Hodgson's Sale Catalogue for the 10th July, 1947, of books from Lord Ilchester's Library at Holland House, contained a curious manuscript which was listed as follows under item No. 60.

“Oriental MS.—75 Coloured Drawings of Native Eaces in the Far East, including the Ladrones, Moluccas, Philippines, Java, Siam, China, and elsewhere, those of China depicting Royalty, Warriors, Mandarins, etc., in gorgeous Robes, richly heightened with gold, also 88 smaller Coloured Drawings of Birds and fantastic animals (4 on a page), all within decorative borders, and a double folding Drawing of a Ship, and Natives in small craft, with about 270 pages of MS. text, sm. 4to, calf, lettered, Isla del os Ladrones (eighteenth century).”

1. Stems. Besides a few uncommon spellings (as etc., see above, A, 4) nothing particular can be observed with regard to the formation of both verbal stems, present and past. The latter in a few cases appears to be formed from the former in a so-called ‘regular’way, and to be used instead of the original preterite, as in (18) ,(92 v.), etc. The verbal compounds also do not show many peculiarities, and only a few more or less archaic prepositions, as , etc., deserve to be mentioned.

Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole is considered to fall within the group of Indo-Portuguese Creoles, which were Portuguese-based Creoles that once flourished around coastal India and Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole arose when the Portuguese established trading posts and fortresses in Sri Lanka from 1517 onwards. The purpose of this paper is to examine critically the influence of substratum (indigenous) languages on Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole.

Any complete biography of Qādī an-Nu'mān, the most illustrious of Ismā'īlī jurists, must necessarily be based on two kinds of sources, internal and external. He was a very prolific author, and although not all his works which were extant some 400 years ago have come down to us, a good many of his akhbār and fiqh works are still preserved. It would be necessary to go through all of these and collect all autobiographical information before the definitive biography of the Qāḍī can be attempted. Even purely fiqh works like the Mukhtaṣaru'l-Athār contain occasional references to contemporary events. The brief biography given below does not profess to be exhaustive; it is based in the main on three external sources, which seem to contain all that was definitely known of this great lawyer, the founder and the greatest exponent of Ismā'īlī jurisprudence. The difficulty of writing on Ismā'īlī subjects is well known; it is next to impossible to expect any co-operation from the sectarians themselves. I am trying, however, to obtain information from different sources, and if ever I am able to study all the works extant of the Qāḍī, a more comprehensive biography may be attempted.

Writing in the Supplement to the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam in 1938, Gibb began his article on “Ta’rikh” by volunteering that the “[t]he problem of the origins of Arabic historiography is not yet finally solved.” It was an astonishing thing to write. For equipped as he was with al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādi, Ibn al-Nadīm, Ḥajjī Khalifa, Yāqūt's Irshād, the first volume of al-Ṣafadī, with Wiüstenfeld's Die Geschichtschreiber der Araber und ihre Werke, as well as with all but Supplementband III of Brockelmann, Gibb certainly knewhow little of the early historical tradition had survived. He was very much working in the dark. It may be hard to imagine now, but of al-Balādhurī's Ansāb al-ashrāf he was probably then familiar only with Ahlwardt's slim volume, and the final volume of Ibn Sa‘d had not yet appeared. Meanwhile al-Wāqidī's Maghāzī (which he knew of), Ibn A‘tham's Futūḥ, ‘Abd al-Malik b. Ḥab7īb's Ta’rikh, ‘Umar b. Shabba's Ta’rikh al-madīna al-munauwara, Ya‘qūb b. Sufyān al-Fasawī's al-Ma‘rifa wa’l-ta’rikh, Abū Zur’a al-Dimashqī's Ta’rikh, and finally Khalifa b. Khayyāṭ's Ta’rikh and Tabaqāt (all of which he did not), remained inaccessible – and this is just to mention some third-century examples.

The scantiness of Parthian inscribed material enhances the importance of any new find. The existence of inscriptions and drawings on the rock-walls of a gorge near Birjand (Southern Khorasan) had been known for some time; but their antiquity was not recognized until Mr. Jamal Rezai, a Persian student from Birjand, visited the gorge and took photographs, which he submitted to Dr. Sadiq Kiya, of the University of Tehran. Dr. Kiya at once correctly identified the writing as Parthian and, in company with Mr. Rezai, published the whole material, together with a preliminary reading of the inscriptions. Dr. Richard N. Frye also paid a visit to the site and reported on it briefly in the Persian literary monthly Mihr. Later some uninformed criticism, claiming modern origin of the remains, appeared in the same periodical; it was justly refuted by Dr. Kiya.

The purpose of this note is to make known a remarkable, and hitherto unrecorded, drachma of Arab-Sasanian form, issued in the year 72/691–2 by the Governor of Sīstān 'Abd al-'Azīz b. 'Abdallāh b. 'Āmīr.

The momentous coinage reform of the Umayyad Caliph 'Abd al-Malik, begun in 77/696–7, was directed at removing all symbolism associated with the former Byzantine and Sasanian rule, and its replacement with a purely inscriptional coin-type, giving in Arabic the Muslim confession of faith, and various Qur'anic verses. These innovations were accompanied by the replacement of Greek in the western Muslim chanceries by the Arabic script and language. Similarly in the eastern provinces, Pahlavi was replaced by Arabic under the viceroyalty in Iraq of al-Ḥajjāj, appointed in 75/694–5. So far as the eastern coinages were concerned the change meant the disappearance of the Sasanian royal portrait from the obverse of the silver coinage; and of the fire altar ' symbol of Zoroastrianism ' from the reverse. The coin illustrated here (Pl. I, a, b - Foroughi Colin.) was struck several years before the commencement of the reform at Damascus, and anticipates it, so far as its reverse type is concerned, though still employing the Pahlavi script of the older tradition. As usual in dealing with a Pahlavi text, we give first facsimile, then transliteration, transcription and translation.

Kumzāri is a dialect spoken exclusively by certain coastal elements of the Shiḥuḥ tribe, the Kumāzara section, who occupy Kumzār at the head of the Musandam Peninsula of Oman, and are found at Dibah, Khasab, the coastal villages of Elphinstone and Malcolm Inlets and at Larek Island.

European science is indebted to Dr. M. A. Stein's industry for the remarkable document here published. It is one of the many valuable MSS. which fell to his lot through the partial acquisition in 1907 of an ancient library discovered, by a Chinese priest, in one of the Buddhist cave temples of the “Halls of the Thousand Buddhas” to the south-east of the Tun-huang oasis, as described by him in the Geographical Journal for September, 1909. Its excellent state of preservation, and the fact of its being written in the clear unequivocal letters of the Manichæan alphabet, renders this MS. a most valuable help to all interested in the study of the ancient Turkish speech in which it is edited.

For most of the Islamic period central and southern Jordan has existed on the periphery of larger states. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the political and economic life of the Muslim and Frankish polities of Bilad al-Sham (Greater Syria) was dominated by cities like Damascus, Aleppo, Jerusalem and Acre. These urban centres contained the greatest concentrations of the military and civilian elite, and provided the largest markets for locally produced and imported commodities. Intellectual activity also prospered in such urban environments and, with few exceptions, it was the occupants of the cities of Bilad al-Sham who composed the histories of the Crusader states and the Ayyubid confederacy. These chronicles tend to reflect the interests of the ruling elites and generally pay rather less attention to rural areas. The lands between the Wadi Zarqa' and the Red Sea – populated as they were by villages and small market towns – excited little interest among historians, and only Karak and Shawbak merit relatively regular mentions in the chronicles of the period.

Early Urdu poetry, at the time called Reḳhtah, forms a remarkable example of the circulation of ideas in early modern India. Scholars trace its modern form to the reception in early eighteenth-century Delhi of a Southern literary idiom, usually called Dakhanī that is itself the result of repeated waves of migration from North India to the Deccan. While the historical origins of Urdu occupy an arena of lively scholarly debate, its later historical and literary importance is quite clear. By the start of the nineteenth century a highly literary and Persian-inflected form of Urdu would swiftly replace Persian in elite circles. Thus we have a historically significant moment at which the confluence of the vernacular and the cosmopolitan created a new cosmopolitan vernacular, however this process remains understudied.

The tablet of which I here give a text and translation was given by Col. Stevenson, of the Ordnance in Mesopotamia; to Professor Langdon, to whom I am indebted for much help in its decipherment. It was found at Wannah wa-Ṣadûm, a group of mounds in S. Babylonia, situated on the Euphrates, to the west of Nippur, and a little to the south-west of Daghara, where other isolated inscriptions of the reigns of Narâm-Sin and Nebuchadrezzar II concerning Marad have already been found.

In the month of Rajab, a.h. 987 (September, 1579), the ‘Ulamā of the Mual Empire issued a joint fatwa (maḥẓar), by which, according to Vincent Smith, “Akbar was solemnly recognized as being superior in his capacity of Imām-i-‘Ādil to any other interpreter of Muslim law, and practically was invested with the attributes of infallibility.” He therefore calls it the “Infallibility Decree”, and he interprets it as the turning-point of Akbar's religious life. He regards it as the “momentous innovation which should extend the autocracy of Akbar from the temporal to the spiritual side, and make him Pope as well as King”. By this step he rendered impossible all opposition to any future developments of his religious policy. This limited interpretation of the maḥẓar, however, in the light of the Dīn Ilāhī, seems to obscure the real policy of Akbar.

This article discusses the Mongol approach to warfare, then goes on to consider the Mongols' conversion to the notion that they would have to develop a siege train, since walled cities cannot easily be taken by a cavalry charge. The contribution of Chinese siege engineers is discussed, and there is a survey of Chinese siege techniques as they evolved before the Mongol period. The author considers the evidence for the use of inflammable materials, and then moves to the question of gunpowder. The widespread (not quite universal) consensus that the Chinese used gunpowder is discussed, and then attention moves to Hulegu's expedition to western Asia in the 1250s. It is pointed out that none of the major sources seems to imply the use of anything that might be construed as gunpowder technology during those campaigns. Lastly, the author considers, in some detail, sieges conducted by the Ilkhanid Mongols against Mamluk border strongholds during the succeeding decades, drawing attention to and explaining those sieges' increasing lack of success.

The stone fragments here published were recovered from the ruins of Shabwa, in the Hadramaut, in 1938 by Major the Honourable R. A. B. Hamilton (now Lord Belhaven and Stenton) and presented to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford in 1952. The finder has described his work at Shabwa in a lecture to the Royal Geographical Society, published in the Geographical Journal, and in his book The Kingdom of Melchior.

Praise belongs to God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. May God be propitious unto our Lord and Prophet, Muhammed the Elect, the Messenger whose doctrines are followed, the Seal of the Prophets, the Chief of the Kighteous; also to his Family and to bis Companions, the Pious, as well as to his immediate Followers in goodness; even unto the day of Resurrection and Judgment.

When the european war ended in November 1918 the fate of the defeated Turkish Empire was no longer in doubt. The other fallen empire, Austria-Hungary, had been dismembered, and the Ottoman Turks could not hope to escape the consequences of allying themselves with Germany. For Indian Muslims this raised grave issues of the political power of Islam. They had provided a large number of recruits in the war and had contributed materially towards the defeat of Turkey. Their political leaders had regretted Turkey's entry into the war on the side of Britain's enemies; their sympathies, however, were with the Turks, for the Turkish Sultan was looked upon as the Khalifa, the temporal and spiritual leader of the Islamic community, and—still more important for Indian Muslims—the Khalifa stood for the unity of the Islamic people, and the Turkish Empire, by then the only surviving Islamic Empire, was the symbol of Islam's worldly power. Muslims in India fervently believed in the ideal of Islamic brotherhood. This had always been an integral part of the religious outlook of Islam, but Pan-Islamism appealed especially to Muslims in India because of their minority status. Their interest in the Khalifate was largely due to the fact that it was the one centre of authority to which they could look for protection. The spread of nationalism threatened to submerge them and made them anxious to preserve and strengthen the Khalifate as an institution which might provide them with a rallying point and mobilize in their defence the united forces of the Islamic world.

Christian Maximillian Habicht was born at Breslau in 1775. He went to Paris in 1797 as Secretary of the Prussian Legation, and remained there until March, 1807, when he returned to Germany. During this ten years he studied Arabic under De Sacy and a Father Raphael, of Cairo, then teaching Arabic in Paris, and lived for some years in the same house with a certain Mordecai ibn an-Najjār, of Tunis, a Jew apparently from his (Epistolœ Arabicœ, pp. 2 f.; Breslau text, vol.i, p.iii).

In a former paper I dealt with the rulers of Lāhijān and Fūman in Gīlān, and now give an account of the remaining local dynasties and petty rulers of that province. The sources from which I have gathered my information have already been mentioned.