Dawlatshah Samarqandi

Dawlatshah b. ʻAlaʼ al-Dawla Bakhtishah Ghazi Samarqandi came from the Timurid elite. His father, the amir ʻAlaʼ al-Dawla Bakhtishah, served at the court of Shah Rukh; his brother, Amir Radi al-Din Ali, wrote poetry in Persian and Chagatai. Dawlatshah was born around 1438 (sources give 1436–1438), and his nisba points to a connection with Samarkand.

Under Sultan Husayn Bayqara he took part in military campaigns and was at times close to the sultan’s circle, but later left state service and lived in the countryside in the manner of a Sufi. In his book he admits to having spent much of his life to little purpose.

At about fifty he began his only known work, the “Tadhkirat al-shu‘ara” (“Memorial of the Poets”), and finished it in 892 AH (1486–87). It is written in Persian: the introduction deals with some ten Arab poets, seven chapters describe poets writing in Persian — the first four those before the Timurids, the rest those of the Timurid age — and the epilogue remembers contemporaries, above all Jami and Alisher Navoi.

The book gives the biographies and sample verses of about 150 poets (sources count 152 or 155). It is dedicated to Alisher Navoi. The author drew on historical and literary sources, among them Nizami Aruzi’s “Chahar maqala”.

Its information on the earlier poets is not always accurate, yet it remains a highly important source for the cultural and political history of the Timurid age. The year of Dawlatshah’s death is not certain: sources give 1491, 1494, 1495 and 1507.

The work was translated into Ottoman Turkish in the 16th century, and Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall published a German version (Vienna, 1818). It has been edited in Bombay (1887), Leiden and London (E. G. Browne, 1901), Tehran (1959) and, most fully, by Fatima Alaqa (2006).