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).

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.

EIGHT years ago I had the honour of reading a paper before the Royal Asiatic Society termed “Historical Notes on South-East Persia”. In 1905 I was appointed to Khurāsān, and the following notes are the result of various tours. My thanks are due to Khan Bahadur Ahmad Din, Attaché to His Britannic Majesty's Consulate-General, for checking the various inscriptions, and, more especially, for enabling me to give the first clear and accurate account of the famous Meshed Shrine.

This article provides, for the first time, a detailed and authentic account of the genesis and planning of the Somali Expedition, derived from previously unresearched documents in the Oriental and India Office Collections of the British Library, and supplemented by material from the archives of the Royal Geographical Society. The author has sought to give the subject a wider historical perspective than that provided by Burton, by including details from the works of earlier travellers in the north-east region of Africa such as James Bruce, Lord Valentia, and Henry Salt, which, to a greater or lesser degree, have a bearing on Somalia. He has also touched on the ‘Eastern Question’, especially with regard to Muhammed Ali's territorial ambitions in Arabia, which was an important factor in the British decision to annex Aden in 1839, leading inevitably to the development of an important relationship, both commercial and strategic, with the Somali coast across the Gulf.

The Chronology of Ancient Nations mirrors both al-Biruni the polymath and Mongol Iran in its wide calendrical, geographical and historical horizons. The pictorial programme highlights multi-ethnicity, Iranian national sentiment and religion: orthodox and heretical Islam, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and Christianity (Annunciation and Baptism).1

This inscription, in private possession, is on gold, seven centimetres long bearing fourteen lines in Kharoṣṭrī script with some 100 syllables (aḳsaras) to a line. Its importance as containing a date of a king of Oḍi and a reference to the Kušān Emperor Kuyula Kataphśa has made me willing, though no specialist in Kharoṣṭrī texts, to prepare the following transliteration, preliminary translation and comment.

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.

The article details the events and themes surrounding a strike and riot that transpired in colonial Bombay in 1832, led by a segment of the Parsi community and joined by other Indians, in reaction to the British cull of stray pariah dogs in the streets. The strike and riot demonstrated the commercial power of the Parsis to disrupt the daily routine of Bombay and exert their influence in hostility to colonial interference and incursions against Parsi (Indian) religious sensibilities. The Bombay dog riots of 1832 exposed the vulnerability of early British-Indian socio-political relations in Bombay and Western India in the face of popular disturbances against British authority and was in marked contrast to the state of Parsi-British relations that developed in the nineteenth century, as the Parsis led the process of Indian accommodation to British rule, tempered only by overt threats to their religious identity.

Following the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 and the consolidation of the Kemalist regime in 1926, the President of the new republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk launched a reform process which aimed at changing Turkey's laws, administration, culture and, most significantly, its image. One facet of this process of transformation was the language reform that commenced with romanisation of the Turkish script in late 1928 and reached its zenith later on in the 1930s. Between 1932 and 1934, the Türk Dil Kurumu – the Turkish Language Institute, a radical reformist institution founded by Atatürk in 1932 – banished thousands of Arabic and Persian words from spoken and written Turkish and fabricated new, ‘authentically’ Turkish, words to replace them. The radical-reformist zeal subsided in 1935 as a result of the linguistic chaos of the previous years and came to a halt in 1936 with the proclamation of the so-called Sun-Language Theory. However, so much had changed during those few years and has done since, that even secondary school and university graduates in contemporary Turkey are not able to read and understand, for instance, Atatürk's famous Speech of 1926 from its original, and hence feel the need to consult ‘modernised’ or simplified versions. In this respect, the legacy of the language reform in early republican Turkey remains a matter of bitter controversy and pits the reformist Kemalists against an array of Islamists, conservatives and even liberals. The current debate on what proper Turkish is neatly overlaps with the major fault line that still divides Turkish society.

“With the Mongols there is neither slave nor free man; neither believer nor pagan…. And every one who approacheth them and offereth to them any of the mammon of the world, they accept it from him, and they entrust to him whatsoever office he seeketh, whether it be great or whether it be little, whether he knoweth how to administer it, or whether he doth not. All they demand is strenuous service and submission which is beyond the power (of man to render).”

Accounts of the two notable translators into Arabic, al-Biṭrīq and his son Yaḥyā are, even in our best works of reference, inadequate and often confused. One gathers the general impression that their translations were displaced by the works of Ḥunain b. Isḥāq and his school, who flourished about sixty years later. It is to this loss of popularity, it would seem, that the paucity of information about the two earlier translators and the limited number of existing MSS. of their works are due. Enough survives, however, to make clear that the translations of Yaḥyā b. al-Biṭrīq and his father covered a wide field, and that at one time their numerous works were well known.

Tibet, according to the Chinese, was inhabited by many scattered tribes up to the end of the sixth century, when they first heard of the establishment of a kingdom in their midst by Luntsansolungtsan, who, according to the ‘Reearches’ of Ma Tuanlin, during the period K'aihuang, (A.D. 581–600) of the Sui Dynasty, extended his dominion on the south-west as far as P‘olomên (Brâhmaṇa—Central India), till at the beginning of the T'ang Dynasty their army numbered 100,000 warriors, and they become a powerful state. He is probably the Luntsansu of the genealogy on p. 443. It was his son Ch'itsunglungtsan who sent the first mission to the Emperor T'aitsung of the T'ang Dynasty in 634, and was given a Chinese princess in marriage in 641.

This article is concerned with four inscriptions found at Bodhgayā in the nineteenth century that are documented by records kept in the Department of Asia at the British Museum. Two Tibetan inscriptions, probably dating between the ninth and fourteenth centuries, are of special note because they provide the first archaeological evidence for Tibetans at the site. Chinese and Burmese records of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth century are also noted, that of the Song emperor Renzong (1022–63) being illustrated for the first time.

Through comparison of three poetic texts describing the career of Rana Raj Singh of Mewar (r. 1652–1680), this paper demonstrates how representations of Aurangzeb could vary dramatically even when they were produced for the same Rajput court. Much of the paper focuses on Rāj-vilās, a vernacular-language work with a lengthy account of conflict between Aurangzeb and the Rajput lords of Marwar and Mewar. Rāj-vilās is also noteworthy for its negative portrayal of the Mughal emperor, whom it castigates as a wicked killer of kin who was duplicitous and vengeful. Sometimes thought to be modern constructions, the criticisms of Aurangzeb found in Rāj-vilās reveal that certain ideas about Indian historical figures have continued to be deployed and repurposed over the centuries. Yet Rajput views during Aurangzeb's lifetime were not uniformly unfavourable, as the Sanskrit texts Rāja-ratnākara and Rāja-praśasti attest. Although these two works resembled Rāj-vilās in covering the reign of Rana Raj Singh and were written at roughly the same time, they cast Aurangzeb in a considerably more positive light. This difference can be attributed to the fluctuating political relationship between the Mughal empire and the Mewar kingdom in the decade between 1677 and 1687, underscoring the need to carefully identify the historical contexts within which representations of Aurangzeb were produced and circulated.

In the medieval Arab world, gemstones were used as ornaments, set in jewellery, seals, and amulets, and also were investments and status symbols. As a result of the Arab conquests and their access to new regions, the distribution and use of gemstones underwent substantial changes. Our research pieces together information regarding the production, use, trade, tradition and cultural value of gemstones from early Arabic sources; this information is compared with material found in ancient Greek and Roman sources and also European sources from the medieval period.

The most valued stones were corundum, diamond, emerald and pearl. Other stones, such as turquoise, carnelian, garnet, onyx, lazurite and malachite, were less expensive and therefore more popular and common among the middle classes. Jasper, amethyst, and crystal were still cheaper and even more commonly-owned. In this article, we have chosen to present in detail the stories of two of the most exotic, expensive, and therefore most interesting gemstones: the diamond and the corundum.

The literature on medicine in medieval Muslim countries in general and in Egypt in particular is vast and detailed. Yet study and assessment of the practical aspects of medicine in the Mediterranean society of the Middle Ages requires examination of authentic, practical medical knowledge. At present this can be extracted mainly from the prescriptions found in the Cairo Genizah; these supply a different and valuable dimension. On the importance and the potential of research into the medical aspects of the Genizah documents, mainly prescriptions, Goitein wrote in 1971 that “these prescriptions have to be examined by experts in the history of medicine”.

An Act of Truth is a formal declaration of fact, accompanied by a command or resolution or prayer that the purpose of the agent shall be accomplished. For example, a hunter asks a sage how a certain nymph can be captured, and the sage replies: “Nymphs can be captured by the utterance of a truth; nor, under such circumstances, have they power to vanish from sight.” Accordingly the hunter says to the nymph he desires to capture: “You are the beautiful daughter of King Druma; if this be true, halt! you are bound fast! If it be true that you are the daughter of King Druma, and that you were reared by the king, move not a foot, O fair Mancharā!” By the utterance of this truth on the part of the hunter the nymph addressed is immediately bound fast, and is unable to vanish from sight; but all of her companions vanish into the air.

The study of the Mamlūks under the Seljuks is of pivotal significance, because those Mamlūks formed the essential connecting link between their predecessors in the ‘Abbāsid Caliphate and their successors in the Sultanates of the Zangids, the Ayyūbids and the Mamlūks of Egypt and Syria on the one hand, and in the Sultanate of the Ottomans on the other. They were also part of an exceptionally important stage in the ethnic transformation which those Mamlūks underwent with the progress of time.

This year M. L. Ch. Watelin, director of excavations for the Oxford Field Museum Expedition at Kish, has found another seal of the early Indus Valley civilization at plain level, 9 metres below the surface of the soil. According to our stratifications at this site, the object should be pre-Sargonic, but it was found with a stone pommel bearing an inscription clearly not earlier than Sargon of Agade. Both objects, therefore, may have fallen from above.

This paper revisits the intersection of the 19th and 20th century to bring into focus hitherto unused archival and diplomatic correspondence from the attempts to define and delimit a boundary between India and China. The theoretical point of departure for the paper is to discern how perception (knowledge, beliefs, and norms) relating to the boundary evolved over time to alter the meaning and construction of the material reality i.e. the boundary itself. In doing so it establishes how what each country deems today, as its ‘traditional customary boundary’ was not an unambiguous fixed one, but was mutable across different time periods. The political importance of the selection of these boundary lines did not lie in their being ‘true’, or in the claim being ‘real’ but in their being shared by a process of political selection, and then being reified in the respective countries.