WAS MUHAMMAD AL-SAMARQANDI A POLYGLOT POET?

It was Edgar Blochet who first gave notice of the existence of the verses in four languages, namely Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Mongolian, at the end of a copy of Juvainî's Tarîkh-i Jahân-gushŞ K He ascribed the authorship of these verses to Muhammad b. cUmar b. Hasan b. Mahmüd b. cAbd al-Ghafiîr al-Samarqandî called Muhammad Bakhshi, who copied them in Mardin on 1st Jamâdî, 11, 724 (26 May 1324). Some 34 years later Blochet, while cataloguing the Persian MSS. of the Bib-liotheque Nationale, as a result of closer examination of the colophon, corrected his former reading of cAbd al-Ghafür in cAbd al-cAzîz, and modified his previous remarks, no longer stating that Muhammad al-Samarqandl was the author of these verses, but merely holding him to be the copyist of the verses and the owner of the MS 2. Hambis 3 and Poppe 4 who regarded the Mongolian poem as the composition of Muh. al-Samarqandî, obviously overlooked the later statement of Blochet, which amounted to a tacit withdrawal of the previous one. In a recent article Igor de Rachewiltz having obtained a photocopy of these pages, leaving aside the Arabic and Persian verses, transcribes and translates the Mongolian' section, and in the same article Poppe supplies the transcription and translation of the Turkish parts. The author, although well aware of the second statement of Blochet, whom he quotes in extenso, attributes the authorship of all four poems to Muh. al-Samarqandl. The main merit of this article is, in ray opinion, the fact that the author provides us for the first