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.

Marsa Maṭruḥ, the classical Parætonium, lies about 150 land-miles west of Alexandria, on the Marmaric coast. During the winter of 1913–14, with the help of my friend W. J. Harding King, Esq., I made a preliminary archæological survey of the locality, and collected a few notes on the modern inhabitants.

This article argues for a re-evaluation of the ‘Islamist’ policies of the Mughal ruler Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir (r. 1658–1707), many of which were arguably harsher towards Shi‘i and millenarian groups than towards Hindus. By charting Aurangzeb's trials of millenarian leaders throughout his long reign, it suggests that the emperor's desire to introduce a more standardised legal system was at odds with the ‘millennial’ nature of his own kingship. The article further suggests we should look more closely at the influence of regional politics on Mughal policy-making. The fact that Sunni Gujarati clerics acquired a remarkable intimacy with Aurangzeb, both as prince and emperor, demonstrates how Gujarat's sectarian disputes and political economy could play out in the imperial court. Finally, the article calls for a realistic reappraisal of the long shadows cast by Aurangzeb's Islamist legalism.

In legal terminology kharáj means land tax, and jizya poll tax. It has been proved conclusively, and here it is only needful to mention the fact, that this usage is not primitive, and that both words, kharájin the east and jizya in Egypt, meant tribute. The commonly accepted tradition is that 'Umar I imposed two taxes, land and poll, which were uniform throughout the empire.

The Pahlavi text presented here has already been published, summarized, and translated (once with and once without transcription). Its contents cannot be said to be of great value, since no new light is thrown on the main theme—the advent of Shah Vahrām after the end of the Zaratušt-millennium. Yetthe text deserves to be treated again, if only for the fact, hitherto unnoticed, that it is a poem with rhyme. This fact must be welcomed for several reasons: firstly, as being of interest in itself; secondly as providing fresh material for the general study of prosody in pre-Islamic times; and finally as affording valuable help for the correct interpretation of the text.

“ Whosoever is harmonically composed delights in harmony; which makes me much distrust the symmetry of those heads which declaim against all Church-Musick. For my own part, not only from my obedience but my particular Genius, I do embrace it: for even that vulgar and Tavern-Musick, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion and a profound contemplation of the First Composer.” This is the confession of Sir Thomas Browne, and in that confession races the farthest apart join. The influence of music on the soul, the emotions it stirs, the fears and hopes it excites, all peoples, all climates, all ages have known. The negro at his camp-meeting, the darwīsh at his dhikr, are here kin with the English scholar and physician. For him it may not have been such a cataleptic ecstasy as befalls the negro or the darwīsh, but the cause was one and the essential nature. All religions have drawn strength and exaltation from this which lies at the root of all religion; it has ever kindled and fed the flame of devotion. The one could picture it to himself as “ a sensible fit of that harmony which intellectually sounds in the ears of God” ; the other can but ignorantly feel it working on his heart and soul, and sweeping him far from all the bonds of mind and thought. The unknown opens before him and clothes itself with his fancy.

Nine years ago, in the J.R.A.S. for January, 1898, pp. 61–94, I published an article entitled Some Notes on the Literature and Doctrines of the Ḥurúfi Sect. The materials for that article were chiefly derived from a manuscript of the Jávidán-i-Kabír (Ee. 1. 27) in the Cambridge University Library, and two manuscripts (Anciens Fonds Persan, 24, and Supplément Persan, 107) in the Bibliothèque Rationale at Paris, of which the former contained (1) the Istiwá-náma of the Amír Ghiyáthu'd-Dín Muḥammad b. Ḥusayn b. Muḥammad al-Ḥusayní, of Astarábád, composed shortly after A.H. 828 ( = A.D. 1425), (2) an allegorical mathnawi poem, and (3) a glossary of the dialect words used in the Jávidán-i-Kabir; while the latter contained another Huriifi treatise which appeared to be that entitled the MaḤabbat-náma. Thanks to information contributed by the late Mr. E. J. W. Gribb, I was also able to prove that the sect, which appears not to have taken root in Persia, the land of its birth, spread into Turkey, where it caused some commotion at several different periods, and suffered several fierce persecutions, amongst the victims of which (in A.H. 820 = A.D. 1417–18) was the bilingual poet Nesími, whose Díwán is not uncommon in manuscript, and was printed at the Akhtar Press in Constantinople in A.H. 1298 ( = A.D. 1881).

In the spring of 1934, a Chinese mission led by General Huang Musong, then Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Guomindang regime, was dispatched to Lhasa with the official purpose of offering condolences to the late 13th Dalai Lama who died in late 1933. Huang's visit to Tibet undoubtedly was the most politically symbolic event in Sino-Tibetan relations since the collapse of the Qing dynasty. He became the most high-profile of Chinese officials to have entered Lhasa since 1911, when the Chinese Republic was created. Before returning to Nanking, Huang left a representative office, along with a wireless set in Lhasa; these could be actions which the Chinese considered marked their authority in Tibet.

The passage treated here occurs in the seventh faṣl, “Concerning words which are frequently used in reference to conquests, expeditions and historical accounts of the Arabs during Islam,” of the sixth bāb of the first maqāla of al-Xwārazmī's Mafātīḥ al-'ulūm (pp. 119–20 of the edition of Van Vloten, Leiden 1895 = p. 73 of the edition of Cairo 1342/1923–4). The whole faṣl was published in the original and translated by J. M. Unvala in his article, “The translation of an extract from Mafātīḥ al-'Ulūm of al-Khwārazmī” in the Journal of the K.R. Cama Institute, XI, Bombay 1928, 76–110. However, Unvala was primarily an Iranian scholar and his commentary on the faṣl is oriented primarily in that direction. He was on weaker ground when dealing with Central Asiatic and especially Turkish topics: and this fact, together with the lapse of nearly 40 years since Unvala prepared his article, warrants a reconsideration of the brief section on Central Asia in the light of more recent researches.

The area, the geological features of which it is purposed to attempt a description of, so far as known, comprises peninsular India from Bombay on the west, and Ganjam on the east coast, to Cape Comorin, lying between the 8th and 20th degrees of north latitude. Its northern limit is skirted by the Sub-Vindhyan ranges, and the plains of Central India; while the remaining sides are washed by the ocean, and lie within the 72nd and 86th degrees of east longitude.

It would seem at first sight as if the history of a small African island were hardly worth the trouble of editing in its original and not very stylish Arabic dress. But it was a saying of Scaliger's that omnis historia bona, and no people seem to have realized the truth of this more than the Arabs. An event once recorded simply as and because it happened, may by the advance of time be brought into new clearness and significance. Once in possession of the fact we can agree upon the fiction at our leisure. And from this point of view we have every reason to be grateful that the influence of Islam tended to narrative rather than criticism, to veracity rather than profundity. In the present instance we have a record, scanty indeed and prosaic, but one to which in the excitement of the scramble for Africa we can hardly be indifferent. It is true that the author, after a fashion not uncommon in the East, conducts us to the crisis and turning-point of his story, and then suddenly relapses into silence, but not before we have seen and recognized “the intruder on his ancient home.” The arrival of Vasco da Gama opens a new chapter of history, of which, with its complications and surprises, we have not yet come to the end.

Man writes, as he speaks, by a special aptness of his nature. As a consequence he has used all sorts of methods and devices which are now in practice, more or less, for the transmission of thought by images, symbols, or arbitrary signs. Rude systems of writing are found everywhere in use, survival or tradition. Many more have totally disapppeared in course of time, superseded by some preferable system, either more advanced or better fitted to the surrounding circumstances. It is not a necessity of nature that these low means of communication should always be pictorial. Conventional marks used alone or in connection with figures play quite as great a part as images among these embryonic writings. And combinations of material and conventional symbols are frequently met.

The Khitai fill a notable place in Asiatic history, and the investigation of their ethnology and early history is full of interest and value. It is also surrounded by considerable difficulties. The Khitai, or Khitans as they are otherwise known, conquered Northern China, and it was from them that mediæval geographers and travellers derived the famous name of Cathay, which has much romance about it. The Russians to this day call the Chinese Kitai. The name was perhaps introduced into Europe by the Arabs, whose adventurous merchants began to frequent the ports of China during the supremacy of the Khitai; or it may have travelled westward through the intervention of the Turkish tribes of Central Asia, who called the Khitai Khatai. They never conquered Southern China, nor did their dominion there extend apparently beyond its six northern provinces; but they made up for this by dominating over the various nomade tribes who occupied the country from the river Hurka to Turkestan, and from the Chinese wall to the country of the Tunguses. The Mongols and the tribes of Manchuria were either immediately subject to them, or tributaries; and, in fact, the history of Eastern Asia from the beginning of the tenth to that of the twelfth century was focussed about the Khitai. When their dominion in the further East was broken, as I described in a previous paper, by the Kin or Golden Tartars, a branch of their royal house founded an empire further west, known as Kara Khitai, which has already occupied our attention.

According to ancient tradition the malady called with which the Israelites were once threatened and the Philistines were once plagued was “emerods” (E.V.), i.e. “hæmorrhoids” or “piles”, but according to modern scholars “buboes” or “plague-boils” (Hitzig). Which view is correct?

The poet, traveller, Arabist and campaigning anti-imperialist Wilfrid Blunt, who visited Gobineau in 1871, described him in his diary as follows: “Gobineau is a man of about 55, with grey hair and moustache, dark rather prominent eyes, sallow complexion, and tall figure with brisk almost jerky gait. In temperament he is nervous, energetic in manner, observant, but distrait, passing rapidly from thought to thought, a good talker but a bad listener. He is a savant, novelist, poet, sculptor, archaeologist, a man of taste, a man of the world”.1 On December 16 1904, Marcel Proust wrote to an old friend from schooldays, “Me voici gobinien. Je ne pense qu’à lui”.2 That old friend was Robert Dreyfus, the brother of the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus, and, together with Proust, one of the leading campaigners for Alfred's release from Devil's Island. (Alfred was only fully exonerated in 1906.) Proust, of course, skilfully worked the scandals and passions of the Dreyfus Affair into his great sequence of novels, À la recherche du temps perdu. As for Robert, he was to publish his Souvenirs sur Marcel Proust in 1926. But he had also published an admiring monograph entitled La vie et prophéties du Comte de Gobineau in 1909. All this may suggest that, though Count Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau (1816-82) was a racist, he may not have been a conventional one.

This article investigates political vocabulary and metaphor in the writings of al-Juwayni (d. 1085) to bring out the commitments and presuppositions of premodern Islamic political tradition and raises the question of their compatibility with those of the modern nation-state.

The Mughal emperors of India were remarkably mobile kings, inspiring modern historians to describe their imperial court culture as ‘peripatetic’. While the Mughals were not immune to the impulse to construct massive urban architect, no Mughal city, no matter how splendid, innovative, accessible or enlightened, remained the imperial centre for long. Through generations of Mughal rule in India, the political relevance of Mughal imperial cities continued to be very limited; it was physical mobility which remained at the centre of Mughal imperial court life and, for much of the Mughal period, the imperial court was encapsulated in the physical presence of the king.

Amongst those sciences which, after a long interval of ignorance and barbarity, were revived by the Mahomedan Arabs, astronomy ranks very high; and it cannot be denied, that had not the Arabs applied themselves to it with great assiduity and zeal, and encouraged all that served to promote its dissemination and advancement, after it had remained almost totally forgotten from the time of Ptolemy, the application to its study would, perhaps, never have extended over so large a portion of the globe as it has done. Although the pagan inhabitants of Arabia, before the time of Islamism, were in the habit of observing the stars, many of which they knew, and denominated by names taken from pastoral life, and several of which they even worshipped as visible gods, yet of a scientific knowledge of astronomy among them no traces can be discovered. The revival, therefore, of this celestial science, was principally attributable to their Mahomedan successors, who introduced its study into Arabia, at a time when the countries around them were immersed in the most deplorable state of mental darkness, which could only be dissipated by slow degrees.

Various Near Eastern and European writers of the thirteenth century remarked on the outlandish appearance of the Mongol warriors then rampaging across Eurasia. One aspect of this was their distinctive headgear. From our sources it is clear that Mongol costume could be exploited by non-Mongols in the Near East for a variety of purposes; how these distinctive hats were described, and how contemporary artists depicted them, will also be discussed.