Considering the fact that the Mīmāṃsā, the Vedānta, the Sāṃkhya, and the Yoga schools owe their origin directly to the Vedas, the Brāhmaṇas, and the Upaniṣads, it may be expected that the doctrines of these would have been systematized and put together into the form of the Sūtras earlier than those of the Vaiśeṣika and the Nyāya schools, the essential tenets of which had their beginnings in a later and different kind of literature. This expectation, however, seems to be belied by the fact that the present Sāṃkhya-sūtras have been proved to belong to a very late period, as late as the fourteenth century a.d.; and the Yoga-sūtras are now believed by a number of scholars, following Professors Jacobi and Woods, to be as late as the fourth or fifth century a.d. Now, while the gap of an early systematic work on the Sāṃkhya is filled up by the Sāṃkhya-kārikā, or it may be explained by the surmise that there was an early Sūtra work, either a shorter form of the present one or altogether different from it, which is lost, the Yoga-sūtras are all that we have as a systematic exposition of the Yoga doctrines, and there is no reason to believe that they were preceded by another work of a similar nature. • The question, then, is whether the systematization of such an early school of thought as the Yoga would have been postponed until as late as the fourth or fifth century a.d., and until after the systematization of the doctrines of even the Vaiśeṣika and the Nyāya schools, which began later on, and the Sūtras of which definitely contain a reference to the Yoga doctrines of mystic intuition and concentration.

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.

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.

The archeological discoveries made on the territory of Bactria – one of the largest states formed in antiquity, which united in a single historical and cultural region the lands of the modern Soviet republics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, together with Afghanistan – can be divided into three stages.

The first episode to create a world sensation opened with the chance find in 1877 of the Oxus Treasure, which contained 200 Achaemenid gold and silver objects of high artistic quality, and some 1,500 coins. Then in 1963 came the discovery of the Graeco-Bactrian town of Ay Khanum in northern Afghanistan. Though this excavation is not yet complete, the French archeological mission has succeeded in defining the structural principles, the planning solutions, the relics of written culture, and the Greek way of life of the ancient city. That is to say, the essential of what is accessible to archeology and historical research. Some parallels to the Ay Khanum discoveries were yielded by excavations at Saksanokhur in south Tajikistan, where a palace-temple complex was uncovered. Finally came the third stage: the operations of the Soviet-Afghan expedition of 1979 that brough to light in the north of Afghanistan, near Shibarghan, at Tilla Tepe “the Golden Mound”, masterpieces of ancient jewellery of the 1st century B.C. to the 1st A.D., comprising 20,000 golden ornaments.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If we were asked to recall a coastal city of early modern China, most of us would choose Shanghai, Canton, Xiamen, or Macau. These port cities became famous for facilitating trans-regional sea trade that linked the Qing Empire to the rest of the world. Attentive observers know that all of these cities are located on the Southeast China coast, by which we mean the coastal areas south of Shanghai. Taking Shanghai as the dividing line between the northeastern and southeastern coastlines, the port cities of the south are far more likely to be familiar to us than are those of the north. I consider this phenomenon (i.e. the focus on the coast of early modern China) to be a “Southeast China centrism.” And although we might all concede that some southeastern seaports were vital to transoceanic interactions, it is shortsighted to ignore the northern port cities and the role they played in connecting China with the maritime world. In this article I investigate the importance of Northeast China's port cities by focusing particular attention on the less familiar coastal seaport of Dengzhou. By detailing and examining the political and economic importance of this port city in the early modern period, I will show that Qing China's northeastern coast was no less important than the southeast. Even if China's northern port cities might not have been as economically vibrant as those in the south, we should not overlook their functions and histories. Indeed, they also attained unique patterns of political and economic development throughout the long eighteenth century.

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.

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.

In the course of the last fifty years there have been on average twenty-four million animals registered annually in Mongolia. In 1996 29, 275,700 animals were counted. This is a quantity never before experienced in the country's history. In the coming years another rise in the number of animals is expected. Some specialists conjecture a continual increase. Others are attempting to prove that this cannot be realized on account of limitations of space and that, already, throughout the country, pasture land is being threatened by overuse due to the sheer quantity of livestock. The question of how much livestock the resources of the entire natural pasture can support is still not completely answered.

It is clear then that the ships plying in the Arabian Sea in 1250–1350 were structurally weak. The question whether this feature persisted until 1500 must be answered almost exclusively from the early Portuguese literature. It is very voluminous; most of it is either badly indexed or not indexed at all; and I have not been able to search it all through, but have looked only in the likely places. My collection of passages may thus be incomplete, while those I have found are mostly fragmentary, and to interpret them itis necessary to have a general view of the course of shipping in the Arabian Sea.

Nationalism in South and South-East Asian countries has been a response to certain common stimuli. Broadly speaking, Western ideas, education, religious influences, the economic activities of the rulers, and their social policies have been of particular significance.