File:Household anthology of the Ordubadi family, authored by Mohammad Mo'in Ordubadi in 1697 (Tehran University MS 2591 folios 3 verso and 4 recto).jpg

English: Tehran University MS 2591 anthology. The 1697 preface introduces Muhammad Muʿin Urdubadi as patron and author of the anthology who together with his anonymous scribe drew from documents, letters, poems, and essays collected in the Urdubadi family library. Official chancery letters and decrees written by Muhammad Muʿin's grandfather Hatim Beg, Grand Vizier (1591–1610), and father Mirza Talib Khan (1629–34), a royal secretary (majlis nivis) in the service of Shah Abbas I, and his grandson, Shah Safi (r. 1629–42), are collected alongside form letters requesting (talab) an astrolabe, sheets of paper, a pot of ink, a jug of wine, prayer beads, and a pair of eyeglasses. What distinguishes the Urdubadi household anthology is that letters requesting everyday accessories are assembled with Hatim Beg's and his son Mirza Talib Khan's collected copies (savad) of diplomatic letters from the sixteenth century. Included in their household archives are letters sent by Safavi shahs to Mughal, Uzbek, and Ottoman rulers. Father and son must have used these letters to fashion their own.

There is much material relating to the chancery profession in this household anthology from the second half of the seventeenth century as well. Assembled during Muhammad Muʿin's lifetime, such documents display habits of collecting and writing. In the case of the Urdubadi household, what one wrote as a professional court secretary was the intellectual property of the family; lines demarcating work and family, even for a functionary of the imperial court, were considered permeable. The Urdubadi anthology is a family archive that provides important clues as to what would have been included in Safavid “state” archives.

As a family archive of bureaucrats and literati, the Urdubadi anthology assembles distinct objects that were written, read, and studied by male and female kin. To learn the epistolary practices of chancery correspondences, those holding bureaucratic posts used manuals on composition and copies of diplomatic letters. Poems composed by family members—including by one remarkable widow—are gathered together with endowment deeds and diplomatic letters that register collective household ownership; professional and personal property figure as part of a larger corpus from which this anthology was bound into a manuscript, ensuring the preservation of material recorded on single sheets of paper. And, like other archives, the Urdubadi anthology marks time, divulging traces from past moments of collecting and disclosing the logic of its own assembly.