Chapter 1 sought to establish a Samanid context and an early to mid-tenth- century date for Naṣīḥat al-mulūk's first composition. This chapter addresses its possible location within the Samanid domains. After brief preliminary comments regarding the major regions subsumed within the Samanid polity, Transoxiana, Khurasan and Tukharistan, the chapter examines the cultural and linguistic evidence of the text, offers an analysis of the locations named in the text, and presents arguments for its provenance from, first and probably, Balkh, and, secondly and possibly, Samarqand.

As indicated in Chapter 1, the Samanid amirate had its beginnings in Transoxiana or, in the terminology of the Arabic sources of the early centuries, Mā warāʿ al-nahr. The designation connoted the Muslim regions beyond the River Oxus, and its usage evolved, as Étienne de la Vaissière has observed, in such a way that it came to correspond largely with the region known to Xuanzang (d. 664), the Chinese Buddhist monk who travelled overland to Buddhist sites in India and along the Silk Road between 629 and 645 and visited the region's monasteries and holy sites in 630, as Sogdia. The major Transoxianan cities to which members of the family had first been appointed by al-Ma ʿmūn as governors, especially Bukhara, Samarqand and to a lesser extent Farghana, remained the principal bases of the Samanids’ power. Ismāʿīl's decision to locate his court and capital in Bukhara ensured the continuing centrality of that region in the Samanid polity and its orientation towards the frontier, a strategic location that brought with it the responsibility for defending and maintaining the borders as well as the economic advantages of a site of convergence for a network of routes involved in an active overland trade.

Bukhara and Samarqand developed distinctive urban characters and their rulers and inhabitants, as observed in Chapter 1, not infrequently vied with one another for power and status. Both cities emerged in the Samanid era as centres for intellectual activity and religious scholarship. At an unknown date, Bukhara, its name possibly derived from the term applied to a Buddhist monastery, vihāra, acquired the epithet ‘the noble’ (sharīf) due to its sustained prominence in the Islamic sciences.