This paper is the first assessment of the different sources and shapes in a selection of Gandhāran furniture. Two main types of furniture legs are discussed. These are thought to be originally wooden legs attached to chairs, stools, and beds that are depicted in Kushan sculpture from Gandhāran. The two types are defined by their decoration. The first type is the geometric, lathe-turned furniture leg, the second type of leg is carved, not lathe-turned and depicts figures. The foreign origins of both types are traced and analyzed. A list, plus illustrations of reliefs showing representative contexts for each type, is given. Several heretofore unpublished reliefs are included. In some cases the Gandhāran examples can be interpreted as well as their developments into Central Asian furniture types.

Based on the first English translation of the Old Tibetan document with the shelf mark Pelliot tibétain 1096 recto, the article analyses the internal organisation of a stage station (sluṅs) in the Central Asian colonial provinces of the Tibetan Empire. It examines officials and offices that constituted a stage station, as well as persons who were using its services. By comparing the information contained in the document with later reports of foreign travellers, the article reconstructs the organisation of a stage station. It also brings to light certain traits that were apparently common to the first historically attested relay system of the Tibetan Empire and the succeeding system introduced by the Mongols during the thirteenth century ce.

In this article I suggest that, although many Jews perished during the wars between the Mamluks and the Franks during the thirteenth century's second half, and others migrated to different Jewish communities in the Middle East and Europe, some Jews migrated to Safed, Jerusalem, and perhaps to Gaza as well. A significant number of the Jews who lived in Safed and Jerusalem during the early decades of the fourteenth century were of a Western European origin but were not newcomers from Europe. I suggest that some of these were Jews who previously lived in Acre and Tyre and migrated to Safed and Jerusalem either shortly before the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem got its coup de grâce, or afterwards.

Various models of interreligious relations have been proposed in recent scholarship, including most prominently the several varieties of inclusivism, exclusivism, and pluralism. One abiding presupposition shared across these models takes the religious adherent (or community of adherents) as a unified individual (or collective of such individuals). This assumption overlooks an important feature of the mystical strains of religiosity, which is to negate selfhood. This article seeks to problematize standard scholarly models of interreligious relations by working through and applying to them such mystical understandings of (non-)selfhood, with particular focus on the Islamic mystics Abū Yazīd al-Bisṭamī, Abū l-Qāsem al-Junayd, ʿAbd al-Karīm ibn Hawāzin al-Qushayrī, Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār Nayshābūrī, and Muḥyiddīn Ibn al-ʿArabī. Based on this textual study, I propose an alternative to interreligious dialogue more adequately termed ‘polyglot monologue’ or, in order to avoid pluralistic implications, ‘omnilogue’.

Modern historians of Persia's Safavid period (1501–1722) have long assumed that there was an interregnum between the death of Shah Ismāʿīl I in 1524 and the date when his son Ṭahmāsp came of age and established direct control in the 1530s. This idea of an interregnum takes two forms in the historiography. According to one narrative, during this time the Qizilbāsh amirs were disloyal to the young Ṭahmāsp and tried to seize control of Persia for themselves. According to the other, there was a war of succession in which Qizilbāsh factions supported different sons of Ismāʿīl I. Both of these narratives co-exist in the contemporary historical literature even though they disagree. Based on a close reading of the early Safavid chronicles, this article demonstrates that both narratives are incorrect and there was no interregnum. The Qizilbāsh continued throughout Ṭahmāsp's minority to respect him and treat him as their leader. Unsurprisingly, given his youth and inexperience, he deferred matters of state to his amirs. Nevertheless, his amirs derived their legitimacy to rule from him, and when leadership passed from one amir to another, it did so only with Ṭahmāsp's approval. Moreover, there was no dispute over the succession during Ṭahmāsp's minority.

Victor Place was appointed as a consul to Mosul in 1851, where having arrived in 1852 he started excavations at Khorsabad. Financial problems forced him to stop this activity towards the end of 1853. As the Interior Ministry appointed him to another post in 1854, he wanted to transport the Khorsabad finds before he left Mosul. However, the roads were extremely unsafe because of the Muntafiq Arab tribes’ revolt. The local authorities repeatedly warned Place about this problem, stressing that he should wait until after the revolt was over before leaving. But despite these warnings, Place transported the Khorsabad finds from Mosul to Baghdad by keleks (rafts). The plan was then to transport them to Basra from Baghdad. Place set off on the river with a fleet made up of four keleks and a ship. Smuggled goods loaded on the ship made it heavier and attracted the attention of looters. On 21 May 1855, the fleet was attacked by bandits in the region of Kurna, located between Baghdad and Basra. The ship and two keleks sank at the spot, while the remaining two keleks arrived at Basra with some of the rescued goods. Various attempts to retrieve the sunken finds then followed. This article accordingly considers new data on the Kurna accident, drawing on Ottoman archival sources, particularly reports written at the time that discussed the possible causes of the accident and the negligent actions linked to it. As the destroyed memory of Khorsabad makes clear, archaeology cannot be rushed.

The present short study publishes five hitherto unknown letters written by the Ottoman historian Paul Wittek (1894–1978) to the American Middle Eastern historian Sydney Nettleton Fisher (1906–87). Fisher was a graduate student of Wittek for a few months in 1938; the letters were written during two short periods (1938–9 and 1946–9), when Wittek was attached firstly to the Institut de Philologie et d'Histoire Orientales et Slaves at the Université Libre, Brussels, and secondly, from 1948 onwards, to the University of London. In the intervening years (1940–6), Wittek was a political refugee twice over in England. The letters manifest the development of a close friendship between Wittek and Fisher who, as two supplementary letters written to him by the British Arabist and Islamic scholar H. A. R. Gibb show, was also active during the war years in attempting—unsuccesfully—to facilitate Wittek's acceptance in the U.S.A. as a political refugee.

This article revisits the question of Indian South Africans as a means of looking at a small selection of events1 situated within the dynamics between India, Britain and South Africa from 1860 to 1960, which were particularly influential in moulding the status of membership born within these interstitial spaces of the British Empire. Adopting a wider rather than a nationalist perspective, this discussion contributes to the growing global history scholarship looking at the relationship between India, Britain and its dominions.

A fresh look at the 1888 Sikkim Expedition using both Chinese and English language sources yields very different conclusions from that of previous research on the subject. During the course of policymaking, the British Foreign Office and the British Government of India did not collaborate to devise a plan to invade Tibet; conversely, their aims differed and clashed frequently. During the years leading to war, the largest newspapers in British India gave plenty of coverage to the benefits of trade with Tibet, thus influencing British foreign policy and contributing indirectly to the outbreak of war. The Tibetan army was soundly defeated in the war, while the British troops suffered only light casualties. Although the Tibetan elites remained committed to the war, the lower classes of Tibetan society quickly grew weary of it. During the war, the British made much use of local spies and enjoyed an advantage in intelligence gathering, which contributed greatly to their victory. Finally, although the war was initially fought over trade issues, the demarcation of the Tibetan-Sikkim border replaced trade issues as the main point of contention during the subsequent peace negotiations. During the negotiations, Sheng Tai, the newly appointed Amban of Tibet, tried his best to defend China's interests.

The Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC), which was mainly controlled by British residents in the treaty port of Shanghai, and protected by the British Foreign Office, came under serious challenge from the Guomindang (GMD) (the rising Nationalist Party of China) from 1927 onwards. The Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP)—an imperial police force with powers to arrest, prosecute and detain—was forced to collaborate with the GMD, and practice unlawful arrest, extradition and re-indoctrination of Communist suspects and convicts. This resulted in the erosion of state powers and the management of prisons. This article argues that the dismantling of British colonialism began to take place in Shanghai during the inter-war period at the expense of some English legal conventions, as demonstrated by SMP violations of existing legal practices and humanitarian commitments. Second, it also suggests that English judicial conventions had an unintended impact on some Chinese civilians, who were keen to safeguard their rights during their detention and trial in and beyond the Shanghai Legation. This article, therefore, offers a new periodisation of British decolonisation and a re-examination of colonial legacy in East Asia.

After the Fourth Mysore War, when the British were dismantling Tipu Sultan's establishment, the East India Company unexpectedly took charge of 601 women who resided permanently inside Srirangapatnam Palace. Along with Tipu's sons, they were moved 200 miles east, to Vellore Fort, in the Company-controlled territory of Madras Presidency. Documentation about these court women held in colonial archives describes moments when they behaved in unexpectedly difficult ways. Because historians have traditionally cast the women of Tipu Sultan's court as voiceless victims, their actions, as described in these colonial sources, have been overlooked. When examined, the descriptions show that they were using the domestic powers granted to them under Tipu Sultan's establishment to influence their treatment by the East India Company. By placing these accounts alongside the broader context of the Company's military history, it becomes apparent that the women of Tipu Sultan's female entourage fomented the events that led to the Vellore Mutiny of 1806.