Heavenly Rose Garden

This book offers a fascinating portrait of the Caucasus at the dawn of the modern era. Written in Persian and completed in 1845, it offered the first look at the region by a native son, Abbas Qoli Aqa Bakikhanov. It remains the only dedicated history of Shirvan and Daghestan to this day and also contains a great deal of interesting information about the Caucasus in general during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bakikhanov demonstrates that despite differences in language, religion, and ethnicity, all the peoples of the Caucasus travelled a similar historical road and, to some extent, shared an identity distinct from the Ottoman Turks and Persians of adjacent, larger states. Translated for the first time into English by two eminent historians, "The Heavenly Rose Garden is a mine of information for scholars studying the region and an engrossing read for anyone else. The book also includes a great deal of poetry in Persian and English.