The career and scholarship of Edward William Lane, the renowned Orientalist and Arabic lexicographer, have been closely described and evaluated. His life is soon to be the subject of a further study, one planned by Jason Thompson. It may therefore be opportune to take a look at a modest cache of letters in Arabic, both addressed to and written by Lane, which is held in the Griffith Institute at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. These letters were deposited, along with a manuscript version of Lane's unpublished Description of Egypt and other papers and drawings, by his great-great-nephew, Austin Lane Poole, in 1947.

The opening line of Abu'l Faẓl's notice in Ā'īn-i Akbarī on “top” (gunpowder artillery) describes it as “a wonderful lock (qufl-i shiqarf) for securing the august edifice of royalty (iqbāl sarā-i jahānbānī) and a key (kulīd-i dilkushā) to the door of conquest (darwāza-i kishwarsitānī)” He then proceeds to claim that except for the Mediterranean/Ottoman territories (Rūmistān), in no other place was gunpowder artillery available in such abundance as in the Mughal Empire. These statements cannot be brushed aside as simple rhetoric. On the contrary, they may well be perceived as reflecting the significance gunpowder artillery had come to acquire with regard to two important matters, namely, (a) strengthening of central authority and (b) rapid military conquests leading to the annexation of vast territories.

We do not know a lot about the exact sources of the Pāli manuscript collection kept today in the Royal Asiatic Society. Records are very few and scattered here and there in the publications of the Society. Mentions of donors or vendors of the Pāli MSS. collected since 1825 are not at all detailed: most of the time there are no titles, no sufficient material description, no measurements, not even naming the exact language or the script, no register numbers or shelfmarks; we are just told about the name of the donor, or conditions of the sale, the date of acquisition (but not the date of the MS.), sometimes place or circumstances of acquisition.

The genealogical seal of the Mughal emperors of India was one of the most potent symbols of Mughal imperial authority. The distinctive design of the seal - a central circle containing the name of the ruling emperor, surrounded by a series of smaller circles, like satellites in orbit, containing the names of his ancestors up to Timūr (1336–1405) each preceded by the filiative ibn - was a self-evident masterpiece of imperial symbolism, in which the authority of the ruling emperor was both legitimised and enhanced by the deliberate reference to his illustrious ancestors. The inscription was designed to be read starting with the ruling emperor's name in the middle, then moving into the outer circle to the name of his immediate predecessor (at 1 o'clock) and, continuing clockwise, finishing up at Timur, who always had pride of place at the top of the seal. In this way, each ruler was expressed as the son of his predecessor, while at the same time, from his central position abutting all the smaller circles, the ruling emperor could be read symbolically as the “son” of each of his ancestors.