So early as 910 AH. the year of his conquest of Kābul, Bābur devised what was probably a variety of nakhsh, and called it the Bāburī-khat̤t̤ (f. 144b), a name used later by Ḥaidar Mīrzā, Niz̤āmu’d-dīn Aḥmad and ‘Abdu’l-qādir Badāyūnī. He writes of it again (f. 179) s.a. 911 AH. when describing an interview had in 912 AH. with one of the Harāt Qāẓīs, at which the script was discussed, its specialities (mufradāt) exhibited to, and read by the Qāẓī who there and then wrote in it.[2834] In what remains to us of the Bābur-nāma it is not mentioned again till 935 AH. (fol. 357b) but at some intermediate date Bābur made in it a copy of the Qorān which he sent to Makka.[2835] In 935 AH. (f. 357b) it is mentioned in significant association with the despatch to each of four persons of a copy of the Translation (of the Wālidiyyah-risāla) and the Hindūstān poems, the significance of the association being that the simultaneous despatch with these copies of specimens of the Bāburī-khat̤t̤ points to its use in the manuscripts, and at least in Hind-āl’s case, to help given for reading novel forms in their text. The above are the only instances now found in the Bābur-nāma of mention of the script.
The little we have met with—we have made no search—about the character of the script comes from the Abūshqa, s.n. sīghnāq, in the following entry:—
Sīghnāq ber nū‘ah khat̤t̤ der Chaghatāīda khat̤t̤ Bāburī u ghairī kibī ki Bābur Mīrzā ash‘ār’nda kīlūr bait
Khūblār khat̤t̤ī naṣīb’ng būlmāsā Bābur nī tāng?
Bāburī khat̤t̤ī aīmās dūr khat̤t̤ sīghnāqī mū dūr?[2836]
The old Osmanli-Turkish prose part of this appears to mean:—“Sīghnāq is a sort of hand-writing, in Chaghatāī the Bāburī-khat̤t̤ and others resembling it, as appears in Bābur Mīrzā’s poems. Couplet”:—
Without knowing the context of the couplet I make no attempt to translate it because its words khat̤t̤ or khaṭ and
sīghnāq lend themselves to the kind of pun (īhām) “which consists in the employment of a word or phrase having more than one appropriate meaning, whereby the reader is often left in doubt as to the real significance of the passage.”[2837] The rest of the rubā‘ī may be given [together with the six other quotations of Bābur’s verse now known only through the Abūshqa], in early Taẕkirātu ‘sh-shu‘āra of date earlier than 967 AH.
The root of the word sīghnāq will be sīq, pressed together, crowded, included, etc.; taking with this notion of compression, the explanations feine Schrift of Shaikh Effendi (Kunos) and Vambéry’s pétite écriture, the Sīghnāqī and Bāburī Scripts are allowed to have been what that of the Rāmpūr MS. is, a small, compact, elegant hand-writing.—A town in the Caucasus named Sīghnākh, “située à peu près à 800 mètres d’altitude, commença par être une forteresse et un lieu de refuge, car telle est la signification de son nom tartare.”[2838] Sīghnāqī is given by de Courteille (Dict. p. 368) as meaning a place of refuge or shelter.