 6

Abrui and Shir-i Kishvar · Battle of Bukhara · Bukhar Khuda · Bukhara · Qutayba ibn Muslim · Sogdians

Related

What links here5

Battles & Events
Abrui and Shir-i Kishvar · Battle of Bukhara
Places
Bukhara
Peoples
Hephthalites
Institutions and Titles
Bukhar Khuda

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Narshakhī, History of Bukhara.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/sources/narshakhi/

Last revised: 8 November 2026