The occasion which brings us together this afternoon is a truly memorable one: to present to you, Sir Harold, the newly founded Denis Sinor Medal for Inner Asian Studies. Here at Cambridge, indeed, and everywhere among Iranists in Britain, your epic contributionsto the knowledge of Inner Asia and its cultures are indeed better known than the new award with which we today seek to acknowledge them. I should, I think, preface my remarks with a few words about the new medal and its origins.

H. J. Polotsky was my teacher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for four years in the 1930s and my friend and mentor and scholarly critic for 53 years. It is difficult for me to speak or write about him without a measure of personal involvement and indeed emotion. In the humanities he was a polymath, as a student of languages he was, I believe, without parallel in this generation. He could appear austere to those not well acquainted with him; he was a man of few words but many thoughts and great profundities. His style in all languages was exquisite and witty; his letters were invariably full of humour and his aphorisms pithy, widely admired, and never forced. He did not suffer fools gladly, but he mellowed with age and developed much tolerance even towards the majority of mankind who could contemplate his mastery with awe – yet never emulate it. While he and I lived in the same city, Jerusalem, for five years only, we were in wellnigh constant communication by letter (more about that correspondence, in part now published, anon), by meetings (often extending over many weeks), and in more recent years by telephone. When I was in error, even in senectute, he could be as sharply reproving as he had been towards the immature undergraduate – and such frankness was not only welcomed, but it had always been of the very essence of our relationship. In a book of reminiscences of Jerusalem in the 1930s I had written of the difficulty of envisaging a future deprived of his guidance and counsel and had expressed the hope that such a contingency would not arise until senility had numbed the blow for me. Alas, this was not to be: he died shortly before his 86th birthday. When his son telephoned me with the sad news on 10 August 1991, I found some consolation in the task of editing his letters in the manner prescribed by him earlier; and that book was published just six months after his death.

The town of Mecca, in the Hijaz of western Arabia, in addition to its importance as the goal of the ḥajj, or annual Muslim pilgrimage, was a commercial emporium of great importance during the Mamlūk era (A.H. 648/1250–A.H. 923/1517). Approximately eighty kilometres to the west of the Holy City lies the port ofjedda, which had been under the direct control of the Ḥasanid sharīfs of Mecca since at least the fifth/eleventh century. During Mamlūk times, Jedda was a way station of gradually increasing importance on the maritime trade route connecting the ports of the western coast of India with the Arabian Peninsula and Egypt. The merchandise around which this trade revolved consisted almost exclusively of luxury goods and small-sized but high-priced commodities, destined for the markets of Egypt, the Levant and western Europe, and included – among other goods – both cotton and silken cloth, all manners of spices, but primarily pepper from the Malabar coast of southwestern India, camphor, musk, amber, sandalwood, Indian Ocean pearls, precious and semi-precious stones, such as agates, and materia medica from the Indian subcontinent, as well as goods trans-shipped from East Asia.

In recent years several important books have discussed aspects of labour in India. Some have been significant in their fields more generally, and the subject as a whole can be seen to be changing. This essay reflects on four works, a three-volume collection of documents published by the Indian Council for Historical Research, and Gyan Prakash's monograph on Bihar, which together might be taken as representing the transition in Indian labour studies.

Yamaga Sokō (1622–85), Itō Jinsai (1627–1705), and Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728) are generally recognized as the three luminaries of the kogaku, or “Ancient Learning”, philosophical movement of Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868). One of the most conspicuous features of their masterworks is their lexicographical methodology. The origins of that methodology are found, this paper suggests, in (I) Chen Beixi's (Jpn: Chin Hokukei; 1159–1223) Xingli ziyi (Jpn: Seiri jigi; The Meanings of Philosophical Terms, c. 1226); and (2) Hayashi Razan's (1583–1657) work propagating the Ziyi, the Seiri jigi genkai (Vernacular Explication of Beixi's Ziyi, 1659).