Achmed Abdullah (1881-1945), a pseudonym of Alexander Nicholayevitch Romanoff, was a Russian-born writer best known for his pulp stories of crime, mystery and adventure and screenplays, including the Academy-award nominated films Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness and The Lives of a Bengal Lancer. Lute and Scimitar describes itself as "poems and ballads of Central Asia translated out of the Afghan, the Persian, the Turkoman, the Tarantchi, the Bokharan, the Balochi, and the Tartar tongues, together with an introduction and historical and philological annotations."