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Secondary sourceBook11th century CE

Tarikh-e Beyhaqi

Abul-Fazl Bayhaqi · 11th century CE

An 11th-century Persian court history by Abul-Fazl Bayhaqi that preserves rare surviving fragments of Biruni's lost history of Khwarazm.

This later court history is the only surviving source for excerpts of Biruni's own lost history of Khwarazm.

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Open double-page manuscript spread in Arabic script. The right page has an illuminated floral and geometric frontispiece with gold and blue panels and a central title cartouche above dense text. The left page is a text block framed in blue ink lines. An oval red-stamped seal appears at upper right.
Abul-Fazl Bayhaqi, Tarikh-i Bayhaqi (also known as Tarikh-i Nasiri). Manuscript copy, 17th-19th century. Library, Museum and Document Center of Iran Parliament.

About this source

What it is

Tarikh-e Beyhaqi is a Persian history of the Ghaznavid Empire, written by Abul-Fazl Bayhaqi, a younger contemporary of Al-Biruni, in the 11th century. Only part of the original thirty books survives. The manuscript shown here is a later copy from the 17th-19th centuries, kept at the Library, Museum and Document Center of Iran's Parliament.

Why it matters

This book is one of the most important sources for Ghaznavid history and is admired as a masterpiece of Persian prose. For students of Al-Biruni, it matters because it preserves the only surviving excerpts of his own lost history of Khwarazm, the Musamara fi akhbar Khwarazm. Without Bayhaqi's work, that book by Biruni would be completely unknown to us.

Look closer

  • Why might a court historian like Bayhaqi have chosen to quote from Biruni's work?
  • What does it mean for historians when a text survives only as fragments inside another book?
  • What decorative features of this manuscript page suggest it was a valued, carefully made copy?

This book is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of Al-Biruni on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.

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Al-Biruni

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