The standing army of the Khanat is stated to consist of 40,000 horsemen, but can be raised to 60,000. Of these troops Bokhara and Karshi are said to supply the greater proportion; the former are especially renowned for their bravery. Such is the account of their numbers current in Bokhara, but I have found it exaggerated; because the Emir, in his campaign against Khokand, where his army never exceeded 30,000 men, was forced to maintain an auxiliary force at a heavy expense--an expense which the stingy Mozaffar-ed-din never would have incurred, if the foregoing computation had been correct. The pay, only made in time of war, consists of 20 Tenghe (about 11_s_. 2_d_.) monthly, with which the horseman has to keep himself and horse. In addition to this, half the booty made belongs to the soldiery. It is really singular that, with the great population subject to him, the prince sets no greater native force on foot; singular, also, that he takes no auxiliaries from the 50,000 Ersari who are tributary to him, but prefers applying to the Tekke, or even taking Sariks into his service, at a yearly expense of 4,000 Tilla. _Short Outline of the History of Bokhara._ Efrasiab, the great Turani warrior, and one of the greatest heroes of ancient Iran, is regarded as the founder of Bokhara. Extravagant fables form the basis of its earlier history. Of the accounts which they embody, we only accept the following fact, that the incursions of the Turkish hordes were from the oldest times the terror of those districts whose Persian population had separated themselves from their brethren in Iran so early as the epoch of the Pishdadian. The first thread of real history, properly so called, only begins at the epoch of the occupation by {377} the Arabs; and we can only regret that these daring adventurers have not transmitted to us more notices than those which we find scattered in the pages of Tarikhi Taberi and some other Arabian authorities. Islam did not so easily as in other countries strike its roots in Mavera-ül Nehr (the land between the Oxus and the Jaxartes), and the Arabs found, on their return to the different cities after an absence of any duration, that the work of proselytism had ever to be begun afresh. Up to the time of its conquest by Djenghis Khan (1225), Bokhara and Samarcand, as well as the city, at that time considerable, of Merv (Mervi Shah Djihan or Merv, 'king of the world'), Karshi (Nakhsheb), and Belkh (Um-ül Bilad, 'mother of cities'), were regarded as belonging to Persia, although the government of Khorasan, as it was then called, was the subject of an extraordinary firman of investiture from Bagdad. On the invasion of the Mongols, the Persian element was entirely supplanted, the Özbegs everywhere seized the reins of government, and Timour, the lame conqueror from Shehri Sebz (green city), was satisfied with nothing less than making Samarcand the capital of all Asia. The design