Baburnama
name given to the memoirs of Ẓahīr ud-Dīn Muḥammad Bābur
The Bāburnāma or Tuzuk-i-Baburi (Chagatay: وقایع, romanized: Vaqayiʿ, lit. 'The Events'; Persian: بابرنامه, تزک بابری, romanized: Bāburnāma, Tūzak-i Bāburī, lit. 'Book of Babur') or is the memoirs of Ẓahīr-ud-Dīn Muhammad Bābur (1483–1530), founder of the Mughal Empire and a great-great-great-grandson of Timur. It is written in the Chagatai language, known to Babur as Türki "Turkic", the spoken language of the Timurids.
During the reign of his grandson, the emperor Akbar, the work was translated into Classical Persian, the literary language of the Mughal court, by a courtier, Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khanan, in 1589–90 CE (AH 998).
Background
Babur was an educated Timurid prince, and his observations and comments in his memoirs reflect an interest in nature, society, politics and economics. His vivid account of events covers not just his own life, but the history and geography of the areas he lived in as well as the people with whom he came into contact. The book covers topics as diverse as astronomy, geography, statecraft, military matters, weapons and battles, plants and animals, biographies and family chronicles, courtiers and artists, poetry, music and paintings, wine parties, historical monument tours, as well as contemplations on human nature.
Though Babur himself does not seem to have commissioned any illustrated versions, his grandson ordered their production as soon as he was presented with the finished Persian translation in November 1589. The first of four illustrated copies made under Akbar over the following decade or so was broken up for sale in 1913. Some 70 miniatures are dispersed among various collections, with 20 in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The three other versions, partly copied from the first, are in the National Museum, New Delhi (almost complete, dated 1597–98), the British Library (143 out of an original 183 miniatures, probably early 1590s) with a miniature over two pages in the British Museum, and a copy, mostly lacking the text, with the largest portions in the State Museum of Oriental Art, Moscow (57 folios) and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore (30 miniatures).
“Baburnama” enters the record as name given to the memoirs of Ẓahīr ud-Dīn Muḥammad Bābur. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Baburnama, name and given can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Baburnama” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Baburnama, name and given provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1906014. VIAF identifies the subject as 1217145857084722921701. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1483, 1530, 1589 and 1913.
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This entry incorporates text from “Baburnama” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.