Tarjama-yi Taqwim al-tawarikh

The Ottoman biographer, historian and former career military officer Katib Celebi (d. 1067/1657), better known as Hajji Khalifa, completed his Taqwim al-tawarikh in Istanbul in 1058/1648. Begun as an excerpt of his earlier history Fadhlakat aqwal al-akhyar, he expanded it to cover personalities and events up to the days in which it was written. Composed in a mixture of Ottoman Turkish and Persian, it became a popular 'desk reference' that received various upgrades by different eighteenth-century authors. The work was printed for the first time in Istanbul by Ibrahim Muteferriqa in 1146/1733. The Taqwim al-tawarikh was translated into Latin, Italian and French, besides the anonymous Persian translation contained in this volume, completed in 1075/1664, well before any of the other translations. It is one of the rare historical works in Persian to have the form of a chronology, most of them being histories of dynasties or general histories.