The standard criteria for using apocalypses as historical sources were established by the late Byzantinist, Paul J. Alexander. Examining the process of literary embellishment and adjustment of a few Syriac and Greek apocalypses, he arrived at the conclusion that historical apocalypses are in fact “prophecies ex-eventu”, i.e. having actually already materialised around the time of their circulation. The amount of such material, he argued, may serve as a kind of barometer for measuring the eschatological pressure at a given time in history since apocalypses are written to provide comfort in times of tribulation, particularly during grave military crises.

The reign of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Khān (1880–1901) is considered by most historians to have been the foundation stone of modern Afghanistan and consequently much has been written about this formative period of Afghanistan's history. However, despite the extensive literature available on his reign, several important features about the Afghan Amīr appear to have been either overlooked or ignored.

In our article on the Aśokan inscriptions, Dr Raymond Allchin and I pointed out the need for a new edition of Hultzsch's Inscriptions of Asoka, bringing it up to date by including the Aśokan inscriptions in Prakrit found in India, and those in Greek and Aramaic found in Afghanistan, since the publication of Hultzsch's work in 1925. Our statement was particularly applicable to the MREs, since only ten versions of MRE I were known to Hultzsch, of which three had the extra portion at the end usually designated as MRE II. To some extent the need for a replacement of Hultzsch's work had been filled by D. C. Sircar's Aśokan Studies which included reprints of all Sircar's articles dealing with new Aśokan inscriptions. Sircar had published a synoptic version of the 17 versions of MRE I and the seven versions of MRE II which are known to date, and a corrected version of this appeared in his Aśokan Studies, but even the corrected version was not entirely satisfactory, in as much as it did not give new editions of the versions already known to Hultzsch.

Among the many manuscripts relating to Ch’an Buddhism included in the Tun-huang finds of the early years of this century, the Leng-chia shih-tzu chi has always been regarded by scholars as a discovery of unusual importance, since it presents an unrivalled picture of the early development of this type of Buddhism from the long-obscured viewpoint of the so-called Northern school of Ch’an. The text has been rendered into English lately by J. C. Cleary, but only in a translation intended for a non-scholarly audience. Fortunately, however, the new French-language translation and study by Bernard Faure is everything a scholar could wish for, a worthy product of many years of research, including several spent at the feet of Yanagida Seizan, Japan's outstanding authority on the early historiography of Ch’an. Faure's work, not surprisingly, shows a complete grasp of the complex issues of intellectual history raised by his text, and also provides copious commentary on its author, Ching-chüeh (683–c. 750), and his background.