Texts stating in plain words the opinions of ancient Mesopotamian scholars concerning the shape of the universe have proved elusive, and consequently the question of whether they believed the sky to be flat or domed has never been settled. In 1975 Professor Lambert summarized the comments of earlier scholars on this topic and noted that textual support for the concept of a vault of heaven was lacking in cuneiform sources known to him at that time. Since then, the topic has elicited comment, but no serious attempt to assemble evidence in support of one view or another. In this paper I propose to bring together evidence from a range of sources and argue that in ancient Mesopotamia the sky was thought to be a rotating sphere with a polar axis.

Writing in the Supplement to the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam in 1938, Gibb began his article on “Ta’rikh” by volunteering that the “[t]he problem of the origins of Arabic historiography is not yet finally solved.” It was an astonishing thing to write. For equipped as he was with al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādi, Ibn al-Nadīm, Ḥajjī Khalifa, Yāqūt's Irshād, the first volume of al-Ṣafadī, with Wiüstenfeld's Die Geschichtschreiber der Araber und ihre Werke, as well as with all but Supplementband III of Brockelmann, Gibb certainly knewhow little of the early historical tradition had survived. He was very much working in the dark. It may be hard to imagine now, but of al-Balādhurī's Ansāb al-ashrāf he was probably then familiar only with Ahlwardt's slim volume, and the final volume of Ibn Sa‘d had not yet appeared. Meanwhile al-Wāqidī's Maghāzī (which he knew of), Ibn A‘tham's Futūḥ, ‘Abd al-Malik b. Ḥab7īb's Ta’rikh, ‘Umar b. Shabba's Ta’rikh al-madīna al-munauwara, Ya‘qūb b. Sufyān al-Fasawī's al-Ma‘rifa wa’l-ta’rikh, Abū Zur’a al-Dimashqī's Ta’rikh, and finally Khalifa b. Khayyāṭ's Ta’rikh and Tabaqāt (all of which he did not), remained inaccessible – and this is just to mention some third-century examples.

The letter book on which this article is based was brought to my attention by postal history dealers Argyll Etkin; I am most grateful to them for giving me generous access to such interesting material. The letter book is for the year 1840, a critical year in the wider political sense and more specifically for one of the chief instigators of the mail route between Britain and India overland through Egypt, Thomas Waghorn. The letters are from Waghom's office in Alexandria, mostly by him to his London office at 39 Cornhill but some to Waghorn during a brief visit he made in mid-year, first to Malta, the halfway station to Alexandria, and subsequently to London. They reveal many aspects of the organisation: details of financing; handling of mail and passengers; means of transport and the preferred route; difficulties with timetables; competition within and without Egypt; as well as the character of Waghorn himself. And all this against a background of the evolving “Eastern Question” – the transfer of European rivalries to the Ottoman Empire that was to obsess the governments of the main European powers for much of the nineteenth century.

Pātaka marks the site of a Buddhist establishment that lies about two miles to the west from Chindākhwara village, situated on the main Kabal–Parrai road, in the Kabal Tehsīl of the Swāt District. The site is situated in the midst of cultivated fields, at the foothills of the mountains that stretch between Koṭlai and Khiamdara. On the way, from the main road to the site, one encounters four dry beds of hill torrents, khwars. Immediately to the north of the site, there is a seasonal stream called Pātaka khwargai, descending from the nearby hills to the west of the site and forming the only source of water in this far flung area.

It has been well established in modern scholarship that the Mongol successors to Chinggis Qan (1162–1227), who launched the campaign against the Chin state in 1213 that led to its extinction in 1234, were heavily indebted to the counsel and support of the Chinese grandees of Jurchen rule in their consolidation of north China. This passed through different stages, beginning with Ögödei Qa’an (r. 1229–41) and continued by Möngke (r. 1251–9), through trial and error amid factional strifes and political bickering among different Mongol rulers and their supporters and dissenters.