Tarikh-i Bayhaqi is believed to have consisted of thirty books, of which only six books remain. The main topic of the remaining books is the reign of
Mas'ud I, sultan of the
Ghaznavid Empire. In addition to reporting political events, the work reports on geographical places and on the history of
Persian literature by mentioning notable writers and poets of the time. K. Allin Luther compared the
epistemology of Bayhaqi's
History to later
Seljuq historians and advises a
rhetorical approach to the work. Marilyn Waldman also recommends a rhetorical approach through
speech act theory, yet does not give a comprehensive breakdown of the text. Julie Scott Meisami also points to the analytical nature of the work and places Bayhaqi among the historians of the
Islamic renaissance. Owing to his distinctive approach in the narration of historical accounts, the precision of Bayhaqi's work was unprecedented.
Tarikh-e Bayhaqi is well known for its rich use of language. Several features of the work has transformed it into literary prose, including the use of
neologisms, novel word combinations and
syntaxes, archaic words,
imagery,
Quranic verses and
Hadith,
Persian and
Arabic poems, and various types of
parallelism and
repetition (including vowels, words, and syntaxes). The work has also been compared to a
historical novel. ==See also==