a well-known find of a vehicle-model in the Indus civilization is the fragmentary copper representation of a covered cart found at a depth of 10 feet 6 inches in Stratum IV of Mound F at Harappā (Vats 1940, I, 99, 452; II, Pl. CXXV, 35), illustrated here by a drawing made from the original in 1943 (Fig. 1). It has a virtually exact counterpart from Chanhu-dāro (Mackay 1943, Pl. LVIII, 2) which, however, lacks not only the draught animals but the figure of the driver. The Harappā model clearly shows that in its unbroken condition it had a central draught-pole, with model animals projecting from the body of the cart on rods, the broken stumps of which look for a moment deceptively like an anachronistic pair of shafts. Both models would originally have possessed a pair of wheels carried on an axle turning in the loops below the vehicle.

Under the title “Le Livre du Coq («Matzḥafa Dorho»)”, M. Chaîne published a short extract from MS. B.N. d'Abbadie 11, a MS. of the Ethiopian Holy Week Lectionary Gabrä ḥamamat (henceforth GḤ). Some citations of Chaîne's article give the impression that (i) the extract is complete in itself, (ii) it is properly entitled Mäṣḥafä dorho, and (iii) catalogue descriptions of MSS of GḤ can simply be cross-referenced to it; Chaîne's introduction does not encourage these assumptions.

Chaîne's extract appears in the printed edition of GḤ2 as part of the first of nine ‘homilies’, each headed dәrsan wätәmhәrt zä'abäwinä ḥawaryat qәddusan zämäharunä …, “homily and teaching of our fathers the holy apostles, which they taught us …”; the first of these “homilies” is additionally headed Mäṣḥafä doroho (sic).

“Quanta sea la aversion entre Portuguéses, y Castellânos, es cósa tan sabída, que no necessita testimónios,” wrote the Spanish Friar, Juan Francisco de San Antonio, O.F.M., in his Chronicas of the Franciscan Order in the Philippines, China, and Japan, printed at the Convent of Our Lady of Loreto, at Sampaloc, a suburb of Manila, in 1738–41 (vol. ii, book i, ch. xv, page 81). Although, like most ex-cathedra pronouncements, this sweeping statement does not hold good for all times and places, it was undoubtedly correct for the region and century with which this essay is primarily concerned.

Dear Sir, — You have requested, me to write some account of the work which I have in hand concerning the Libyan languages. I cannot satisfy myself without a rather lengthy introduction, which must begin with some account of my sources of knowledge. It may be best to open these historically.

Venture de Paradis, Professor of Turkish in the Paris School of Living Languages, initiated the study of the native language spoken on the highlands and slopes of Mount Atlas. He was well acquainted with Arabic and Persian, and was selected by Napoleon the First as “Secretary Interpreter” to the Chief of the Army in Egypt. The celebrated Amédée Jaubert, his successor in the Turkish Professorship, gives high testimony to his powers and activity.

In a paper published in the Numismatic Chronicle (1873, Part I. page 60), I enumerated and described all the glass discs with Kufic inscriptions which had till then come under my notice; comprising those in my own cabinet, M. Sauvaire's collection, and others in the possession of the Rev. Greville Chester. I then advanced my reasons for believing that these discs were standard coin-weights. The theory that they were tokens, or equivalents of coins, had been supported by several learned writers; but all those students and collectors with whom I have since been in communication now recognize them as weights.

It is my intention to trace the history and evolution of the dome in Persia from the earliest times to the present day; and I hope to show at the same time the very important part played by Persia in the evolution of domed construction, which I believe has never been pointed out before. Before I can do this, however, I must first briefly review the dome in antiquity.

Ever since the establishment of the Fatimid empire in the early part of the 10th century of the Christian era the origin of its rulers has been the subject of incessant discussion and polemics. This was, for the people of the time, no idle academic question, but one of immediate political importance. The defenders of the declining Abbasid state went to great lengths to discredit the rulers of the dynamic rival caliphate in the West, denouncing them not only as rebels and heretics, but also as impudent swindlers falsely claiming to belong to the house of the Prophet, while they were in reality the offspring of one Maymūn al-Qaddāḥ. The Fatimid rulers, for their part, maintained all along that they did indeed belong to the family of Muḥammad, and traced their lineage, at least from the middle of the 10th century onwards, to Ismā‘īl, the second son and, it was claimed, only legitimate successor of the famous Shi‘ite leader Ja‘far al-Ṣādiq, the great-grandson of ‘All and of Fāṭimah, the Prophet's daughter. The Ismaili descent of these rulers became a matter of faith for their partisans, who survive to the present day, in various branches, proudly identifying themselves precisely as “Ismailis”. Historians, whether in the Muslim world or, later, in the West, have taken sides in this ancient dispute, which flares up again from time to time, often with astonishing ferocity.

[It will be of use to the future historian of British India, to know the precise periods at which the British government granted to the natives of the Island of Ceylon, and of the different parts of India, those rights which are alike calculated to elevate both their moral and their political character; and, also, to be enabled to refer to the opinions which were entertained at the time upon the subject, by the people of the country. One of the most important of these rights was that of sitting upon juries, and of being tried by juries of their own countrymen. It is, therefore, thought advisable to record the period, and to give some account of the circumstances under which the British government granted this right to the natives of the Island of Ceylon, and to the natives of the different parts of India; and, also, to give a copy of a paper written to Mr. GræMe, the late Governor of Madras, by Rám Ráz, who was native Chief Judge of the Mysore country, and one of the most enlightened of the Hindú inhabitants of the peninsula of India.

It is a well-known fact that descendants of the Visigothic kings lived on in Spain under Muslim rule for several centuries. An important early historian of Muslim Spain, Ibn al-Qüṭīyah (died 367/977), owes his name—“son of the Gothic woman”—to descent from the princess Sara, granddaughter of King Witiza, and in his Iftitāḥ gives an account of the destinies of several members of the family. The following pages will, I hope, serve to throw light on one of these and at the same time to clear up a bibliographical problem which has never been properly solved.

The following classified references may prove useful and suggestive to the student of the economic conditions of ancient India. The work accomplished by Professor Zimmer in his Altindisches Leben, which contains, among so much of varied interest, almost all that may be gleaned on the political economy of Vedic times, has not been carried on with respect to the advancing civilization of the succeeding centuries. Mr. Romesh Chunder Dutt's important compilation, the Civilization of Ancient India, cannot, from the magnitude of its scope, treat adequately of what the literature of that era lets us see concerning rural economy, organization of industry, and methods of exchange. Dr. Fick's Sociale Gliederung im Nordöstlichen Indien is most valuable and suggestive as far as it goes. But it is compiled from a sociological and not from a specifically economic standpoint. Yet if we consider the ancient records now accessible, contemporary respectively with the age which preceded and with that which saw the rise of Buddhism and Jainism, and with the times of the earlier and succeeding ‘law-books’ —covering, from b.c. 800, let us say, a thousand years,— we may find materials sufficient to justify at all events some initial efforts to gain a coherent outline of economic institutions. I do not pretend that the passages noted are at all exhaustive; I am confident that much valuable material remains embedded both in edited and unedited texts.

The following transcript of a Persian Newspaper, lithographed and printed at Tehran, is given as a specimen of the political advancement of the Persians, among whom a printing press is but of very recent introduction. The newspaper was undertaken a few years since, under the editorship of Mirza Salih, one of the public secretaries of H. M. the Shah of Persia, who has been employed on a diplomatic mission in this country. The original is lithographed on two large folios, printed on one side only; it is closely written in a plain hand, and is surmounted by the Persian emblem of the Lion and Sun.

The organization of the nobility of the Indian Mughal Empire in numerical grades (manṣabs) is now generally recognized as one of the basic elements of its administrative and military structure. Equally general, perhaps, has been a recognition of the manṣab system's many complexities. However, by combining the information in Abu 'l-Faẓl's Ā'īn-i Akbarī with a number of 17th-century texts and documents, it has been possible to construct a tolerable picture of the working of the manṣab system during the 17th century. In many respects, the basic features were first delineated by Moreland and Abdul Aziz; but their views have been greatly refined, and often substantially revised, by M. Athar Ali and Irfan Habib. It is now accepted as beyond argument that by Akbar's death (1605), manṣab was explained in two numerical representations: the first, zāt, determined the holder's personal pay (ṭalab-i khāṣa) and status in the hierarchy; the second (sawār) indicated the number of horsemen to be maintained by the holder and set the amount sanctioned to cover their pay (ṭalab-i tābīnān). In each case, the rank-number was converted into monetary claims and military obligation by means of the schedules (dastūr al-'amals) in force at the time. The system undoubtedly gave to the Mughal nobility and military machine a high degree of uniformity and regularity in its functioning, which is likely to have contributed greatly to the stability and strength of the Empire.

This article examines the relationship between the leader of the Aqquyunlu Turkman confederation, ‘Uthmān Beg Qarā Yulūk, and the Mamluk Sultanate, with an eye to the ways in which the Mamluks sought to define the limits of sultanic sovereignty on the frontier, as well as the ways in which Qarā Yulūk sought to pursue his own interests and those of his tribal followers within the framework of the Mamluk political order. What becomes apparent is that while the interests of the Turkmans ultimately clashed with those of the Mamluk sultans on the Anatolian frontier, both Qarā Yulūk and the Mamluks shared a common interest in maintaining a relationship in which formal recognition of Aqquyunlu autonomy was exchanged for ritual submission to the sultan.

Kalīlah wa Dimnah, a compendium of individual tales and short stories, is a very well-known Middle Eastern literary work. Although it can not match the popularity of the ‘One Thousand and One Nights’, it is nevertheless sufficiently well known to have attracted scholarly interest for decades. As a result, a considerable volume of scholarly writing has been produced regarding its origin and importance.

This article focuses on the origin of one story in the work, the trial of Dimnah. Since the Indian original is missing, accepted wisdom attributes the writing of this story to its first Arabic translator, Ibn al-Muqaffac. Although I do not challenge this view, I argue that there could be an Urtext in Middle Persian which was later rewritten by the famous translator. In what follows, this article provides evidence for this hypothesis from what at first glance might be considered a surprising perspective – Sasanian legal history.

The ‘discovery’ of early Chinese, and its subsequent reconstruction, have allowed the modern linguist to reach a wide range of firm conclusions about the Chinese language and its position within the Tibeto-Burman family. Reverend Joseph Edkins (1823–1905) should be credited with initial work on early Chinese as the ancestor language of the various Sinitic languages, and with its first partial reconstruction. This article is an attempt to supply at least a first historical guide for those interested in obtaining a better understanding of the implicit discovery of Sinitic and the first reconstructions of early Chinese.

Few nations, either ancient or modern, have surpassed the Amazirgs, or lineal descendants of the primitive inhabitants of northern Africa, in power to produce a more ingenious and contemplative writer than the one now before us. And yet this writer, equally profound as an historian and as a statesman, has hitherto been so little known in Europe, that the majority of our Arabic scholars have but very confused notions of his scientific and literary merits, and to many, even his name is almost unknown. In the East, and in Africa, however, the great historical work he has composed, has given him a celebrity which no lapse of time, nor any vicissitude of events, will ever impair or lessen.