Or 16122 (2)

This section contains extracts from Yazıcıoğlu Ahmed Bican’s (died after 870 AH/1466 CE) Ottoman Turkish translation of Zakariyya ibn Muhammad al-Qazwīnī’s (died 682 AH/1283 CE) ‘Ajā’ib al-makhlūqāt, an Arabic work on geography and cosmography.

Yazıcıoğlu Ahmed Bican’s translation was the most well-known and perhaps the most widely read work of its kind. He completed the work in Gallipoli 857 AH/1453 CE. It consists of seventeen chapters, and is based on Persian translations rather than al-Qazwīnī’s Arabic original. For more information on this text, see the entry of Sloane MS 4088.

The text is incomplete at the end, coming to a halt in mid-sentence; the following four folios are entirely blank but were perhaps intended to accommodate the remainder of the work.

Begins:

elhamdülillah Rabbi’l-Alemin ve selam ala Resulih es‘adi’l-halk ve alih ecma‘in Amma ba‘d, Sebeb-i tahrir-i kitap oldur ki muhibbu’l-ulema el-‘izam ve hadimu’l-fukara Yazıcıoğlu Ahmed Bican gaffer Allah ‘anhuma rivayet eder mütalaa-i masnuat ederken gönlümde bu şey zuhur ettiğim...

Ends:

Gerşasb (sic) iki arsalan öldürdü cevlan-bazlık eylediler cümleye galaba eyledi Zahhak Gerşasbun kuvvetine hayran olup korkdu, Bir gün ‘işret ederken meğer Nuh…

This section of the work is undated, but is likely from the later 12th century AH/18th century CE.