halt to the pursuit. On 13 June, Baqi called on Babur, who was apparently dissatisfied, and, on 20 June 1529, Babur dismissed Baqi (issued rukhsat) along with the army of Awadh that he was commanding. No more is known of Baqi Tashqandi until his mysterious reappearance on a supposed inscription on the Babri Masjid as "Mir Baqi", as reported by the British East India Company's surveyor in 1813. Babri Masjid inscriptions Francis Buchanan (also called Buchanan-Hamilton) did a survey of the Gorakhpur Division in 1813–14 on behalf of the British East India Company. Buchanan's report, never published but available in the British Library archives, states that the Hindus generally attributed destruction of temples "to the furious zeal of Aurangzabe [Aurangzeb]", but the large mosque at Ayodhya (now known as Babri Masjid) was ascertained to have been built by Babur by "an inscription on its walls". Buchanan had the said inscription in Persian copied by a scribe and translated by a Maulvi friend. The translation however showed two inscriptions. The first inscription said that the mosque was constructed by 'Mir Baqi' in the year 935 AH or 923 AH. The second inscription narrated the genealogy of Aurangzeb. The translator had a difficulty with the anagram for the date, because one of the words was missing, which would have resulted in a date of 923 AH rather than 935 AH. These incongruities and mismatches made no impression on Buchanan, who maintained that the mosque was built under the orders of Babur. The Babri Masjid stands at a location believed by Hindus to be the birthplace of Rama. There are no records of a mosque at the site till 1672 and no known association with Babur or Mir Baqi prior to Buchanan's discovery of these inscriptions in the 19th century. The Baburnama does not mention either the mosque or the destruction of a temple. The Ramcharit Manas of Tulsidas (AD 1574) and Ain-i Akbari of Abu'l-Fazl ibn Mubarak (AD 1598) made no mention of a mosque either. In 1611, an English traveller William Finch visited Ayodhya and recorded the "ruins of the Ranichand [Ramachand] castle and houses". He made no mention of a mosque. In 1634, Thomas Herbert described a "pretty old castle of Ranichand [Ramachand]" which he described as an antique monument that was "especially memorable". However, by 1672, the appearance of a mosque at the site can be inferred because Lal