In the seventies and early eighties of the eighteenth century the Secret Committee had shown, as we have seen, an increasing tendency to become subservient to the Ministry, and in consequence the Directors had begun to keep a careful watch on the Committee's activities. Although, in April, 1783, to please Fox they nominated the “Chairs”, Sir Henry Fletcher and Nathaniel Smith, to be the Secret Committee, with authority to conduct the Company's naval and military affairs and to consult with the Ministry, they at the same time cautiously enjoined that such powers should be valid for only one month. These powers were grudgingly renewed monthly until November, when Fox, with the approval of Fletcher, who was one of his best friends and firmest political supporters, produced his India Bills, which sought to destroy the Company's existing home government. That Fletcher had seen and yet silently acquiesced in these revolutíonary Bills was deemed by the majority of the Directors to be a betrayal of his trust as chairman, and they promptly sacked him. So great was the blow to their confidence in the “Chairs” that subsequent to the overthrow of the Coalition in late December they forbade the new Chairmen privately to interview the Ministers unless accompanied by Laurence Sulivan, the senior Director and trusted representative of the Indian interest, the strongest party in the Court.

Among the thousands of Jaina images found throughout India, those from Mathura produced during the Kuṣāṇa period are unique, for they alone contain representations of unclothed Jaina ascetics holding a single small piece of cloth in such a way as to cover their nudity. These curious figures cannot be identified with monks of the present-day Jaina sects of the Digambaras, who practise total nudity, or of the Śvetāmbaras, who wear two long pieces of unstitched white cloth wrapped around their bodies and occasionally a white blanket over their left shoulders. The veteran art-historian, the late Dr. U. P. Shah, in Aspects of Jaina art and architecture briefly mentions these figures, noting that ‘nowhere in the above references from Śvetāmbara as well as Digambara texts do we come across a reference to those figures on the siṃhāsanaof a Jina which we find in a number of sculptures of the Kuṣāṇa period from the Kaṅkāli Tīlā.’ Subsequently, in Jaina-Rūpa-Maṇḍano, he calls these figures ardhaphālakas (monks with partial covering) and speculates that these figures might be Yāpanīya monks, another Jaina sect that is now extinct, and states that these figures need further investigation. In addition to Shah, N. P. Joshi has also discussed these ardhaphālaka images. He states that ‘all the monks seen in the bas-reliefs, except one known to me, seem to belong to the Ardhaphālaka sect. … Besides the monks seen in the bas-reliefs, those hovering in the air (vidyā cāraṇas) or seen on some of the śilāpaṭṭāsare all Ardhaphālakas. This suggests that during the pre-Christian and early Christian centuries a large number of Jainas at Mathura followed this sect’.

The first traveller who brought copies of Pahlavi inscriptions to Europe was Garsten Niebuhr. On 2 March 1765, he arrived at Shīrāz, and on 13 March he went to Persepolis. In its surroundings he sojourned till 7 April, almost every day visiting its ruins and the monuments of Naqš-i Raj ab and Naqš-i Rustam, all of which he describes very minutely (Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und andern umliegenden Ländern, 11, Copenhagen, 1778, 121–63). In the ruins of Persepolis he found and copied the Old Persian inscriptions on which Grotefend, in 1802, based the first decipherment of the Persian cuneiform script. At Naqš-i Rajab he copied three short inscriptions, each in two Pahlavi versions and a Greek translation, of the Sasanian kings Ardashir I, Shapur I, and Hornmd; and at Naqš-i Rustam the left corner, the tails of 23 very long lines, of a Pahlavi inscription which he could not identify at all. The short inscriptions, together with two kindred inscriptions of Shapur II and Shapur III at Tāq-i Bostān, were deciphered by Silvestre de Sacy (Mémoires sur diverses antiquités de la Perse, Paris, 1793), who thus initiated the Pahlavi palaeography. Carsten Niebuhr and Silvestre de Sacy have a claim to be called the fathers of this branch of Oriental research.

Bishop caldwell, the founder of the comparative study of the Dravidian languages, was interested not only in the relationship of those languages among themselves, but also in the question of their connection with other families of languages outside India. His investigations in this direction led him to believe that the Dravidian languages are connected with what he called the “Scythian” family of languages. By the term “Scẏthian” Caldwell referred mainly to the Ural-Altaic languages, though occasionally using the word in a rather wider sense than that. Within the “Scythian” family he held that it was possible to define the position of Dravidian even more closely, by attaching it to the Finno-ugrian group in particular. The evidence which Caldwell offered in support of this theory consisted partly of grammatical features which he held to be common to the languages concerned, and partly of comparisons of vocabulary. The former are to be found scattered through the body of his work, and the latter are collected together in an appendix entitled “Glossarial Affinities”. In presenting this theory Caldwell was quite modest in his claims; he admitted the possibility of being misled by accidental assonances, and claimed rather to have pointed the way to the possibilities of future research than to have demonstrated the relationship with any finality.

Emphasizing the importance of balanced geographical and historical knowledge in the late sixteenth century, Richard Hakluyt remarked: ‘Geographie and Chronologie are the sune and moone, the right eye and left eye of all history.’ In current studies of archaeology and history this emphasis remains apt, for to write a proper account of both artifacts and kings, they must be set geographi- cally in space and chronologically in time. The regions south of the River Yamunā, anciently known as Gopakṣetra, Daśārṇa, and Jejākadeśa (Maps 1 and 2), are rich in antiquarian remains, and have played an important role in the history of India, especially from the Gupta period to the time of the Muslim invasion. Their historical geography, however, has been generally ignored, and scholars have been content to describe the area simply as ‘ Central India’. The purpose of the present essay is to give an introduction to the historical geography of these provinces, and as such it can be taken as a foundation for further studies in local history and archaeology.

After the Islamic conquest, the Greek Orthodox, so-called Melkite ( = Royalist), church fairly early adopted Arabic as its literary language. Their intellectual centres in Syria/Palestine were Jerusalem, along with the monaster ies of Mar Sabas and Mar Chariton in Judea, Edessa and Damascus. A great many Arabic manuscripts stemming from the first millennium, some of them dated, copied at the monastery of Mar Chariton and especially at that of Mar Saba, have been discovered in the monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai, the only monastery that has not been pillaged and set on fire by the bedouin. These manuscripts are of great importance for the history of the Arabic language. Because Christians were less devoted to the ideal of the ‘arabiyya than their Muslim contemporaries, their writings contain a great many devi ations from classical Arabic, thus enabling us to reconstruct early Neo-Arabic, the predecessor of the modern Arabic dialects, and bridge a gap of over one thousand years in the history of the Arabic language.

In a previous article discussing the text entitled al-Lughāt fī'l-Qur'ān attributed to Ibn 'Abbās, mention was made of two manuscripts of Gharīb al-Qur'ān also attributed to Ibn 'Abbās. A recent visit to Istanbul allowed an examination of these works, leading to the discovery that, in fact, these manuscripts contain two additional copies of al-Lughāt fī'l-Qur'ān and that an independent text Gharīb al-Qur'ān attributed to Ibn. 'Abbās does not exist. A proliferation of titles has taken place regarding this text and, most significantly of course, around the figure of Ibn 'Abbās and his role in Qur'ānic lexicography.

In his interesting and provocative book Hindu and Muslim mysticism (Athlone Press, 1960), Professor R. C. Zaehner has discussed at length the part which lie believes Abū Yazīd al-Bistāmī played in introducing Vedāntin ideas into Muslim mysticism. In this paper it is proposed to re-examine some of the crucial texts upon which this theory has been based.