In the numerous letters and papers which I have addressed during the last two years to the Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, and which have been either read at the meetings of the Society, or in some instances published in the Journal, I have explained, in more or less detail, the successive discoveries which I have made in the history of ancient Assyria. Those discoveries have pretty well established the fact that an independent empire was first instituted on the Upper Tigris in the thirteenth century, B.C. They have furnished what may be considered an almost complete list of Assyrian kings from the above-named period to the destruction of Nineveh in B.C. 625, and they have further made us acquainted with the general history of Western Asia, during this interval of above seven centuries.

When set against our knowledge of contemporary Greece and Rome, the whole of Parthian history may be termed a “Dark Age”. Even so, within the four centuries of Arsacid domination, the accidents of discovery and the efforts of scholarship have illuminated some periods more than others. Of the latter, one, running between the death of Mithradates II in about 88 B.C. and the accession of Orodes II some thirty years later, has proved peculiarly impenetrable.

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.

Among the few published Central Asian sources of the seventeenth century are two very unusual Persian-language accounts by Central Asians of their stays in Mughal India: the memoirs of Mutribi al-Asamm Samarqandi, and the travelogue of Mahmud b. Amir Wali. Written in stylistically different but distinctly personal voices untypical for their time, these accounts offer the modern reader valuable first-person insight into the minds and outlooks of their authors and shed light on the nature of how Muslims in Asia thought about their world and its boundaries.

This article studies two generations of the Mahmudabad family, which was one of the largest Muslim landholding families in India: Maharaja Sir Muhammad ‘Ali Muhammad Khan and Raja Muhammad Amir Ahmad Khan. The family were Twelver Shi‘as and hailed from Mahmudabad in Awadh. Specifically, it shows how intra-community links of marriage and kinship facilitated a flow of ideas, information and people and therefore created new networks. The article then explores these connections through the example of the Madrasa’t-ul Wa‘izeen, which was founded by the Maharaja and its two main publications, Al-Wa‘iz, an Urdu magazine and the English language The Muslim Review. The founding of the madrasa also demonstrates the importance of ideology, pilgrimage, preaching and their corresponding networks. These relationships are analysed keeping in mind local, national and transnational institutions and the role these played in creating ties between Mahmudabad, Lucknow and the wider Muslim world. This article thus presents a typology of a particular kind of Muslim transnationalism, showing how family, marriage, ideology and the importance of preaching mutually reinforced each other. The larger goal is to show how this family could be both ‘rooted’ in the local while also being part of the transnational Muslim community.

Like other elements of culture, alphabets have both practical and ethnopolitical integrating or differentiating significance. Hence, any alphabet change has serious political implications. This article will briefly consider the process of romanisation undertaken in the six newly independent Muslim states that were part of the Soviet Union (Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan); and then evaluate its success or failure and attempt to explain the causes for these phenomena.

Danodhar is the name applied to a large irregularly shaped and lofty hill, situated on the edge of the Runn of Cutch, about twenty miles NW. from Bhooj; attached to this place is the popular tradition, accounting for the present appearance of the Runn, and which also, at some remote period, appears to have been the means of founding the sect of Jogís, commonly known as Kánphatís.

At the beginning of this century shadow plays were sometimes performed in Egypt, but not very often. They had latterly become chiefly an entertainment for the lower classes, and because of the drastic comedy of these plays the Government took steps to suppress them. But we know that these shadow plays had a long history in Egypt, and have been performed also for the higher and highest classes. It is reported,1 for instance, that the well-known Sultan Saladin (died 1193) with his Wazir al-Qāḍī al-Fāḍil, was present at the performance of those plays; that the Turkish Sultan Selīm I, who in 1517 conquered Egypt, amused himself by seeing a performance of the shadow play. In recent times, the Khedive Taufīq Pasha (1879–1892) liked to see such representations. I myself possess some shadow play figures especially made for performances before him.

Within the last quarter of a century two serious attempts have been made to explain the fact that the Avesta uses one set of words for beings belonging to the creation of Ahura Mazda and another for those formed by Aura Mainyu. The former of these theories was advanced by Leo Frachtenberg (“Etymological Studies in Ormazdian and Ahrimanian Words in Avestan,” in Spiegel Memorial Volume, Bombay, 1908, pp. 269–89), and the latter by Hermann Güntert (“Ueber die ahurischen und daēvischen Ausdrücke im Avesta, eine semasiologische Studie,” in Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, philbsophisch-historische Klasse, 1914, Abhandlung 13).

The article offers a survey of religious contacts maintained between Tibet and Russian Buddhists, the ethnic Buryats and Kalmyks, from the late 19th C. to the 1930s. Chronologically, the story falls into two parts, the dividing point being the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The focus in the first portion is on the Russian Buddhist colony in Lhasa centred around the Gomang Datsang (school) of the Drepung monastery, its emergence and growth in the early 20th C., in the wake of Russo-Tibetan rapprochement brought about by a Buryat scholar-monk and adviser of the 13th Dalai Lama, Agvan Dorjiev. The tsarist government tried to use their Buddhist connection with Lhasa to political ends – in January 1904, shortly after the beginning of the British military invasion of Tibet, they sent a secret Kalmyk reconnaissance mission to Lhasa under a Cossack subaltern, Naran Ulanov, assisted by a cleric (bakshi) Dambo Ulianov. The latter part of the article concentrates on the dramatic post-revolutionary period. It begins with the story of the Kalmyk refugees in Turkey and their abortive attempt to emigrate to Tibet. There's also a detailed discussion of the endeavours by Soviet leaders to win the Dalai Lama over, by employing the loyal Buryats and Kalmyks for their secret missions to the Potala. The key figures behind this scheme were the Soviet foreign minister, G. V. Chicherin, and the same Agvan Dorjiev, posing as the Dalai Lama's representative in the USSR. As a result of the Bolshevik propaganda, many of the Buryat and Kalmyk residents in Lhasa began to return to their homeland in the 1920s. The crackdown on Buddhism in Soviet Russia put an end to the Moscow–Lhasa political dialogue. Hence all connections between the Buryat and Kalmyk Buddhists and their religious “Mecca” were deliberately cut by the Soviet authorities by 1930.

This article studies two questions related to al-Khansā'’s mutaqārib poem, rhyming in -ālahā: how was it changed through anthologisation and what is its relation to the Qur'ān and Surah 99? Whereas the six-verse excerpt in al-Mubarrad's Kāmil is full of Qur'ānic echoes, the Dīwān version of the poem has few such echoes. The analysis, however, opens up a possibility that the Qur'ān's first audience may well have recognised in Surah 99 features familiar to them from marthiyas.

In 1943, at the Bibliothèque Nationale, whilst browsing in the Historiae Hungaricae Fontes Domestici edited by M. Florianus, I came across a short notice, No. 2 of Adnotationes Historicae seculi XII et XIII, entitled: “Quos Bela rex Hungarorum, velut dominus papa, nuntios ad Thartaros direxit.” An explanatory note states: “Notitia … de electione novi imperatoris Tartarorum, et nuptiis Stephani Belae IV-i filii cum filia regis Cumanorum celebratis descripta ex codice Parisiensi Luxemb. Fol. 22. sec. XIH-i, edita fuit in opere collectitio cui nomen “Thesaurus historicus” Budapestini anno 1878.” It took me some time to establish that the “Thesaurus historicus” mentioned here was in fact the Hungarian periodical Történelmi Tár. Fortunately I had no difficulty in finding the volume referred to by Florianus, and in it I saw reproduced the same Latin text accompanied by a note to the effect that the MS referred to contained also a version of Piano Oarpini's Historia Mongalorum. There was also a reference to the “Zeitschrift für deutsche Literature, XVII”. I had been chasing this reference intermittently for years when, in 1951, Mile. Marie-Thérèse d'Alverny, conservateur adjoint at the Bibliothèque Nationale, told me that Marczali's reference was wrong, and was to be corrected to “Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum”! There I found an article by W. Studemund, in which the note mentioned by Florianus and Marczali had been published, probably for the first time.

The famous Kūfic inscription in the mosaics of the Dome of the Rock, which provides the building with a direct dating and an explicit message and which has been discussed for more than a century, once more claims our attention: a recent review of the mosaic decoration maintains that it has lost its original character during the latest restoration; that it has been “entirely redone” and has suffered corrections such as “adding alifs and diacritical points and signs wherever they appear to be missing”. No evidence is given for this disquieting news beyond the statement of a certain (or, as it seems, a rather uncertain) person; this inevitably provokes demand for further information, the more so as it is included in a book renowned for its reliable documentation.

The recent unearthing of this thirteenth century collection of notes pertaining to the political history of the early Ilkhanate has thrown some light on events and attitudes of that time. Though the manuscript was actually penned by Quṭb al-Dīn Shīrāzī of the Rasadkhana in Maragha, it is not certain that he was the author of the work. Rather than comprising one continuous narrative of events, the manuscript is a collection of notes and observations, occasionally detailed but other times very sketchy. However stamped with the seal of the Raba’ al-Rashidi there is evidence that this text was used selectively as a source for Rashīd al-Din's Jama’-ye Tavarikh. What is particularly interesting is that some of the events that are quoted in Rashid al-Dīn's chronicles are only partially reported and it is obvious that for whatever reasons parts of “Shīrāzī's” accounts are omitted in the re-telling.

The Shī'ite revolts against the Umayyads may be said to have begun in 671. Immediately after his father's death in 661, al-Ḥasan had made an unsuccessful attempt to resist Mu'āwiyah, and had then retired to a life of luxury in Medina. Ten years later there was an abortive revolt in Kūfah led by Ḥujr b. ‘Adī al-Kindī. Next, in the troubled period after the death of Mu'āwiyah in 680, al-Ḥusayn, the younger son of 'Alī and Fāṭimah, with some encouragement from the Shī'ite party in Kūfah, came to 'Irāq and claimed the caliphate. He did not receive the support he had expected, however, and his small force of about a hundred was massacred at Karbalā'. In the confusion of the following years, with considerable support in ‘Irāq for Ibn az-Zubayr, the Shī'ites remained quiet; but on the death of Yazīd in 684 some of the older Shī'ites of Kūfah, led by Sulaymān b. Ṣuraḍ al-Khuzā'ī, preparedfor military action. The basis of this movement was twofold: they were to show that they repented of the betrayal of al-Ḥusayn (and so are known as the tawwābūn or Penitents), and they were to seek vengeance for his blood. Most of those who carried out the massacre at Karbalā' were living in Kūfah, but the governor who had despatched the army against al-Ḥusayn, 'Ubaydallāh b. Ziyād, had been forced to retire from 'Irāq and was now on the Syrian border with an army. After some debate they decided to march against him with their 4,000 men, but they were defeated and several of their leaders killed (Jan., 685).

Pedanius Dioscorides, a Greek physician and one of the first pharma-botanists is known mainly for his book De Materia Medica, a medical codex listing hundreds of medicinal substances. The Arabs admired Dioscorides’ legacy however they were very aware that their own inventory of drugs was much larger than his.

The Andalusian physician Ibn Juljul (944 – after 994) became famous on account of several medical treaties which he wrote. He devoted most of his time to identifying the drugs listed in Dioscorides’ monumental work, and thereafter wrote: “An article on the drugs not mentioned in Dioscorides’ book. . .”

This article analyzes and discusses the names of those drugs and presents an English translation of this work. The absence of these substances from Dioscorides’ codex, and from other classical sources of the pre-Islamic period (Theophrastus, Pliny, Galen, Paul of Aegina), is a prime reason for ascribing their distribution to the Arabs.

Ibn Juljul's list reflects the major change that took place in the inventory of Galeno-Arabic drugs after the Islamic conquests; about one hundred new substances. Some of these substances, such as the myrobalan, soon became among the most common and popular drugs in the practical pharmacology of the Middle Ages. The fact that about half of the substances not mentioned by Dioscorides are of “Indian” origin should be seen against the background of the influence of the Ayurvedic medical culture, to which the Arabs were exposed alongside the Greek.

When the people which spread the Brahminical religion and institutions from the valley of the Ganges, extended them, by migration and conquest, over the Indian peninsula, large portions of the primitive population remained unsubdued and unconverted where physical circumstances specially favoured their resistance to force and to the pressure of moral influences; and, accordingly, numerous remnants of them are now seen, scattered widely under the most various aspects, and often under highly interesting relations to the dominant people.

The following is an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of Mu'tazilite theology by looking at the political attitudes of its exponents. I am much indebted to H. S. Nyberg's pioneer work, notably his article Mu'tazila in the Encyclopedia of Islam and his edition of Kitāb al-Intiṣār. If different conclusions are reached, that is because his work has made possible a more radical estimate of the sources.