Both an official chronicle and a highly personal memoir, the Baburnama presents a vivid and extraordinarily detailed picture of life in Central Asia and India during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It is also the text most often quoted by historians and scholars of Mughal India. The prose of Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, the first Mughal emperor, is described by its new translator Wheeler Thackston as frank, intimate, truthful, and unbiased.

It is all the more astonishing, therefore, that the Baburnama is also the first real autobiography in Islamic literature. Babur had no historical precedent for his narrative, yet even today it is a remarkably engrossing volume to read.

1. The interests that Babur expressed so eloquently in the memoirs - his profound curiosity about the natural world and human personalities, for example - defined also the directions that artists were to take. Dr. Thackston's translation provides many new insights into a particularly stimulating period in the world's history.