By the removal there is āburnāleft to consider the historical matter of pp. 12-13. The first paragraph concerns matter of much earlier date than `Umar's death in 1494 (p. 13); it may be part of an obituary notice, perhaps that of Yunas Khan. What follows of the advance of displeased kinsmen against `Umar Shaikh would fall into place as part of Babur's record of his boyhood, and lead on to that of his father's death.
The above is a bald sketch of what might be effected in the interests of the book and to facilitate its pleasant perusal.
THE TURKI MSS. AND WORK CONNECTING WITH THEM.
This chapter is a literary counterpart of "Babur Padshah's Stone-heap," the roadside cairn tradition says was piled by his army, each man laying his stone when passing down from Kabul for Hindustan in the year of victory 1525 (932).[11]
For a title suiting its contents is "Babur Padshah's Book-pile," because it is fashioned of item after item of pen-work done by many men in obedience to the dictates given by his book. Unlike the cairn, however, the pile of books is not of a single occasion but of many, not of a single year but of many, irregularly spacing the 500 years through which he and his autobiography have had Earth's immortality.
_Preliminary._—Much of the information given below was published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society from 1900 onwards, as it came into my possession during a search for reliable Turki text of the _Babur-nama_. My notes were progressive; some MSS. were in distant places, some not traceable, but in the end I was able to examine in England all of whose continued existence I had become aware. It was inevitable that some of my earlier statements should be superseded later; my Notes (_see s.n._ JRAS.) need clearing of transitory matter and summarizing, in particular those on the Elphinstone Codex and Klaproth's articles. Neither they nor what is placed here makes claim to be complete. Other workers will supplement them when the World has renewed opportunity to stroll in the bye-paths of literature.
Few copies of the _Babur-nama_ seem to have been made; of the few I have traced as existing, not one contains the complete autobiography, and one alone has the maximum of dwindled text shewn in the Persian translation (1589). Two books have been reputed to contain Babur's authentic text, one preserved in Hindustan by his descendants, the other issuing from Bukhara. They differ in total contents, arrangement and textual worth; moreover the Bukhara book compiles items of divers diction and origin and date, manifestly not from one pen.