Page:Babur-nama Vol 1.djvu/72

2 Yangi which in books they write Tarāz, at the present time all is desolate, no settled population whatever remaining, because of the Mughūls and the Auzbegs.

Farghāna is a small country,³ abounding in grain and fruits. It is girt round by mountains except on the west, i.e. towards Khujand and Samarkand, and in winter an enemy can enter only on that side. Fol. 2. The Saiḥūn River (darya) commonly known as the Water of Khujand, comes into the country from the north-east, flows westward through it and after passing along the north of Khujand and the south of Fanākat, now known as Shāhrukhiya, turns directly north and goes to Turkistān. It does not

1 2  3 Schuyler (ii, 54) gives the extreme length of the valley as about 160 miles and its width, at its widest, as 65 miles. 4 Following a manifestly clerical error in the Second W.-i-B. the Akbarnāma and the Mems. are without the seasonal limitation, "in winter."

Babur here excludes from winter routes one he knew well, the Kindirlik Pass; on the other hand Kostenko says that this is open all the year round. Does this contradiction indicate climatic change? (Cf. f. 54b and note; A.N. Bib. Ind. ed. i, 85 (H. Beveridge i, 221) and, for an account of the passes round Farghāna, Kostenko's Turkistan Region, Tables of Contents.) 5 Var. Banākat, Banākas, Fiākat, Fanākand. Of this place Dr. Rieu writes (Pers. cat. i, 79) that it was also called Shash and, in modern times, Tāshkint. Bābur does not identify Fanākat with the Täshkint of his day but he identifies it with Shahrukhiya (cf. Index's.nn.) and distinguishes between Tāshkint-Shāsh and Fanākat-Shāhrukhiya. It may be therefore that Dr. Rieu's Tashkint-Fanākat was Old Tashkint,-(Does Fanā-kint mean Old Village?) some 14 miles nearer to the Saiḥūn than the Tashkint of Bābur's day or our own.