Mir Sayyid Sharif Raqim Samarqandi

Mir Sayyid Sharif Raqim Samarqandi was a Central Asian historian and poet who wrote in Persian. The nisba “Samarqandi” points to his origin in Samarkand. The years of his life are unknown: reference works place his activity in the 17th–18th centuries, and a manuscript of his work copied in 1732 shows that the book had been completed by then.

Very little is preserved about the author’s life. He is said to have visited many countries and to have known several languages. He wrote his poetry in Persian under the pen name Raqim; some publications render his name as Rahim, which is why both spellings appear in Russian-language literature.

The main work associated with his name is “Tarikh-i Raqim”, also called “Tarikh-i Raqimi” and “Tawarikh-i Mir Sayyid Sharif Raqim”. It is not a continuous narrative but a chronological compendium of short entries on rulers, viziers, scholars, poets and Sufis. The death of many of them is marked with a chronogram, a line of verse whose letters add up by the abjad system to a date.

The compendium covers events from roughly the middle of the 14th to the middle of the 17th century in Central Asia, Iran and India. It is valued as a reference for the dates of birth and death of well-known people, battles and other events, and is therefore used by historians of Central Asia and Kazakhstan. The authorship of the surviving text is discussed: it is linked with the name of Mir Sayyid Sharif, and the orientalist A. A. Semenov considered him the author of the later abridgement found in most manuscripts.

Manuscripts of the work are held in several collections around the world; one copy, now at the University of Edinburgh, was made in Shahjahanabad (Delhi) in 1732. A printed edition prepared by M. Sutuda was published in Tehran.