Bāburnāma (Chagatai/Persian: بابر نامہ;´, literally: "Book of Babur" or "Letters of Babur"; alternatively known as Tuzk-e Babri) is the name given to the memoirs of Ẓahīr-ud-Dīn Muhammad Bābur (1483–1530), founder of the Mughal Empire and a great-great-great-grandson of Timur.
It is an autobiographical work, written in the Chagatai language, known to Babur as "Turki" (meaning Turkic), the spoken language of the Andijan-Timurids. According to historian Stephen Frederic Dale, Babur's prose is highly Persianized in its sentence structure, morphology, and vocabulary, and also contains many phrases and smaller poems in Persian. During Emperor Akbar's reign, the work was completely translated to Persian by a Mughal courtier, Abdul Rahīm, in AH 998 (1589–90).
Bābur was an educated Timurid and his observations and comments in his memoirs reflect an interest in nature, society, politics and economics. His vivid account of events covers not just his life, but the history and geography of the areas he lived in and their flora and fauna, as well as the people with whom he came into contact.
The Bāburnāma begins with these plain words:
After some background, Bābur describes his fluctuating fortunes as a minor ruler in Central Asia – in which he took and lost Samarkand twice – and his move to Kabul in 1504.