The monograph is recommended for publication by the Academic Council of the Center for Oriental Manuscripts named after Beruni (Minutes No. 9 dated September 30, 2015). The monograph is being published as part of the project “The History of Central Asia in Manuscripts”, carried out by the International Institute of Central Asian Studies and the Center for Oriental Manuscripts named after Abu Rayhan al-Beruni at the Tashkent State Institute of Oriental Studies. This work was carried out as part of the fundamental grant FA-F1-GO27: Studying the written heritage of the peoples of Central Asia: source study and textual research (based on the fund of the Institute of Law, Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Uzbekistan). The book contains the scientific and critical text of Agahi’s work “Zubdat al-Tavarikh” (Cream of Chronicles), written in the 19th century in Central Asian Turki. The work sets out the history of the rule of Rahim Kuli Khan (1842–1846) from the Kungrad dynasty. The book is intended for historians, orientalists and Turkologists, students and undergraduates of universities, as well as for specialists interested in the history of Central Asia.

This publication has been prepared within the framework of a long-term program launched by the Abu Rayhan Biruni Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan in 2007. The main purpose of the program is to facilitate textual research with a special emphasis on editing and publishing manuscript works (in their original language and script) relating the history of the Central Asia in the XVII – early XX centuries. The present work is the first of this series.

The monograph is a complete publication of results of the long-term excavations at the burial cultic site of the late Bronze Age in pre-historical North Bactria. The catalogued report (506 objects) on the necropolis dated to the late 2nd millennium BCE and related to the ancient agricultural Sapalli culture – Buston VI – is introduced into the scientific operation. The database of quantitative and qualitative indices of criteria, on the base of which such ritual groups as inhumation, cremation, symbolic tombs and traces of ritual actions have been revealed, is published for the first time. Objects of burial and non-burial purpose are given in the summary tables, graphical pictures and photographs. The publication is directed to archaeologists, historians, ethnographers, students of local history, and students of the faculty of history.

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Present catalogue includes 748 handwritten documents currently held in the Samarkand Museum of the History of Culture and Art of the Peoples of Uzbekistan. It represents the results of a collaborative project between the Samarkand Museum, International Institute for Central-Asian Studies, Martin-Luther University in Halle (Germany), and the Abu Ryahan al-Biruni Institute for Oriental Studies in Tashkent. The project was initiated in May 2009 and substantially funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung from Germany.