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10 A HISTORY OF SHARVAN AND DARBAND
writer and some of his explanations are valuable as being based on a
direct knowledge of the country.
For the history of Sharvan B, Dorn's two essays: (a) 'Versuch einer
Geschichte des Schirwanschahe', in Mem, de I'Acad. de St. Petersburg,
1840, pp. 523-602, and (b) 'Geschichte Schirwans . . . von 1538-1820',
ibid., 1841, pp. 317-434, are useful for later periods, but obsolete for the
tenth-eleventh centuries. For Daghestan there exists an excellent
"bibliographic raisonnee" by E. Kozubsky (in Russian), Temir-Khanshura,
1895, 268 pp. Considerable progress in the study of local history
has been achieved by the numismatic research of Prof. E. A. Pakhomov
who published a 'Short course of the history of Azerbayjan, with an
excursus on the history of the sharvanshahs in the eleventh-fourteenth
centuries' (in Russian), Baku 1923; 'On the principality of Darband in
the twelfth-thirteenth century' (in Russian), Baku 1930, and several
other important articles (for example on the Pahlavi inscriptions on the
walls of Darband).1
The best short summaries of local history are found in V. V. Barthold's
articles Daghestan, Derbend and Shirvan* in the Enc. of Islam, but even
in them the tenth and eleventh centuries present an almost complete
blank.3
§4. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The limited scope of the present publication does not admit of our
going into the analysis of the extremely numerous names of ancient
tribes quoted by the classical and Armenian sources4 in the area covered
by the Ta'rtkh al-Bab. We can only hint at some changes which had
intervened between the classical period and the Muslim conquest.
1V. M. S'isoyev's 'Short Outline of the History of (northern) Azerbayjan', Baku
1925, is a clear summary of a more practical Mnd. On later works by I. P. Petrushevsky,
A. A, Ali-zadeh, etc., see below, p. 135.
2 The first two translated into Turkish in the Islam Ansiklopedisi. Cf. also
Barthold, The place of the Caspian provinces in the history of the Islamic world (in
Russian), Baku 1926 (valuable but brief).
3 On several occasions J. Marquart announced his work Historische Ethnologie
von Daghestan but it has remained unpublished and it could not be traced in Marquart's
papers. See Marquart, Streifzuge, pp. 492, 508, etc., and Minorsky, 'Essai
de bibliographic de J, Markwart', Jour. As., Oct. 1930, p. 322.
1 See a complete collection of texts in Latyshev, Scythica et Caucasica e veteribus
scriptoribus Graecis et Latinis, cum versions Rossica, 2 vpls., 1890-1906 (the translation
has now been re-edited with additions in Vestnik drevn. Vostoka, 1947-9).
On the Armenian sources see Hiibschmann, 'Die altarmenischen Ortsnamen',
1904; for the important list of East-Caucasian tribes contained in the Armenian
Geography (eighth century?), see V. F. Miller, OsetinsMye etynffi, 1887, III, pp. 102-
16, and Minorsky, Jgudud al-'Alam, p. 401.