A FOUNDATION FOR HISTORY 57
a person to the Prophet's family or to early Muslims. Seen within the
prestige economy of city states and courts, such a claim was often an
argument for the prestige of the author himself rather than any indi-
cation of actual biological or textual ties.
Let me present two examples which demonstrate the presence and
"-.utilization of such claims in texts contemporaneous with Chachnama.
The claim of Arab biological descent is also in Fakhr-i Mudabbir's (d.
1228) Shujara-i Ansab, which was written in 1206. The text is a gene-
alogy (tabaqat) of the Turkic rulers until the taking of Delhi by
Muhammad bin Sam Ghur. Mudabbir begins by presenting his cre-
dentials-a common trope in Persian historiography after Firdawsi.
Mudabbir recounts that the project grew from his attempt to locate his
own genealogy, which he thought was lost. It was only after Sam's
taking of Lahore that Mudabbir "acquired documents of descent and
foundations" in which his genealogy was traced back to the second ca-
liph, Abu Bakr.17 From this beginning, Mudabbir wrote, he began to
think about how to expand the chart to include other caliphs, the rulers
down to his time period, and his employer-the, Ghurid. Mudabbir's
tracing of personal prestige by biological descent from the Prophet's age
to political prestige of the Turkic rulers created an early precedent that
other authors of the thirteenth-century Persianate cosmopolis followed.
Translating or marking the genealogy of a text from Arabic into
Persian was also a significant practice in the early thirteenth century.
Hence, in 1224, Muhammad 'Awfi began to translate sections from
Arabic of Tanukhi's (939-994 CE) Kitab Faraj ba'd Shidda, which he
dedicated to Qabacha.^18 Tanukhi's text represented a popular example
of the adab (belles lettres) genre, which contained anecdotes of trav-
elers facing wild animals or robbers or officials facing execution or
penury because of a capricious ruler. In his preface to the text, 'Awfi
presents his humble offering to Qabacha, saying that "a beautiful bride
who was hiding behind the Arabic script" can now be revealed "to the
eyes of the learned Persianate betrothed.lll^9 The metaphor of the con-
jugal relatibnship was a common one with which to frame "transla-
tion" as an act of transcreation. 'Awfi saw his role as making a literary
heritage available to an appreciative and exclusive audience while-also
claiming newness for his work. 'Awfi, however, abandoned this "trans-
lation" and instead wrote his own composition of the genre of traveler