Art. XIV.—On the Uzbeg Epos

Extract

I Have to remark before all, that the manuscript referring to Sheibani Khan, upon which I am speaking, ought not to be confounded with the Sheibani-nameh, edited by the Russian Orientalist K. Berezin, in 1849, in I. Biblioteka Vostochnikh Historikof. The last-named is an insignificant little treatise of the deeds accomplished by the famous Uzbeg chief, and may be divided into two different parts. The first, containing one of those numerous compilations of the history of the Turks, must be ranked amongst the third class of imitators of Ala-eddin Djuveini and of Rashid-eddin Tabibi, with the only exception that the anonymous author, being probably of Turkish origin, has less disfigured the Turkish and Mongol nomina propria than many of his predecessors and subsequent writers upon the same subject. In the second part the author dwells at some length upon that branch of the Djenghizides of which Abulkhair Khan, the ancestor of Sheibani, was an offspring—I mean to say upon the family of Djudji Khan, and here we meet with certain details and genealogical data not to be met with in most of the books treating the same subject.