The Kan narrative presents a series of events that are believed, by many Cambodians today including top leaders, to be the historical contestation for kingship between a commoner named Kan and members of the royal family during the early sixteenth century. Discussing the contents, the formats, the epistemology, and key figures bound up in the Kan narrative, this article provides insights on its contextual origins and reception as well as the texts that recount it. Rather than a proven historical episode, the narrative was effectively re-constructed by two groups of chronicle writers during the early 1900s in order to promote ideas about ‘treason’ and ‘loyalty’ to the throne. Uncovering the contextual origins and reception of the narrative not only allows us to understand the process whereby a long-held body of local scholarship lying outside the scholarly practice of ‘history’ in the present-day sense was used to shape collective knowledge, but also to see its profound impact on colonial and post-independence collective memory and culture.

The second part of this paper will be occupied by an attempt to show how the ancient Indian system of numeral signs, described in Part L, was simplified. In other words, it will be attempted to show how this old system became the parent of that now used in India, which employs only nine units and a zero,—indeed of that system as used not in India alone, but now almost universally both in eastern and western countries

I. The Malagasy belongs unquestionably to the stock of languages which have been denominated Malayo-Polynesian, and more particularly to the great Western Branch, which comprehends the languages of the lank-haired races of the Indian Archipelago and the Philippines, and which we shall call Malayan (from the most predominating language in that part of the globe), to distinguish it from the Eastern Branch, which may be called Maorian (from the Maori of New Zealand), the geographical term Polynesian haying the disadvantage of not excluding the languages of the crisp-haired races. The Malagasy bears the greatest analogy to the Toba dialect of the Batak in pronunciation (III), and many salient points in its grammatical structure may be pointed out (IV) to prove its affinity to Javanese, Batak, Malay, Dayak, and other Malayan tongues.

Since the Shī'ī response to constitutionalist notions of government is potentially a very large subject, for the purposes of this discussion Shī'ī will be taken to mean the members of the orthodox 'ulamā, those most committed to the sharī'a and learned in its precepts. Whilst even within this group there is a wide diversity of opinion, it is hoped that, by looking at works written over a longer period, the discussion will show that the response by a particular ‘ālim to constitutionalism is to some extent influenced by the political conditions prevailing at the time of writing. These form a factor together with the restrictions imposed by the sharī'a in shaping the views of particular writers. The ideology under consideration is constitutionalism, but it will be observed that for a large part the subject matter treated consists of ideas such as representation, consultation, legislation, freedom and equality, which are allied to the constitutionalist theory of government, rather than the complete theory itself.

In my previous note on page 655 ff. above, I have given the narrative of the Mahāparinibbāna-Sutta about the cremation of the corpse of Buddha and the original distribution and enshrining of his corporeal relics. We come now to the tradition about the subsequent fate of the eight deposits of those relics, which were placed in Stūpas or memorial mounds at the localities shewn in the list given on page 671. And we take this matter in the order, as closely as we can determine it, of the dates of the writings from which we gather the tradition ; which, however, is of course not necessarily the order in which the tradition was developed.

Western science began to penetrate to the Far East at the end of the sixteenth century, along with the Christian faith spread by Portuguese Jesuits.

Astrology was important in both China and Japan. It included not only a limited knowledge of astronomy, but some philosophy and logic. The advent of astronomical knowledge as understood in Europe was the beginning of a new kind of science, which did not affect the East's traditional view of the universe; although at first information from Europe about medicine, physics, and astronomy reached the Far East along with the doctrines of Christianity, as a means of attracting converts to what the Chinese termed a new philosophy of life. An early propagator of Western civilization in China was the Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1553–1610), who taught medicine and astrology together with the principles of Catholicism. Another Jesuit, Francis Xavier, advised his superiors to send a mission consisting not only of the devout but also of the cultured.

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries tempted several European nations to exploit the opportunities for overseas trade by expanding their influence in distant seas and lands. When Vasco de Gama discovered a new route between Europe and South-East Asia during the last decade of the fifteenth century, Europeans increased their search for new colonies and for new trade routes. Like many other nations of the region the people of Balochistan also felt the impact of this new phenomenon. The Portuguese were the first European Colonisers to reach their shores.

A number of years ago, Dr D. K. Bassett pointed out that the English East India Company's objective in re-entering East Asian waters during the second half of the seventeenth century was the re-establishment of a direct trade with Japan from which the company had withdrawn in 1623. It was a futile pursuit. But, far from being an inconsequential historical footnote, the unintended consequence of this policy was the beginning of a direct trade with China, first mooted in the 1610s and which was to prove of greater consequence to the company's fortunes than the chimera of trade with Tokugawa Japan. It is within this context and that of the changing fortunes of the English company and its Dutch rival as well as the broader East Asian situation that the brief, and largely ignored, history of the company's factory on Taiwan is worth examining.

It is one of the most popular devices of wits and humorists of all nations to make use of various slang expressions, dialectical or rustic sentences, or local words in order to add to the “fun” in their narrative. Persians are no exception to this. Moreover, educated people regard all the numerous local dialects of Iran as unwritten languages and in their writings occasionally make use of them, but only for such facetious purposes. Peasants and the less educated people strive to use high-flown diction in their correspondence, and even in their songs an imitation of this appears instead of their native dialects.

In Muslim countries adherents of the protected religions had to put up with certain restrictions on their public life. It was held that this was sanctioned by the Ḳur'ān, “Until they pay tribute out of hand, and they be humbled.” This humiliation is often mentioned in the early treaties.

Surprisingly, the history of Chinese studies in Britain has received little academic attention. In fact, its development in the twentieth century, and its problems and lack of world standing actually tell us much about the background to Sino-British relations, and especially about the resources available to enable those interested, for professional, business, evangelical or plainly academic reasons, to understand China and the Chinese. British sinology in the interwar period, if discussed at all, is routinely condemned by historians. After 1949 China was closed off to outside contacts; not surprisingly, commentators thereafter look back jealously to the opportunities for close and frequent contact that were available before the revolution but which they saw as being apparently wasted. This common judgement does not, however, do full justice to the scale of the underlying problems, especially financial ones, faced by academic institutions that taught Chinese.

Towards the end of the eleventh chapter of the Śṛṅgāraprakāśa, there is an aside in gāthās that surveys the genres that king Bhoja accepts as constituting the complete range of literary form. The passage is long, 14 pages in Raghavan's edition, and gives us some idea of the unusual flavour of the Śṛṅgāraprakāśa as a whole. Much of it is taken over en bloc from the Nāṭyaśāstra's eighteenth adhyāya, although with considerable reorganisation and occasional rewriting by Bhoja to account for the spectrum of forms said to be prekṣya ‘visible’ or abhineya ‘performable’. When the text next moves to the anabhineya or ‘non-performable’ types (that is, what other genre surveys, following Kāvyādarśa 1: 39, would call śravyakāvya), Bhoja composes his own verses, though continuing in a very similar style to the old Bhāratīya gāthās, to account for the rest of his typology.

This article aims to discuss the question of the inculturation of Syriac Christianity in Central Asia, based on archaeological examples including architectural evidence from a particular ethnocultural area: Sogdiana. It questions to what extent the Eastern Syriac Church has become rooted in local culture, thus enabling Christian communities to express their faith in both material and artistic ways. This article is divided into two sections which present a comprehensive study of the medieval sources relevant to the spread and establishment of Christianity in the Central Asian landmass by considering and analyzing existing tangible evidence. In doing so, it provides assessment of comparable evidence, which demonstrates both the “extended” and an “immediate” context in which Eastern Syriac Christianity was accepted, adapted and transformed into a localised expression of Christian faith.

The ancient lunisolar calendar of the Hindus is still widely used in India, especially for ritual purposes. In most of India, months are lunar and the discrepancy between lunar and solar years (12 lunar months equal approximately 354 days) is resolved by the periodic addition of an intercalary month into the year. However, in Tamilnadu, Kerala and eastern India (Bengal, Orissa and Assam), months are solar, but because the lunar calendar is also used, complications arise which are absent in areas employing only the lunar calendar. The aim of this paper is to describe the calendrical system currently in use in Tamilnadu and to explain the basic principles of the Tamil almanacs.

The aim of the present article is to describe the morphosyntactic properties of Iranian Coastal Balochi as spoken by the Afro-Balochi community. The Afro-Baloch have completely switched to Balochi and there are no traces of African languages in their speech. In comparison with other Balochi dialects of Iran on the one hand and Coastal Balochi dialects of Pakistan on the other, Coastal Balochi as spoken in Iran shows archaic characteristics, particularly in its case system, in the demonstrative pronouns and in the alignment features. This particularly applies to the speech of the Afro-Baloch, who due to persisting social segregation have limited access to education and media.

Exchange and reciprocity are central concepts in all forms of human society. Based on a system of mutual obligation, they denote any activity in which valuables are circulated between individuals or groups of people. In the religious sphere they include the transfer of both material and immaterial goods between human and spiritual beings. As outlined by Marcel Mauss in his Essai sur le don, the classic work on the total system of reciprocity, such exchange is governed by the principle of the gift entailing the counter-gift.

The fragment here referred to belongs to Mr. John Quinn, jun., of Liverpool, and was purchased by him from the collection of the late Mr. Boutcher, artist to Mr. W. K. Loftus in Assyria. The height and the width are nearly the same, being about two inches and seven-eighths. Like all the tablets from Nineveh, it is of baked clay, but the colour is much darker than the generality of documents from that site which have not been stained with bitumen, or some other material, in consequence of their 2,500 years' burial in the earth. According to a statement made by the agent who sold it, the fragment, at the time it came into his hands, was covered with grease, which would account for the exceedingly dark brown of the surface. Unfortunately, none of the lines, which number eighteen in all, are complete, about a third only of the middle portion of the longest of them being preserved.

Southern Iouthern abounds in prehistoric remains, mostly of the neolithic, but some few undoubtedly of the palaeolithic age; and of all the districts of the Madras Presidency none is more remarkable in this respect than the country about Bellary. The present area of this division comprises the old capital of the Vijayanagar kingdom, now usually called Hampe, from the name of alittle village on the Tungabhadra River, which in the old palmy daysconstituted a small fraction of the great city. On the south of the districtthe territories of Maisūr form the boundary. The fine old rock-fortress of Adoni lies near its eastern frontier, and on the north the Tungabhadra River divides it from the country belonging to the Nizām of Haidarābād. Within these boundaries are seen in every direction rocky hills with a very sparse covering of vegetation, standing boldly out of the level plain, some singly, some in ridges, and in a few tracts massed together into confused heaps extending in all directions for many miles.

The first decade of the 21st century proved remarkably fertile in yielding up manuscripts relevant to the earliest direct contacts between Latin Europe and the Mongol empire – namely, those framed by the devastation of Rus´ (1237-40), Poland, Moravia and Hungary (1241-2) by the Mongols (or ‘Tartars’) and the subsequent despatch to the Mongol world of three parties of friars (1245-7) as envoys of Pope Innocent IV. These texts include:- (1) an early manuscript of the Epistula de vita secta et origine Tartarorum of the Hungarian Dominican Julian, who travelled to the Ural region in 1236–7 in search of the Hungarians’ pagan kinsmen in what was known as ‘Greater Hungary’, and returned with news of the imminent Mongol assault on Rus´; (2) two hitherto unknown letters from the Nestorian monk Simeon Rabban-ata to the Emperor Frederick II and King Louis IX of France, brought back from Azerbaijan in 1247 by one of Innocent IV's envoys, the Dominican André de Longjumeau; and (3) a second copy of the so-called ‘Tartar Relation’, an account produced in Poland in mid July 1247 by a Franciscan friar calling himself ‘C. de Bridia’ and closely linked with the most celebrated of the papal embassies to the Mongols, which was led by the Franciscan John of Plano Carpini and travelled across the Eurasian steppes as far as the court of the Qaghan Güyük in Mongolia.