Muhit al-Tavarikh, ‘The Sea of Chronicles’ is a unique historiographical work written during the seventeenth century in Bukhara, Central Asia, by Mohammad Amin b. Mirza-Zaman Bokhari. The seventeenth century is considered to be the climax of an era, during which the Islamic world was split into four main political zones, i.e. the Ottoman realm, the Safavid realm, the Mughal realm, the Shaybanid and later the Ashtarkhanid realm. Our knowledge of this period in general and of the Central Asian region, in particular, is unsatisfactory. Muhit al-Tavarikh can markedly contribute to better understanding of the history of the Central Asian region particularly during the last great Ashtarkhanid ruler Sobhan Qoli khan. The work is like an encyclopedia which contains very valuable information not only on the political and social life of that period, but also on the cultural one. Furthermore, the work is a valuable source for the study of the New Persian of this period; a transitional period that links the late Classical Persian of the thirteenth to fifteenth century to the Modern Persian of the twentieth century. A linguistic description of any work from this period is therefore of great importance, not only for understanding the diachronic processes of language change leading from late Classical to Modern Persian, but also for synchronic studies of dialectal variations of the period to which the work belongs.
Thus, the first and main purpose of the project has been to edit critically the ninth and tenth chapters of the Muhit al-Tavarikh with the aid of three extant manuscripts of the work at our disposal, namely: 1. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, supplément persan1548; 2. Tashkent, Abu Raihon Berunii Nomidagi SharqshunoslikInstituti, nos. 7351 and 835; 3. St. Petersburg, Institut Vostochnӯkh Rukopiseī RAN (ИВР РАН), no. D 89, (574agg). The second purpose has been to provide a linguistic description of the text by an analysis of the morphosyntactic structures of the text. The third purpose of the project has been to provide an English translation of the work.
