NOTE ON AUTHORITIES
The chief authority for Bábar’s life is his own Memoirs or Commentaries, the Wakáï or Túzak-i-Bábari, on which see pp. 12-15. The English translation by Erskine and Leyden, and Pavet de Courteille's French version, are both cited, but not always verbatim. The blanks in the Memoirs are to some extent filled by notices in the Taríkh-i-Rashídi, a history of the Mongols in Central Asia, written by Bábar's cousin, Mirzá Haidar, and completed within seventeen years after the Emperor’s death: this important work has been admirably translated and edited by Professor E. Denison Ross and the late Consul-General N. Elias (1895). The Tabakát-i-Båabari of Shaikh Zain-ad-dín is little more than an inflated paraphrase of the later portions of the Memoirs. Bábar's daughter, Gul-badan, who survived her father, also left some interesting Memoirs, which remain in MS. in the British Museum (Or. 166). The Shaibáni-náma of Muhammad Sálih (ed. Vambéry, 1885) gives the rhapsodical view of an enemy, and Mirzá Iskandar’s history throws light upon Bábar's relations with Shah Ismá'íl; on which the coins of the period also hear evidence,
