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THE HISTORY OF INDIA.

THE

HISTORY OF INDIA,

AS TOLD

BY ITS OWN HISTORIANS.

THE MUHAMMADAN PERIOD.

THE POSTHUMOUS PAPERS

OF THE LATE

SIR H. M. ELLIOT, K. C. B.,

EDITED AND CONTINUED

BY

PROFESSOR JOHN DOWSON, M.R.A.S.,

STAFF COLLEGE, SANDHURST.

VOL. IV.

LONDON:

TRÜBNER AND CO., 8 AND 60, PATERNOSTER ROW.

1872.

[All rights reserved.]

BODLEAD

STEPHEN AUSTIN AND SONS,

PRINTERS, HERTFORD.

PREFACE.

THIS fourth volume of the History of India traverses the disordered interval between the irruption of Tímúr and the culmination of Musulmán glory under Akbar; but the thread of the history is not perfect, as the annals of some of the reigns have to be drawn from later works, and will appear in the succeeding volume. The period is one which has been less illustrated than any other in the seven centuries of Muhammadan rule, for, with the exception of Bábar's Memoirs, no work of mark has come down to us, and the authorities within the reach of European students have hitherto been scanty and incomplete.

The Táríkh-i Mubárak Shahí now makes its first appearance. It is an exceedingly rare work, and a knowledge of it has long been anxiously desired, for it covers that "hiatus of about sixty years " which Col. Lees thought it would be difficult to fill up from

contemporaneous historians." It is not a work of any literary pretensions, and it can only be regarded as a plain unvarnished chronicle of the period over which it travels. Such as it is, however, it is a contemporary record, and all later writers have been directly or indirectly indebted to it for the history of the troublous times which followed the invasion of Tímúr. Sir H. Elliot's MS. is incomplete, but as Nizám Ahmad, the author of the Tabakát-i Akbarí, made great use of this

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