Maẕkūr būlūb aīdī kīm Akhsī qūrghānī buland jar austīdā wāqi‘ būlūb tūr. ‘Imāratlār jar yāqāsīdā aīrdī.... Mīrzā jardīn kabūtar u kabūtar-khāna bīla aūchūb shunqār būldī;—'It has been mentioned that the walled-town of Akhsī is situated above ravine(s). The royal dwellings are along a ravine. The Mīrzā, having flown with his pigeons and their house from the ravine, became a falcon (i.e. died).’
A few particulars about Akhsī will shew that, in the translations just quoted, certain small changes of wording are dictated by what, amongst other writers, Kostenko and von Schwarz have written about the oases of Turkistān.
The name Akhsī, as used by Ibn Haukal, Yāqūt and Bābur, describes an oasis township, i.e. a walled-town with its adjacent cultivated lands. In Yāqūt’s time Akhsī had a second circumvallation, presumably less for defence than for the protection of crops against wild animals. The oasis was created by the Kāsān-water,[2750] upon the riverain loess of the right and higher bank of the Saiḥūn (Sīr), on level ground west of the junction of the Nārīn and the Qarā-daryā, west too of spurs from the northern hills which now abut upon the river. Yāqūt locates it in the 12th century, at one farsākh (circa 4 m.) north of the river.[2751] Depending as it did solely on the Kāsān-water, nothing dictated its location close to the Sīr, along which there is now, and there seems to have been in the 12th century, a strip of waste land. Bābur says of Akhsī what Kostenko says (i, 321) of modern Tāshkīnt, that it stood above ravines (jarlār). These were natural or artificial channels of the Kāsān-water.[2752]
To turn now to the translations;—Mr. Erskine imaged Akhsī as a castle, high on a precipice in process of erosion by the Sīr. But Bābur’s word, qūrghān means the walled-town; his word for a castle is ark, citadel; and his jar, a cleft, is not rendered by ‘precipice.’ Again;—it is no more necessary to understand that the Sīr flowed close to the walls than it is to understand, when one says the Thames flows past below Richmond, that it washes the houses on the hill.
The key to the difficulties in the Turkī passage is provided by a special use of the word jar for not only natural ravines but artificial water-cuts for irrigation. This use of it makes clear that what ‘Umar Shaikh did at Akhsī was not to make escarpments but to cut new water-channels. Presumably he joined those ‘further out’ on the deltaic fan, on the east and west of the town, so as to secure a continuous defensive cleft round the town[2753] or it may be, in order to bring it more water.
Concerning the historic pigeon-house (f. 6b), it can be said safely that it did not fall into the Sīr; it fell from a jar, and in this part of its course, the river flows in a broad bed, with a low left bank. Moreover the Mīrzā’s residence was in the walled-town (f. 110b) and there his son stayed 9 years after the accident. The slip did not affect the safety of the residence therefore; it may have been local to the birds’ house. It will have been due to some ordinary circumstance since no cause for it is mentioned by Bābur, Ḥaidar or Abū’l-faẓl. If it had marked the crisis of the Sīr’s approach, Akhsī could hardly have been described, 25 years later, as a strong fort.
Something is known of Akhsī, in the 10th, the 12th, the 15th and the 19th centuries, which testifies to sæcular decadence. Ibn Haukal and Yāqūt give the township an extent of 3 farsākh (12 miles), which may mean from one side to an opposite one. Yāqūt’s description of it mentions four gates, each opening into well-watered lands extending a whole farsākh, in other words it had a ring of garden-suburb four miles wide.
Two meanings have been given to Bābur’s words indicating the status of the oasis in the 15th century. They are, maḥallātī qūrghān-dīn bīr shar‘ī yurāqrāq tūshūb tūr. They have been understood as saying that the suburbs were two miles from their urbs. This may be right but I hesitate to accept it without pointing out that the words may mean, ‘Its suburbs extend two miles farther than the walled-town.’ Whichever verbal reading is correct, reveals a decayed oasis.
In the 19th century, Nalivkine and Ujfalvy describe the place then bearing the name Akhsī, as a small village, a mere winter-station, at some distance from the river’s bank, that bank then protected from denudation by a sand-bank.
Three distinctly-marked stages of decadence in the oasis township are thus indicated by Yāqūt, Bābur and the two modern travellers.