“An oriental Samuel Pepys”. The phrase has been lodgedin my mind for the several decades during which Ihave been working, on and off, on this early Persianhistorian Bayhaqī. I am pretty certain that I readit originally in that monument of mid-VictorianAnglo-Indian scholarship, The History ofIndia as told by its own Historians. TheMuhammadan period, by Sir Henry Elliottand John Dowson. This multi-volume work consists oftranslated extracts, many quite lengthy, from textsillustrating the history of the Indian subcontinent,the greater part of them dealing with what was thensome eleven centuries of Muslim rule there. InVolume II, the compilers presented several passagesfrom Bayhaqī's work, The History of SultanMaʿsūd of Ghazna, which had just appearedin a printed edition at Calcutta in the BibliothecaIndica series, edited by the person who had in factproduced the pioneer catalogue of the Royal AsiaticSociety's Arabic and Persian manuscripts, William H.Morley. Elliott made many translations himself, butsometimes employed local munshis,not always with happy results. Although Persianculture was still very much alive in India in themid-nineteenth century, thesemunshis were far from beingau fait with the earlyeleventh-century Persian style of Bayhaqī and wereat times flummoxed by his idiomatic usages. One ofmy favourites here is the Persian sayingṭablī zīr-i gilīm mīzadand,translated literally and ludicrously in its contextas “they were beating a drum under a carpet”. Whyanyone should crawl under a carpet and beat a drum,in the midst of a high-level discussion betweenSultan Maʿsūd and his administrators, the equivalentof a cabinet meeting, is rather baffling; the idiom,already used by Firdawsī in the national epic, theShāh-nāma, means of course “tospread rumours clandestinely”.