Muhammad ibn Najib Bakran

Very little is known about the life of Muhammad ibn Najib Bakran: what we know comes almost entirely from his own work. According to Yu. E. Borshchevsky, who prepared the edition of the text, the author lived in Khorasan, most likely in Tus. The dates of his birth and death are unknown; he was active in the early 13th century.

In 605 AH (1208–1209) Bakran drew a world map on cloth for the Khwarazmshah ‘Ala’ al-Din Muhammad, who ruled in 1200–1220. He wrote an explanatory treatise in Persian to accompany it, the “Jahan-nama” (“The Book of the World”). The map itself has not survived, but the detailed description in the text makes it possible to reconstruct how it was laid out.

The “Jahan-nama” describes lands and peoples from China and the Turkic steppes to India and the Caspian region, among them Transoxiana, the Qara Khitai state and the Khalaj tribe. The author drew on earlier geographical works, including those of Nasir Khusraw and Ibn Khurdadhbih. According to Borshchevsky, Bakran’s map is older than that of Qazwini and is the oldest known medieval world map with a graticule.

The work survives in two manuscripts: one in Paris, in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and a Leningrad copy, the older of the two, dated to 663 AH (1264–1265). The Leningrad manuscript was found in Bukhara in 1892 by Abu’l-Fazl Gulpaygani and in 1893 passed to the orientalist A. G. Tumansky. In the 15th century the “Jahan-nama” was taken almost in full into Sa‘id ‘Ali Jurjani’s “Masalik al-mamalik”, and it later served as a source for Hafiz-i Abru; Jurjani’s dependence on Bakran was first pointed out by V. V. Barthold.

The text of the “Jahan-nama” was published by Yu. E. Borshchevsky in the series “Monuments of the Literature of the Peoples of the East” (Moscow, 1960); a Persian edition was prepared by M. A. Riyahi (Tehran, 1963), and an edition by Firuza Kadirova appeared in Khujand in 2019.