CHAP. XII.] SHAH JAHAN AS EMPEROR. 291 official annals of the Mughal Emperors written by their command, every period of ten years (called dawwar) was taken together and a volume devoted to it. Three such decades formed an epoch (qarn), which was regarded as a sort of perfect and auspicious number. Shah Jahan had completed one such epoch and begun another. The occasion was, therefore, one of peculiar importance and solemnity. The reign had been as prosperous as it had its glories; been long. The 'wealth of Ind' under this Great Mughal dazzled the eyes of foreign visitors, and on gala days ambassadors from Bukhara and Persia, Turkey and Arabia, as well as travellers from France and Italy, gazed with wonder at the Peacock Throne and the Kohinur and other jewels which cast a luminous halo round the Emperor's person. The white marble edifices which he loved to build were as costly as they were chaste in design. The nobles of the empire eclipsed the kings of other lands in wealth and pomp. Save for two failures of his arms outside the natural frontiers of India, the Imperial prestige stood higher than ever before. The bounds of the
- Inayat Khan's Shah Jahan-namah (as quoted in Elliot,
vii, 74). Waris, 16. Digitized by Microsoft Ⓡ
