Tarikh-e Alam-ara-ye Abbasi

The Tarikh-e Alam-ara-ye Abbasi (Persian: تاریخ عالم‌آرای عباسی, romanized: World Adorning History of Abbas) is a Persian-language chronicle covering the history of the early Safavid dynasty of Iran, particularly Shah Abbas I (r. 1587–1629). Its author was his court historian and scribe Iskandar Beg Munshi, who completed it in 1629.

The book is considered the most significant piece of Iranian historiography written about the Safavids. It has greatly influenced Safavid studies and serves as the foundation for a number of widely held beliefs regarding Safavid history. This book has been translated into English by Roger Savory.

The most complete biography of Abbas the Great was written by the head secretary at his court (Iskandar Beg Munshi) in a famous Persian history book called the Tarikh-e Alam-ara-ye Abbasi (“The Adorner of the World”). This long and detailed book uses very fancy language and talks not only about Shah Abbas’s life and rule, but also about earlier Safavid kings, what was happening in the Ottoman Empire and West Asia, and the state of art, science, and learning at the time. It also includes short life stories of many poets, artists, writers, and scholars. This book is the most important source we have for learning about Safavid history, and it is seen as the last great work in the tradition of old Persian history writing.

Translating Tarikh-e Alam-ara-ye Abbasi was quite challenging. Not only is the book extremely long (over 1116 pages of dense text in its latest edition), but its writing style is so complex that a word-for-word translation would be very difficult and boring to read.