The building of the great mosque at Samarkand in 1396 is shown here. This picture comes from a manuscript of the Zafarnama or The Book of Victo­ry which is the biography of Timur 0336?-1405), known to the English world as Tamerlane. The illustrations are believed to be the work of the re­nowned painter Bihzad. A descendant of Genghis Khan, Tamerlane proclaimed himself lord of Turkestan in 1370 and built his palace at Samarkand. The Zafarnama is in the John Work Garrett Library which, along with the George Peabody Library, is part of the Special Collections Department of the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The Garrett Library has a fine collection of nearly 30,000 rare books in the fields of 16th- and 17th-century English literature, natural history, Renaissance architecture, voyage and exploration literature, maps, and colonial imprints.