Princess Zeb-un-Nissa was born on February 15 in the year 1638 in what is now Daulatabad, India. She was born to Prince Muhi-ud-Din, who would go on to become Emperor Aurangzeb, and his first wife and chief consort, Dilras Banu Begum, a princess from the Safavid Dynasty, which at the time ruled Iran. Growing up, she was considered her father’s favorite daughter and she received the highest quality education available by a woman of the court. Zeb-un-Nissa memorized Al-Quran in just three years and became a Hafiza, or guardian of Al-Quran at 7 years old. She went on to study the sciences under Mohammad Saeed Ashraf Mazandarani, a learned scholar in philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy. Her education and breadth of knowledge meant that her father turned to her to discuss political affairs when he became emperor. In addition to advising her father, she maintained an extensive library and wrote poems under a pen name, Makhfi or The Hidden One. Later in life though, her relationship with her father spoiled, for unconfirmed reasons, although many hypotheses exist, from his disdain after discovering she was a poet to an alleged affair with a governor. Regardless of the reason, Emperor Aurangzeb imprisoned his daughter for twenty years in Salimgarh, where she eventually passed away in 1702 at the age of 64. In 1724, twenty two years after her death, her writings and poems were collected under the name Diwan-i-Makhfi, which translates to the Book of the Hidden One. The collection would go on to be published as books, first in India in 1929 and again in Tehran in 2001.