The Baz-nama-yi Nasiri

The Bāz-Nāma-yi Nāṣirī is at once a royal memoir, a practical handbook, and a vivid historical record of Persian falconry. Framed by the author's devotion to Nāṣiru'd-Dīn Shāh and his own life in hunting service, it moves from pilgrimage, grief, and courtly praise into a richly detailed world of birds of prey, technical skill, and inherited knowledge. The narrator presents the treatise as a lasting guide for beginners and experts alike, promising an encyclopedic survey of hawks, falcons, training, feeding, moult, injuries, and disease. Alongside this manual of care and performance runs an extraordinary family history: the rise, failed power struggle, exile, and eventual survival of Prince Taymūr Mīrzā and the Farmān-Farmā family amid the political chaos of Qajar Persia. Their fortunes are shaped by rivals, winter hardship, desertion, and English intervention, before exile carries them to Baghdad and even London. Preserved through accident and loss, the manuscript itself becomes part of that story, while the work's intimate studies of goshawks, saker falcons, and hunting practice give it a rare blend of folklore, scholarship, and lived sporting expertise. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.