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.

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.

No 1 (large folio of 460 pages) contains the About the hero see Malayan Annals, translated by Leyden, chapters xiv. and xvi. A small extract is found in Crawfurd's “History of the Indian Archipelago,” ii. p. 51. Manuscripts of this work, the text of which might be available, are in the possession of Mr. J. Pijnappel, at Leyden; and of Mr. E. Netscher, at Riyow. The last chapters of this tale are found in No. 2607 of the manuscripts of the India Office, commencing with that part where the king of Mălaka intends to make one of his sons king on Mount Siguntang.

This composition is very interesting, as it exhibits a faithful picture of Malay life, and is written in genuine Malay.

No. 2 (large folio of 288 pages; the last four pages are filled up with doggrel rhymes by some transcriber).

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).

The tomb-scenes of Egypt of all periods are particularly rich in pictures of various phases of agricultural life: so complete is our material that it is possible to reconstruct every episode of the farmer's year. The newly sown seed was turned into the ground by various methods, sometimes by means of the hoe and human labour, sometimes by means of the plough drawn by oxen, and sometimes, again, it was trodden in by animals. From Herodotus' statement, it might appear that the only method of treading-in corn was by means of swine, but actually this method is very rarely met with. So far as I know, there is no instance of this procedure earlier than the eighteenth dynasty. In two Theban tombs (Nos. 24 and 146), each of which belonged to a different person bearing the name Nebamun, amongst the agricultural scenes, pigs are seen following the sower to tread in the grain. Both these tombs date from the reign of Tuthmosis III.

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 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.

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 Thai kingdom of Ayudhyā endured several periods of crisis during its long history from 1350 to 1767, but the crisis which will concern us here happened in 1592. During that year the king, Nareśvara, was well aware that he lived in a hostile world of unusually wide dimensions. His behaviour will be discussed as a basis for a brief consideration of Ayudhyā's attitude towards the world, a subject of more than diplomatic interest.

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.

I have the honour to return you Sir James Mackintosh's interesting memoir. It possesses (like every thing which comes from the pen of that gifted and ingenious writer) the highest interest; and the ideas which are so luminously developed in it have the more merit, if we consider, that, at the period when this memoir was published, philosophical notions on the study and nature of languages were rarer and more novel than they are at present.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This article provides an historical review of the Arabic rendering of Swahili, while Appendix A (Parts I and II) contains proposals for the development of Arabic script to yield a phonologically adequate writing system for a variety of Swahili spoken on the East African coast – the variety known as kiMvita (central Swahili), and spoken from just north of T’akaungu to Mombasa, and thence as far south as Gasi. Parallel possibilities for the refinement of romanised script are not considered in any detail.

It should be stressed that kiMvita, the variety of Swahili here described, is not the standardised language. For a number of reasons, the Swahili speech of Zanzibar town, together with the Swahili spoken by Africans from the interior of the continent but resident in Zanzibar, were the varieties of Swahili with which the pioneering standardises of Swahili were familiar.

Usually the European perception of South Asia and, related to it, academic research into this region, is informed by specific, powerful images and metaphors that establish a dichotomisation of the world. The reasons for this development cannot be analysed in detail here. Suffice it to say, however, that this organisation and designation of the world has deep roots. Until the Reformation, Europe was basically perceived only in terms of geographical boundaries. But the dichotomy between “Europe” and “Asia” acquired a new dimension in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when, in the wake of a change of paradigm into modernity, European self-consciousness gradually developed into a sense of European intellectual superiority. Just as a new form of collective identity had developed within the boundaries of Europe, based on the idea of “nation” in the late eighteenth century, and just as the members of the early nation-states forcibly dissociated themselves by definition from members of other societies in order to be able to establish their own identity, now, with the same intention, though on a different level, Europeans dissociated themselves from “Asia”, the “Orient” and “Islam”. The political recollection of important master narratives kept the mythical fictions in mind and imbued the nation-building process with enormous real power. This development towards a modern European identity was based, as can be deduced from many travellers' testimonies, on the history of reception, reciprocal perceptions, and the development of enemy images. In this process, the Orient and the Orientals were also used by Europeans as a didactic background for the critique of their own (European) urban societies. The literary technique of contextual alienation and distancing, such as can be found in Montesquieu's “Persian Letters”, was born in this period. These and following processes of projection were connected among others things with the fact that Europeans, as colonial masters, advanced to confront the world outside Europe. There they were faced with attitudes and norms that forced them to question their own perceptions. In doing so, they also tended to accept some of these strange and different ideas, and, thus, exposed themselves to cultural hybridisation which could then only be overcome by the reconstructing of their own culture as something “pure”, in contrast to the “degenerate” culture of the colonialised. In this way, collective antagonisms developed. Even the Oriental crusades that had been critically evaluated by European academicians, were now for the first time perceived in terms of cultural clash. Analogously, Europe and Asia were constructed in the eighteenth century and very predominantly in the nineteenth century in terms of arenas of power politics. For instance, it was during this time that the eastern borders of Europe were conceptualised, with the Balkans and Transoxania being considered as buffers or gaps between the two.