The extraordinary ascendancy of the Saffarid dynasty began with the meteoric career of its founder, Yaʿqūb b. al-Layth al-Saffār. Yaʿqūb appeared on the historical scene in 238/852 as the member of an Eastern Iranian military band, and ended his days as the ruler over a vast swathe of territory stretching from today's ʿIraq to the borders of today's India; while at least theoretical acknowledgement of his overlordship was found both in Central Asia and the holy cities of Arabia.

Historical analyses of slavery in India generally emphasize the escalation of this social institution during the era of Muslim domination in north India. The present study is not an exception to this rule. However, while historical records make it clear that the Delhi Sultans and Mughal emperors retained slavery in order to suit their political and economic needs, it should be emphasized that Muslim rulers did not introduce slavery to the subcontinent. Sources such as the Arthaśāstra, the Manu-smrti and the Mahābhārata demonstrate that institutionalized slavery was well established in India by the beginning of the common era. Earlier sources suggest that it was likely to have been equally widespread by the lifetime of the Buddha (sixth century BC), and perhaps even as far back as the Vedic period. Furthermore, just as slavery was common in India long before the eighth-century Islamic conquests in Sind, recent work demonstrates that the institution continued, in various manifestations, well after the decentralization of the Mughal Empire in the early eighteenth century. Still, it is argued here that the expansion of slavery in Muslim India is an important component of the medieval and early modern history of the region and, at least in terms of its role in the commercial and cultural relations of India and Central Asia, it is a subject that would benefit from further historical analysis.

This article examines the interrelationship and interactions between the notions of Son of Heaven and Son of God with respect to sacral kingship in Inner and East Asia by first uncovering a previously unnoticed synthesis of the two in ancient Inner Asia. The author argues that the Chinese belief of “heaven” and related political and religious concepts may share a common origin with parallel notions in Altaic cultures, possibly intertwined with Indo-European elements. Nevertheless, by studying theophoric names, which existed in all major Old World civilizations except early China, he demonstrates the distinctness of Chinese civilization, as well as the extensive pre-Islamic Iranic influences in East Asia.

In the spring of 1934, a Chinese mission led by General Huang Musong, then Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Guomindang regime, was dispatched to Lhasa with the official purpose of offering condolences to the late 13th Dalai Lama who died in late 1933. Huang's visit to Tibet undoubtedly was the most politically symbolic event in Sino-Tibetan relations since the collapse of the Qing dynasty. He became the most high-profile of Chinese officials to have entered Lhasa since 1911, when the Chinese Republic was created. Before returning to Nanking, Huang left a representative office, along with a wireless set in Lhasa; these could be actions which the Chinese considered marked their authority in Tibet.

For about 150 years scholars of unusual temerity have asserted that themes found in Buddhist texts, many of them celebrated in surviving Buddhist sculpture, can be found in the New Testament in more or less recognizable forms. If this were true, as in the case of Japanese philosophy showing through the work of M. Heidegger, students of the New Testament, already overburdened with conspissated conjectures, would be obliged to enter into a field which is not only unfamiliar to them, but, as a rival, unsympathetic. Few would take on such an adventure gratis. It has been shown elsewhere that parallels can be sorted into those which could have arisen anywhere, being invented many times over (such as the Golden Rule); those which are unlikely to have been invented more than once, but which can be attributed to one culture or the other, without hope of our deciding which is earlier; and finally those which are completely at home in one culture (say the Jewish) and exotic in the other (say the Buddhist), so that the conjecture that the latter “borrowed” from the former is attractive.