Sa‘d b. Mansūr Ibn Kammūna, a Jewish polymath whose writings are now receiving a good deal of scholarly attention, worked in Baghdad under the aegis of the Mongol rulers and their courtiers. Born early in the thirteenth century, so it seems, he was forced to flee the capital after rioters protested against his book which compared the three revealed monotheistic faiths; he died in the 1280s. His oeuvre includes a treatise on ophthalmology, no longer extant; quotations from it are however available in the writing of another ophthalmologist, Sadaqa ibn Ibrāhīm al-Shādhilī. From these we learn that Ibn Kammūna practiced medicine in Aleppo (Halab).

Travellers to the fabled city of Samarqand will not miss the opportunity to visit the tomb of Tīmūr (Tamerlane), the famous conqueror of much of Central Eurasia in the fourteenth century. In the courtyard of the Gur-i Amir, Tīmūr's mausoleum, stands a stone of greyish marble, approximately ten feet long, four feet wide and two and a half feet high, decorated with arabesques. A relic of a glorious past, this stone, known as the Kök Tash, is reputed to have served as the great coronation stone for Central Asian rulers ever since it was used as Tīmūr's throne.

Yi, a term denoting one of the primary concepts of Confucian ethics, has proven to be one of the most difficult terms to interpret and translate. It has been rendered as ‘righteousness’, ‘rightness’, ‘right conduct’, ‘propriety’, ‘justice’, ‘morality’, ‘duty’, ‘sense of duty’, ‘obligation’, and so forth. The aim of this article is to open new avenues to discuss the original and extended meanings of yi by the means of paleographic, archaeological, and socio-cultural studies.

In standard accounts of medieval Japanese society, enormous stress is put on the conflicts between local landholders (zaichi ryōshu) and absentee proprietors. Fuelled by the debate on feudalism that divided scholars up until the early 1990s, these conflicts have widely been recognised as proof of the diminishing powers of the central elite in, or near, Kyoto and of the increasing absorption of power by warriors in both the countryside and in the administration of the military government, the bakufu. The conflicts were, in other words, seen in the structural context of a system of huge landed estates (shōen) owned by court nobles or large religious institutions, which were gradually replaced by much smaller proprietary units controlled personally by individual warrior families.