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The article examines the patronage, composition and reception of Arabic historiography "al-Yamini," written in the early eleventh century by Abu Nasr Utbi to commemorate the deeds of the Gaznavid Sultan Mahmud. The work survives in many manuscripts, and was translated into Persian in the early 13th-century and again in India in the 19th-century, and also into Ottoman Turkish. According to Utbi, he composed the work in Arabic rather than Persian so that the Gaznavids' fame would become known in Iraq.