Note 1341 — SECTION II. KĀBUL666 (continued 4)

It is one recorded with some variation, in Niyāz Muḥammad Khukandī’s Tārīkh-i-shāhrukhī (Kazan, 1885) and Nalivkine’s Khānate of Khokand (p. 63). It says that when Bābur in 918 AH. (1512 AD.) left Samarkand after defeat by the Aūzbegs, one of his wives, Sayyida Āfāq who accompanied him in his flight, gave birth to a son in the desert which lies between Khujand and Kand-i-badām; that Bābur, not daring to tarry and the infant being too young to make the impending journey, left it under some bushes with his own girdle round it in which were things of price; that the child was found by local people and in allusion to the valuables amongst which it lay, called Altūn bīshik (golden cradle); that it received other names and was best known in later life as Kḥudāyān Sult̤ān. He is said to have spent most of his life in Akhsī; to have had a son Tīngrī-yār; and to have died in 952 AH. (1545 AD.). His grandson Yār-i-muḥammad is said to have gone to India to relations who was descendants of Bābur (JASB 1905 p. 137 H. Beveridge’s art. The Emperor Bābur). What is against the truth of this tradition is that Gul-badan mentions no such wife as Sayyida Āfāq. Māhīm however seems to have belonged to a religious family, might therefore be styled Sayyida, and, as Bābur mentions (f. 220), had several children who did not live (a child left as this infant was, might if not heard of, be supposed dead). There is this opening allowed for considering the tradition.