Francesca Bray has recently pointed to the neglected role of women in the history of Chinese technology. This article takes up one example, and shows that the work of one woman inventor, whose personal name is unknown but whose family name was Liu, may be securely dated to between 712 and 724. From later descriptions it is also possible to discern that her invention (or just possibly the invention of another craftsperson, which she was able to introduce to court circles) consisted of the bringing together of two carefully carved woodblocks to create a resist for dyeing cloth. Ths in turn suggests that she may well have been familiear with woodblock printing, an invention for which there are also other forms of indirect evidence at about the same time. Since her family was relatively prominent, it may in future be possible to find about more about this inventor from genealogical materials.

The port of Cambay in Gujarat was formerly one of the premier ports of western India and home to a rich and vibrant tradition of Islamic architecture and artistic patronage. This article presents a previously unpublished structure from Cambay, the Kothī gateway. Though commonly believed to have been constructed as part of the English factory at Cambay, the article demonstrates through stylistic analysis that the Kothī gateway in fact predates the factory by several centuries and is a neglected Tughluq structure, probably dating to the 1330s A.D.. The article also suggests that the gateway is in fact a rare, if not unique, surviving example of the secular architecture of fourteenth-century Cambay so praised by contemporary travellers. The Kothī gateway therefore represents a valuable addition to our list of known Islamic structures at the port of Cambay, and takes its place among the growing number of Tughluq structures identified in India. The article also provides an opportunity to publish a number of other structures, architectural fragments and carvings from Cambay that relate to the present gateway.

This paper looks at the professional alternatives that Buddhism offered to women by analysing the important role played by a female master in the as yet little studied Dhūta movement, a form of ‘heretical’ Chan Buddhism that flourished during the final years of the Jin dynasty and afterwards in the Yuan dynasty. By examining the descriptions of female master Jizhao and male master Puguang, as seen in epitaphs composed by officers-literati and preserved in a Bejing gazetteer dating back to the mid-fourteenth century, this paper aims to highlight some features of the Dhūtaists' discourse of femininity and also to point out the differences vis-à-vis orthodox Chan constructs, in order finally to evaluate whether such a discourse could have an influence on the general definitions and content of gender roles.

Berber in the Sahara and southern Morocco, and several West African languages including Soninké, Mandinka and Songhay, all refer to the five Islamic daily prayers using terms not derived from their usual Arabic names, and showing striking mutual similarities. The motivation behind these names has not hitherto been explained. An examination of Islamic sources reveals that many correspond to terms attested within Arabic from an early period but which have passed out of use elsewhere. Others, with a more limited distribution, reflect transfer from a time-keeping system widely attested among Berber-speaking oases of the northern Sahara. These results demonstrate that the variant prayer terminologies attested in the ḥadith reflect popular usages that were still commonplace at the time when North Africa was conquered, and underscore the conservatism of non-Arabic Islamic religious terminology in and around the Sahara.

Despite the admonitions of responsible scholars, writers of books on Buddhism still tend to assume that a reasonably historical account of the life and personal teachings of Śākyamuni Buddha may be extracted from the earliest available canonical accounts. This quest of the historical Buddha began as a Western nineteenth-century interest, imitating both in its pre-suppositions and its methods of inquiry the parallel quest of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. The general principle of operation is set forth succinctly by Hermann Oldenberg in his impressive work, Buddha, sein Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde, Berlin, 1881, 92:

‘Abstrahiren wir nun von den Traditionen der bezeichneten Kategorien, welche sämmtlich unhistorisch oder doch des unhistorischen Characters verdachtig sind, so behalten wir als festen Kern der Erzählungen von Buddha eine Reihe positiver Thatsaohen iibrig, die wir als einen zwar sehr bescheidenen, aber vollkommen gesicherten Besitz für die Geschichte in Anspruch nehmen dürfen’.

Yang Ju is one of the Chinese philosophers of whom we know least. In the fourth century B. C. his doctrines and those of Mohtzyy were the two most successful rivals of Confucianism.1 In the literature of the next century his school is rarely mentioned, perhaps because it had been absorbed into Taoism.2 The most familiar summary of his teaching is that of Mencius:

Modern Gujrātī has three phonemes in the group of voiced cerebrals: viz. the unaspirated stop ḍ, the unaspirated tapped ṛ, and the aspirated stop ḍh, there being no corresponding aspirated tapped in the standard language. In Gujrātī script ḍ and ṛ are written with the same symbol, while ḍh has a different symbol.