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My doctoral research project revolves around the production, in neo-Chinggisid Central Asia (1500-1747), of encyclopaedic texts; that is, of compendia covering a variety of topics, compiled from a body of authoritative sources and presented in a clearly structured, easily accessible format in order to educate the reader. The three focal points of my research are the structure and contents of these works,
the intellectual networks underpinning their production, and the manuscript traditions they spawned. Mobility, of both knowledge and individuals, is central to all three. For one thing, encyclopaedias were instruments of knowledge transmission, serving as an interface between readers and a canonical corpus of texts. By excerpting and popularising the contents of these sources, they promoted the mobility of knowledge by both disseminating it more widely and – when drawing from older sources – relaying it across time. Through either misunderstandings or decontextualisation, encyclopaedists often significantly altered the knowledge they were seeking to transmit – something which, once their work had become a source relied upon by subsequent authors, resulted in these alterations being replicated through an onward chain of knowledge transmission. Furthermore, since the encyclopaedist's work was premised on selecting the most authoritative sources available, these encyclopaedias offer a unique insight into what constituted a textual canon at the time and place of compilation. Two of the three Central Asian encyclopaedias produced in this period (Sulṭān Muḥammad Balkhī's Majmaʿ al-Gharāʾib and Muḥammad Ṭāhir Balkhī's ʿAjāʾib al-Ṭabaqāt) were based chiefly on the same mixture of Ilkhanid and Timurid sources, as well as on a few more recent works produced under Safavid and Abū'l-Khayrid patronage. Conversely, the third one – Maḥmūd b. Amīr Walī Balkhī's Baḥr al-Asrār – was penned by a native of Balkh who spent close to a decade travelling around India, and who, upon his return, chose to base his work on a substantially different corpus of sources, which, as he makes clear, were deemed canonical in the Mughal domains. The study of which texts were held in higher regard in a particular time and place, and how these textual canons overlapped and intersected, is a fundamental component of my research, and bears heavily on the question of cross-border knowledge mobility. As the last example makes clear, moreover, knowledge mobility was predicated on the mobility of the individuals producing and reproducing it in written form. Two of the aforementioned authors were travellers, as were many of the scholars, officials and dynasts with whom they interacted; indeed, the encyclopaedias in question include both personal accounts of travel and second-hand information on far-away lands derived from and attributed to trustworthy travellers. More importantly, they contain a significant amount of information on the intellectual life of 16th- and 17th-century Central Asia, and on the social circles which shaped their authors’ lives. Accordingly, my project also touches on intellectual and patronage networks, and on the mobility of scholars across geographical, political and confessional boundaries, between the neo-Chinggisid, Safavid and Mughal domains. Lastly, in seeking to address the textological problems posed by these encyclopaedias, my research also focuses on the manuscript traditions they spawned. In some cases, these texts remained popular for centuries after their initial compilation, with surviving copies numbering in the dozens. Through prolonged engagement with these corpora, my project attempts to understand how the manuscript transmission of these texts came, through repeated patterns of scribal mistakes, corrections, rearrangements and omissions, to shape their form and contents. As such, it seeks to treat these works as “living texts” which existed in a constant state of flow, and to understand the dynamics of manuscript transmission as integral to the way in which encyclopaedic texts, and the knowledge contained therein, were relayed and transformed over the centuries.