Hubert Dark “The Book of Government or Rules of King”
This competent translation of Persian Siyasat Name of Nizam al-Mulk, Prime minister of the seljuq sultan Malikshah, has few notes of explanation of technical terms or corruption in the text. Fortunately, the Persian text on which the translation is based has now been published by Darke in Tehran (1962).many question of the reader wiil be answered by the extensive notes to the edition, but this available only to those who read Persian.
The book is a fascinating example of the mirror for princes genre which was popular in the late mediaeval Islamic world. It is perhaps more important as a work literature than historical since a number of event recorded in the book are anachronistic or otherwise unreliable. Nonetheless, history is enriched by accounts of occurrences which elsewhere are only summarily told. For example, chapters forty-three through forty eight, telling of heresies are valuable as supplements to standard accounts of those religious revolts found in Arabic histories.
Obviously one might write much about the book, but we are here only concerned with the translation which establishes Dark as a master in knowledge of classical Persian. His vocalization of Turkish names, however is usually wrong: read Toghan ‘falcon, read changhri ‘merlin.
The Bighish on p.266 is probably the Bekec of Mahmud al-Kashghari, while Bik of 227 and passim is surely Turkic beg (I am using popular transcription in all cases). Since the translator is presumably not interested in the historical or technical (names, etymologies, etc) questions of the book one should not quibble about such points. As a straight translation the book can be well recommended to English reader