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A much more meritorious work on the Darband-nama was published
in English by the Russian Academy in I85I.1 The editor, Mirza A.
Kazem-Beg,2 was himself a native of Darband and grandson of a former
vazir to the local ruler Path cAli-khan. He was brought up as a strict
Muslim but as a young man was converted to Christianity by the Scottish
missionaries then established in Astrakhan (hence the English language
of the translation), Kazem-Bek rose to professorship, first at the University
of Kazan and then in St. Petersburg. In his Introduction he writes:
"When I was a boy about 14 years of age, I well remember that the
public reading of the Derlend-wameh, with explanatory illustrations and
remarks, occupied for a few days the attention of that small circle of
curious and semi-civilised young men of Derbend who—be it recorded
to their honour—passed the tedious hours of their winter evenings in
assembling (together) and amusing themselves with reading out of
ancient MSS. popular stories, fictions and romances, concerning the antiquities
of Asia, the exploits of its ancient heroes, and the enterprises of
renowned adventurers," These recollections of his youth moved Kazem-
Bek to undertake the work for which he was exceptionally well equipped,3
Even now his translation of the text which he had at his disposal is quite
satisfactory, but the text itself rouses many doubts.
The existing copies are either in Azarbayjan-Turkish or in Persian.
They differ very considerably in style and composition, and Kazem-Bek
had divided them roughly into two classes, when a new discovery made
him reconsider his theories.4 It seems that each of the translators and
copyists enlarged and modified the text by introducing into it some local
traditions with a number of anachronistic records and badly mutilated
proper names.5
We need not go into all the discrepancies of these scant summaries,
Most of the copies deal with the early days of the Muslim conquest, of
1 D&vbena-n&meh, or the Mstory of' Derbend: translated from a select Turkish
"version . . . and with notes, St. Petersburg, Memoires des savants strangers pitblies
par 1'Academie des Sciences, t, VI, 1851, 242 pp., 4°.
z Born in Rasht on 22 July 1802, died in St. Petersburg in 1870.
3 Only one later translation of the Darband-wama (into Russian) was published
in Tiflis in 1898, under the supervision of the future general Alikhanov-Avarsky,
himself a native of Avaria.
4 Kazem-Bek, I.e., p. XII, speaks of five MSS. in Turkish: one in Paris, one in
Berlin, two at the Public Library (now Leningrad State Library) and one in his
possession, and of two MSS. in Persian: one at the Public Library and one at the
Asiatic Museum. After having completed his work Kazem-Bek found an important
Turkish MS. at the former Rumiantsev Museum (now Lenin State Library in Moscow),
which proved to be in a class of its own.
5 Thus the famous conqueror of Daghestan Maslama b. 'Abd al-Malik was transformed
into "Abu-Muslim".