I write this article in the spirit of the Persian poetic tradition, in which an answer to an earlier work takes off from the original and charts its own course. I will suggest that Tamerlane's recreation of the Mongol Empire was symbolic, and was part of his successful creation of a regional state which was at once Turco-Mongolian and Perso-Islamic. His experiment was continued and elaborated by his successors, and the resulting state provided a highly useful model for later dynasties in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Through my long engagement with Mongols and Turks, David Morgan's influence and aid have been a constant advantage and his friendship a recurring pleasure. Our acquaintance began in 1987 with a kind letter he sent me after reading the manuscript for The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane for the Cambridge University Press. Since then I have profited from his scholarship, have used his two books to teach generations of students, and have called on him for uncountable letters of recommendation, always generously given. I also want to thank David for asking me to write the Mongol chapter for the New Cambridge History of Islam, and thus attracting me into the Mongol period. It may seem odd to express my gratitude by writing an answer to David's article which is not entirely in agreement with his conclusions. I trust in the well-known openness of his mind and assume that he will take this in the spirit in which it is offered, as the continuation of many years of discussion.

This article engages with the 838–841/1435–1437 Anatolian adventures of the Mamluk amir Jānibak al-Ṣūfī. It demonstrates how Jānibak's narrative is a remarkable story full of meanings, which enable a more nuanced understanding of Mamluk engagements with southern and eastern Anatolia during the reign of sultan al-Ashraf Barsbāy (825–41/1422–38). First Jānibak's whereabouts in Anatolia are reconstructed on the one hand as they appear from contemporary source material and as they have been analysed in a handful of modern studies on the other. Against this historiographical background, a more comprehensive understanding of Jānibak's role and significance is then developed, combining local, Syro-Egyptian and Anatolian readings of Jānibak's story into one integrated social network approach. This reconstruction of Jānibak's social network in the Anatolian frontier zone finally leads to a number of conclusions on the complexity of political life in the 1430s in eastern Anatolia, on the nature of Barsbāy's state, and on the shared realities of 15th-century political cultures in the Nile-to-Black-Sea area.

This paper traces the history and usage of the theory of Sinicisation in western and Chinese scholarship, and discusses the intellectual trends underlying the different discourses in which the theory has been adopted. Since early 20th Century, the theory of “Sinicisation” has evolved and was adopted into three distinct historiographical discourses to construct different arguments. The first discourse is about the historical acculturation of border peoples and assimilation of domestic peoples to Chinese language, culture and economic life; the second one argues an inherent superiority in Chinese culture specifically produced cultural change across eastern Eurasia to promote nationalism; the third discourse emphasizes the diversity and mixture of the people living inside historical and contemporary China to construct and stabilise the polity. Every discourse rooted in its own intellectual trend, and also faces different criticism. Followed with examining criticisms of Sinicisation since the 1950s, this paper concludes by discussing the relationships of the three discourses of Sinicisation.

This article examines the significance of Buddhism in the insurgency that followed the annexation of the kingdom of Burma in 1886, demonstrating that Buddhism was a critically important part of the Burmese polity and identity. Moreover, it indicates that opposition to the British after the full colonisation of Burma was not only instantaneous, but also fuelled primarily by Buddhist sentiment. This challenges the prevailing notion that anti-colonialism in Burma – Buddhist-inspired or otherwise – was a twentieth century phenomenon. Beginning with the pre-colonial era, the article explores the intimate connection between Buddhism, the Burmese polity and the national psyche. The critical importance of the Buddhist king is emphasised in particular. When the kingdom of Burma was annexed in 1886, opposition to the British manifested itself instantaneously in the form of rebellions and insurgency. This period, sometimes referred to as the “pacification”, has been often ignored in studies. The article, using British colonial documents, shows clearly the importance of Buddhist sentiment in these uprisings as a response to the abolition of Burma's last Buddhist king. Buddhist themes present in translated rebel proclamations, as well as the widespread participation of Buddhist monks corroborate this.

Recent discoveries at Ur have thrown fresh light upon the Babylonian custom of burying beneath the floors of houses small figures intended to secure the houses and their occupants against sickness and evil spirits. There are texts giving instructions as to how such figures should be used, and examples of the figures themselves were already known, but now we have, to illustrate the texts, a far wider range of types and much more detailed information as to the manner of the actual ritual in connexion with them.

The Turkish Languages are unusually rich in numerical series, and there are pecularities in their numerical system which are, I believe, unparallelled elsewhere. The main facts are well known, and it might be thought that there was nothing more to be said about them; but several interesting points have never been properly discussed. The purpose of this paper is to call attention to them.

The last few decades have seen the publication of several hitherto unedited Arab sources relative to the history of the 'Abbāsid empire in the tenth century—such as Kitāb ta'rīkh al-wuzarā' by Hilāl aṣ-Ṣābi, the volumes of Miskawaihi's Kitāb tajārib al-umam, and at-Tanūkhī's Nishwār al-muḥāḍarā—that are a veritable storehouse of information on the social, economic, and political situation of that period. These works have revealed a completely new world to us: they show us, so to speak, the back stage of tenth century 'Abbāsid administration and we see the governmental machinery with all its ramifications in action.

This paper explores the varied reactions of the Turkish literati and intelligentsia to the adoption of the Roman script imposed by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1928. Though alphabet reform had been on the agenda for almost 75 years, few intellectuals and bureaucrats had been supportive of romanisation in the years preceding the move. However after the implementation of the reform, opponents remained silent or were seemingly converted. This article discusses the reasons behind the silence and conversion of the elites and the strategies of opposition developed by more radical defenders of the Ottoman script. Finally it records the impact of the reform on the literary world and literary historiography.

Travellers from the city of Peking to the town of Kalgan on the great wall of China, must make the journey by the rugged defile known as the Nankow Pass. Five miles north of the entrance, where the village of Nankow stands, is the smaller village of Keu-yung kwan. Fortifications there run up the steep slopes of the mountains on both sides of the valley; and besides arched gateways at the two ends of the village, the highway passes under a limestone archway of a much more striking appearance. This is covered with mythological and symbolic sculptures of obviously Indian origin. The tradition of the natives in the neighbourhood asserts it to have been the basement story of a pagoda which stood there; and the name by which it is still designated, Kwŏ keae t'à, “Pagoda crossing the street,” bears out the statement. We are told that this pagoda, though erected for the benefit of the locality, proved an object of such terror to the superstitious Mongols, coming south from their native wilds, that they could not be induced to pass under the ominous-looking structure; and thus it was found necessary in the early part of the Ming dynasty, to remove the upper stories of the erection; the policy of the government being to conciliate and attract these wild nomades.

Seldom has a work had such world-wide success and been translated into so many languages as the Indian stories and animal fables known as the Panchatantra. In the sixth century of our era they were translated from Sanskrit into Pehlevi. Thence they passed into Arabic; and from the Arabic text, called by Muhammadans the Fables of Bidpai or the Book of Kalila wa Diṁna, were made all those different versions through which these stories were transmitted to the countries of Europe.

The text contained in the MS. described below begins with three syllables śa-li-ẖbur, which scholars will naturally (unless illuded for a moment by the thought of sāli “year”) find suggestive of Śāriputra. The recurrence of the syllables will confirm this impression, more especially when far on in the document appears 'an.nog.da.la.sam. yag.sam.bu.de, previously recognized as=Sanskrit anuttara samyak-sambodhi. But, since the conjunction of this expression with the name of Śāriputra is frequently exemplified in the mass of Sanskrit Buddhist writings, we are grateful for the occurrence early in the text of the combination 'a.myi.ẖda, i.e. obviously Amitābha or Amitāyus, pointing to the Amitābha literature. When we come to try the smaller Sukhāvatīvyūka (published by Max Müller and Bunyiu Nanjio in Anecdota Oxoniensia, Aryan Series, vol. i, part ii, pp. 92–100), the distribution and character of the paragraphs soon enables us to fix upon sections ix(viii)–xx, of which several afford great assistance by furnishing names of numerals or of Buddhas in succession. As in the former case, some apparent divergencies from the Sanskrit original direct attention to the Chinese version translated into French by Messrs. Ymaizumi and Yamata in Annales du Musée Guimet, vol. ii, pp. 39–44. And this has enabled Captain Clauson to verify the whole text as a transcription, syllable for syllable, of Kumārajīva's rendering (Nanjio, No. 200). We give the Chinese characters from the India Office copy, and append a direct and inverse index of the syllables as represented in the Tibetan writing. From the interesting colophon it appears that the copy was a work of piety.

It is so long since Indo-Muslim numismatics first attracted scholarly attention and there have been so many devoted labourers in this field that it is gratifying to note a new coinage struck by yet another Indo-Muslim dynasty. To the best of the knowledge of the present writer no coinage of the Samma Jāms of Sind (14th–16th century a.d.) has yet been published. This paper records two varieties of their copper coinage, dating from the latest period of their rule.

We must admit that very little is known about the first development of Indian logic and particularly about Buddhist logic before Diṅnāga. If we take the best manuals of Indian logic now available, such as those by Suali, Vidyābhūṣāṇa, Keith, or the most comprehensive Histories of Indian philosophy like those of Dāsgupta and Rādhākrishna we shall easily recognize that the data contained therein are far from being satisfactory; more than that, they are also very often wrong. In fact, almost the only source from which their statements are derived is the book by Sugiura, who certainly had the merit of giving the first account of Indian logic as preserved in Chinese sources, but, being himself absolutely without knowledge of orthodox nyāya and of Sanscrit, is in his statements and in his translations very often misleading.

A brief glance at any bibliography for a history of Cambodia written in the last hundred years will reveal the immense preoccupation that historians have had with the institution of kingship. Yet nothing has been written on autonomously ruling queens, despite the acceptance by some twentieth-century historians that at least two such queens apparently ruled in pre-classical Cambodia (c. 50-802). These female sovereigns have been considered an anomaly, their reigns evidence that the political and social fabric of pre-classical society was rent asunder by the intrusion of female rulers into a male domain. Such a scenario is at variance with epigraphic evidence. One of the queens accepted by twentieth-century historians as an autonomous female ruler belongs to the eleventh century, not the seventh, as previously determined. Moreover, it appears that in most pre-classical Cambodian polities, women held the power of sovereignty, even if they did not rule independently. This not only raises questions regarding the accepted understanding of gender and power in pre-classical Cambodia, but also calls for a revision of pre-classical Cambodian history.

Detective fiction counts amongst the most successful literary products that the metropolitan west has exported to the world periphery. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of the Second World War the genre acquired a global presence – both in the form of translations of existing works such as the Sherlock Holmes stories, and in the form of numerous indigenous adaptations. This kind of literature represented a prime example of the mass-produced and mass-circulated print entertainment that was part and parcel of the emergence of mass consumption as a social form. Detective fiction was, thus, both a carrier and an expression of modernity. While some literary theorists have pointed to longstanding historical antecedents, detective fiction would not have made sense in earlier historical epochs. The principles of scientific enquiry permeate the genre throughout, not just in terms of the ubiquitous magnifying glasses, finger-prints and assorted scientific apparatuses, but in terms of the subject matter itself – the fact that it is possible to make sense of an increasingly confusing world by uncovering hidden causal connections through rational enquiry.

Since the publication of the third part of my Memoir on the Cuneiform Inscriptions of Van in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (xx. 1.) for 1882, the number of new Vannic inscriptions which have come to my knowledge has been but small. During the winter of 1888–1889 Prof. H. Hyvernat and M. Müller-Simonis travelled in Armenia, and Prof. Hyvernat made every effort to discover fresh cuneiform inscriptions and re-copy those which were previously known. But unfortunately political intrigue and religious antipathies, aided by the severity of the winter, so seriously impeded his efforts as to oblige him to leave the country with few additions to our knowledge of its early epigraphy. That many more inscriptions, however, exist above ground besides those with which we are already acquainted has recently been ascertained by a German engineer, Dr. Belck, who has been settled in Armenia for some time past.

The possibility of understanding certain parts of the Yh-King, such as the ethnological chapters and the legendary ballads, led early to the conclusion, that the whole of these documents could be currently read and interpreted. It is quite possible that the hexagrams were attached to them merely as a system of numerical classification to keep them in proper order; but it is more likely that the antiquity of these obscure documents, and the tradition that they contained a treasure of ancient wisdom, first led to their use as fateful and prophetic sentences, in which some glimmer of meaning was detected or surmised, and that the hexagrams were then applied to them for the purposes of divination.

A pre-Sasanian Middle Persian inscription on a silver bowl is published here for the first time and compared with a similar inscription published by P. O. Skjærvø in 2000 and identified by him as naming members of the dynasty which ruled Persis (Fārs) in the 1st century bce. The commentary concentrates on the word šʾtḥw, apparently a name for this type of bowl, and on the importance of these inscriptions for the history of the Pahlavi script.

This article analyses philological and literary aspects of a jātaka tale with a pygmalionesque motif involving a craftsman who falls in love with a non-human woman. This tale circulated along the Silk Road in at least six different versions: two original Sanskrit versions; one Tibetan translation from the Sanskrit source; one Tocharian adaptation; and two Chinese translations that also adapt the work to a smaller degree than the Tocharian version. By analysing the textual contexts and the content of the tale in all its alterations, this article shows that the two versions that differ most from the others, the Tocharian and the older Chinese version, are closely related to each other. Further analysis of the Tocharian version situates the tale among its literary kin. An analysis of the formulaic elements of the Tocharian tale indicates possible relations to Chinese chu-kung-tiao and pien-wen genres. The article also suggests the Tibetan lha mo as a link between Indian prosimetric campū style and the two Chinese genres. Finally, the analysis of the cluster of motifs in the tale is paralleled with canonical Western texts by Ovid and E. T. A. Hoffmann, opening fruitful venues for literary scholarship regarding human-like objects.

A modern student of Buddhism, unfamiliar with Buddhist art, and accustomed to think of the Buddha only as a human and historical figure, would naturally expect to find the Śākya sage represented in art like any other Buddhist friar, with a shaven (muṇḍa) head; and to suppose that such representations could only have existed as memorials, and not as objects of a cult. As a matter of fact, however, the Buddha is always represented, although not in royal garb, as a deity, with a nimbus, lotus or lion throne, and certain physical peculiarities proper to the conception of a MahāPuruṣa and Cakravartin or King of the World. But crowned and otherwise ornamented Buddhas are not unknown, and again, the earliest Indian type differs in several respects from the established formula of the Gupta and later periods. Thus the Buddha iconography presents a number of difficult problems; and amongst these are those referred to in the title of this paper.