On several occasions, when my Persian coaster ventured into the Indian Ocean and was battered by too heavy seas, and I was murmuring the verse of Hafiz:– Dr. L. D. Barnett, like the expert pilot he is, came to the rescue. As a token of gratitude I wish him to accept my translation of the chapter on India extracted from the unpublished part of Gardīzī′s historical work.

With few surviving chronicles and the loss of almost all the state archives, historians of the later Ṣafavid period have to rely to a disproportionate degree on the accounts of European travellers. Fortunately some of these, such as Chardin, Tavernier and Olearius, have left pre-eminent examples of the genre, but even so, few attempts have been made to explore their preceonceptions, prejudices or the extent of their understanding of Persian society. Almost all travelled for a well-defined purpose, as members of diplomatic missions, military advisers, missionaries or merchants, and their attitudes and the kind of information they recorded naturally were determined by these preoccupations. They did not necessarily ask the kind of questions that interest historians today and rarely reached levels of Persian cultural and intellectual life beyond the Court and provincial officialdom.

Although the ratio between Egyptian gold coins (dinars) and those of silver (dirhams) is known to have fluctuated throughout the history of Islamic Egypt, no attempt has been made to explain the principles underlying the rate of exchange. Any such research is handicapped from the start by a deplorable failure on the part of numismatists to provide their fellow-historians with details concerning the alloys of various Egyptian coins. This drawback deprives us of any means of counterchecking the textual evidence. Nevertheless, it is the belief of the present writer that the material contained in written sources relating to the period of the Ayyūbids (A.H. 569–648/A.D. 1174–1250), allows us to ascertain certain facts concerning the contemporary exchange pattern. The analysis of the nature of that pattern shows clearly that the exchange rate of the gold and silver issues of the BaḥrI Mamlūks (A.H. 648–784/A.D. 1250– 1390), which remained fixed at 1: 20, 1: 25, and 1: 28 1/2, had its roots in the system of the Ayyūbids.

An important passage which has often been treated, but not so far satisfactorily, is found on page 186 of the Iranian text of the Bundahišn, lines 11–12,

that is, but dēv ān kē-š pat Hindūkān paristēnd api-š vaχš pat ān butīhā mēhmān <i > čēegōn bōδˇāsaf paristēt: “the demon But is that which they worship in India and in his images a spirit is resident which is worshipped as Bōδāsaf.”

FOR years now the question of orthography in the South African Bantu languages has kept the authorities busy. It flares up periodically in different parts of the country, and local committees are called from time to time to deal with the conflagration.

In the past, unfortunately, these committees have too often concerned themselves with the problems of one language only, and apparently ignored both the effect their decisions would have on literature exchange and the attempts of previous committees to solve similar problems in related languages. Thus we have Zulu and Xhosa, very closely related languages, with considerable orthographical differences, while North Sotho and Tswana now differ from each other and from South Sotho, which (perhaps wisely) has set its face against orthographic change since 1906.

Until Dr. Jacob Nhlapo launched his campaign for Southern Bantu linguistic unity, few people had seriously considered the possibility of an orthographic system which would cover both the Nguni and Sotho groups, the feeling being that such unity lay in the realms of wishful thinking in view of the virtual impossibility of achieving unity within the groups.

The present article is an attempt to combine the experience of past efforts into a system that would actually be applicable to these two language groups. The acceptance of such a system would naturally involve great sacrifices of tradition and prestige from both parties. This aspect is not to be ignored, but at the same time can have little connection with the scientific elaboration of an alphabet. Consequently the argument “The Sotho (or the Nguni) would never accept such a solution” must be relegated to the sphere of practical politics.

Contemporary accounts of the events which led up to the Afghan conquest of Persia in 1722 ascribe some importance to the role played by the Georgians in this catastrophe. The well-known narrative of Jonas Hanway and reports of Catholic missionaries, European travellers, and Consular agents, together with the published documents from Russian archives, indicate that the deterioration of relations between the Shah and the King of K'art'li was among the factors which assisted Mīr Maḥmūd's enterprise. In the present brief study, the archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the Quai d'Orsay, as well as Georgian sources, have been drawn on to sketch the history of Georgian relations with the government of Shah Sulṭān Ḥusayn, and follow up some suggestive indications contained in Professor Minorsky's own writings.

Since the publication in the West last century of a major Sunnī work on the Islamic sects, those interested in the early firaq have found themselves dependent on the heresiographical tradition. Islamicists have had little choice in the matter; most writing and thinking produced in circles later deemed heterodox has not been preserved, and to a large extent is available only through the mediation of the heresiographers. While material of other sorts has not gone unstudied, it has for the most part been the heresiographers who have shaped the way we look at early Islamic sectarianism.

This marriage of modern scholarship and medieval heresiography is, however, a distinctly uncomfortable one. As indispensable as the firaq material may be, questions about its reliability persist. The difficulties which characterize this literature are well known, and hardly need to be rehearsed here: it is late, highly schematic, and frequently hostile to the doctrines and groups which it describes. To these might be added one other problem noted less frequently: most of the books in general academic circulation have passed through Ash'arite and/or Mu‘tazilite hands. If, as we shall see, the tradition is not entirely synoptic, there are at least powerful forces at work which militate against a diversity of perspectives.

The tercentenary year of the second siege of Vienna by the Turks has seen the first-fruits of a long-planned venture, the publication in full of the Ottoman documents preserved in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv. This first part presents, in facsimile and with full transcription and translation, the texts of 36 documents issued in the name of Süleymān the Magnificent (1520–66), one being addressed to Charles V as ‘King of Spain’, 28 to Ferdinand I as ‘King of Austria’ and later as Emperor, and seven to Ferdinand's son and successor, the Emperor Maximilian. The earliest, a remarkably splendid fragment, is the beginning of a fetḥnāme, probably sent from Baghdad in December 1534 to report victories in Persia to Ferdinand as being (ostensibly) a friendly neighbour after the conclusion of peace the previous year; nos. 2–8 relate to negotiations during the war-years 1541–7; nos. 9–15, mainly recriminations over frontier skirmishes but with another fine fetḥnāme (no. 11) of 1549, belong to the brief period of uneasy peace; nos. 16–27 concern peace-feelers and embassies during the war-years 1551–62, no. 25 being the 'ahdnāme; a main topic of the remainder is the tribute, while no. 32 is the renewal of the 'ahdnāme of 1562 in favour of the new emperor Maximilian.

This article examines the attitudes of the Quranic mushrikūn to the resurrection and the afterlife, focusing on those who doubted or denied the reality of both. The first part of the article argues that the doubters and deniers had grown up in a monotheist environment familiar with both concepts and that it was from within the monotheist tradition that they rejected them. The second part (published in a forthcoming issue of BSOAS) relates their thought to intellectual currents in Arabia and the Near East in general, arguing that the role of their pagan heritage in their denial is less direct than normally assumed. It is also noted that mutakallims such as Abū ʿĪsā al-Warrāq and al-Māturīdī anticipated the main conclusions reached in this paper.

This article examines a group of ten Indonesian inscriptions citing a range of gāthās, mantras and dhāraṇīs. The texts, contextualized and in some cases read and identified for the first time, underline the pan-Asian character of Buddhism and the integral place the Indonesian archipelago once held in the ancient Buddhist world. The identification of the sources of several of these texts in known Sanskrit scriptures raises the question whether some of these texts, none of which survives as such in the archipelago, were once transmitted there in manuscript form.

THE scholarly article entitled ‘Muslim institutions of learning in eleventhcentury Baghdad’ by Dr. George Makdisi deserves careful study. It is much more than a mosaic of notices of institutions and men of learning; it has a thesis running through its course, which seeks to elucidate the character of the madrasah in general and that founded by Niẓām al-Mulk in Baghdad in particular.

There exists a considerable body of scholarly literature on the contributions of the Jesuit missionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the knowledge of geography in China. Much of this literature is centred around the world maps of Matteo Ricci. Studies have been made on the different editions of these maps, on the sources of information (both European and Chinese) that Ricci must have used, on the reception by the Chinese literati of Ricci's time of the maps and the world-view represented by them, and on the possible influence of Renaissance cartography on Chinese map-making. Writers differ on the importance and utility of these maps and their influence.

My article written some twenty years ago had a twofold purpose: to insist on the importance of a systematic study of the toponymy of Persia and, by way of example, to examine the Mongolian stratum of placenames in the southernmost area of the Persian province of Azarbayjan.

Much of what I said in the first part of the original draft has happily become superfluous in view of the appearance of a very welcome series of volumes which, in the years 1328–32/1949–53, was published by the Persian Army Survey, under the title of Farhang-i joghrāfiyāyi-yī Irān. The production of this series is chiefly due to the enlightened endeavours of the former chief of the Survey, General Hosayn ‘Ali Razmārā (brother of the assassinated premier).

The challenge of establishing the chronology of the early Zhou dynasty, especially the date of the Zhou Conquest of Shang, periodically arouses the intense interest of scholars. Down the centuries interest in the general problem has revived whenever advances in calendrical, astronomical, or textual knowledge seemed to offer the promise of a breakthrough. Extraordinary efforts have repeatedly been brought to bear, but until quite recently little progress was achieved in verifying benchmarks prior to 841 B.C., a date already regarded as secure in the time of Sima Qian toward the end of the second century B.C.

THAT there existed an Arabic translation of the commentary of Themistius on the De Anima of Aristotle has long been known through the references made to it in the works of Ibn Rushd.1 The commentary itself is mentioned by Ibn al-Nadīm in the Fihrist.2 In his note on the De Anima he says: ‘ Themistius wrote a commentary on the whole of this work. He dealt with the first section in two sections, the second in two, and the third in three ’—a division which corresponds to that of the Greek text as we have it. Unfortunately, on the subject of the translation, Ibn al-Nadim's article is not without ambiguity. According to it, Hunain ibn Ishāq translated the entire De Anima into Syriac, while his son, Ishāq, translated the greater part of it into Arabic, and then made a second and complete translation. Ibn al-Nadīm proceeds to quote Ishāq himself as saying: ‘ I translated this work into Arabic from a defective manuscript. Then, after thirty years, I found an extremely good manuscript with which I collated my first version’. The quotation ends with the words: ‘ and it is the commentary of Themistius ’.

The Palaungs, called by themselves Ta-ang, are an ethnic group speaking a language of Northern Mon-Khmer type, distributed widely in the Shan State of Burma and the adjacent border regions of Yunnan, and having its greatest concentration in the former state of Tawngpeng in the northwestern part of the Shan State, where Palaungs are a majority in the population. Occupied chiefly in growing and trading in tea, they are at the same time the most prosperous of the minor hill races of Burma and the only one to have adopted Buddhism. Their language, which is not written—Shan being used as a written language by educated Palaungs—shows the influence of both Shan and Burmese; Shan loans are particularly frequent in the formal language of songs. A grammar and dictionary were published by Mrs. Leslie Milne in 1921 and 1931 respectively.

With the accession of Tegüder, alias Ahmad, on the death of his brother Abaqa in 681/1282, the Īlkhānate was for the first time ruled by a Muslim. Consequently the possibility appeared of the establishment of peaceful relations with the rival Mamlūk sultanate under al-Manṣūr Qalāwūn (regn. 678–89/1279–90). Two successive embassies were in fact sent to the sultan during Ahmad's short reign, and accounts of these as seen in Mamlūk court circles are extant in the writings of two contemporaries. The first appears in the largely unpublished biography of Qalāwūn, al-Fadl al-ma'thūr min sīrat al-Malik al-Mansūr by Shāf‚’ b. ‘Alī (649–730/1252–1330), and the second in the published but incomplete biography, Tashrīf al-ayyām wa'l-‘usūr fi sīrat al-Malik al-Mansūr by the maternal uncle of Shāfi'b. ‘Alī, Muhyī al-Dīn Ibn ‘Abd al-Zāhir (620–92/1223–92). Both writers served in the chancery of the sultan in Cairo.

From early times China was surrounded by states of lower culture, and on the whole, of lesser military power, which the Chinese regarded as protectorates or tributaries. As early as the Chou dynasty, interpreters were appointed to deal with envoys bringing tribute or declarations of loyalty. The Chou interpreters were called chi , hsiang , ti t'i , or i , and took charge of peoples from the east, south, west, and north respectively. The Ch'in dynasty bureaux of tributary affairs were the tien k'o and tien shu kuo , which the Han later replaced by the Ta Hung Lu under which there were interpreters (i kuan ). In the Sui, T'ang, and Sung dynasties tributary affairs were handled by the Ssŭ Fang Kuan (). In the Ming dynasty the Ssŭ I Kuan was founded to translate foreign diplomatic documents, and was continued in the Ch'ing with a change of name ( to ) and accompanied by the Hui T'ung Kuan, which handled oral interpreting.

In recent years, the field of Buddhist studies has witnessed renewed interest in the study of the Parthian An Shigao (active since 148 A.D., during the Later Han Dynasty), the earliest translator of Buddhist scriptures into Chinese.

One of the most controversial aspects of Hittite phonology is the question of the significance, if any, of the so-called plene-writing of vowels. Explanations for this practice have been sought in a variety of directions. Some have seen in it the continuation of a tradition inherited from predecessors of the Hittite cuneiform syllabary with perhaps little relevance to the facts of the Hittite language. Others have been more confident in seeing in it a method of representing some real linguistic feature, such as vowel length, while inconsistencies or apparent inconsistencies in its use have led others to the conclusion that it has often no functional significance at all. No full-scale investigation of the phenomenon covering the entire Hittite corpus has yet been carried out, nor is such an attempt practicable here. The present paper has the restricted aim of investigating one particular phenomenon, the occurrence of plene-writing in different syllables in different inflexional forms of the same words, and the material drawn upon is chiefly Old and Middle Hittite, since it seems likely that certain patterns of variation in the use of plene-writing were quite early disturbed by analogical levelling within paradigms, or eliminated by the abandonment of plene-writing in the words in question; nevertheless, I believe that the oldest texts in particular still preserve enough evidence for these patterns to be discernible and that the reasons for them are intelligible in historical terms.