To those interested in the translation of the Bible into Chinese it is well known that there is a manuscript of part of the New Testament in Chinese among the Sloane MSS. in the British Museum. But no exact description of this manuscript seems ever to have been published, and even its author's name was unknown till lately.

It has been recognized for a long time that the Iranian word āzāta- covers what would seem to us to be two distinct ideas: “free” (not a slave) and “noble” (not a commoner). Avestan has āzāta-, “noble” hvāzāta-, “very noble”; Old Persian *āzāta- is attested by the phrase ’zt šbqtky bmwty, “I free you (a slave girl) at my death”, in an Aramaic document from Elephantine dated in the 38th year of Artaxerxes (427 B.C.). Early Middle Iranian forms are reflected by Hesychius' glosses , i.e. *āzāt-īh, = “freedom”, and i.e. *āzāta- with the Greek plural suffix “the intimates of the (Persian) king”. That the Arsacid Parthians used one and the same word for “free” and “noble” is evident from two passages where Josephus refers to the Parthian élite troops as “free men”. In Middle Persian and Sasanian Parthian texts āzād is extensively attested in both senses, “free” and “noble”, as are numerous derivatives. From Parthian come Armenian azat, “free, noble” and Georgian azat'i, “free”. Sogdian ”z't means “noble”, “free”, and “clear”. Khotanese has āysāta-, “well born” and “free born”. In Neo-Persian, however, āzād has become restricted to “free”, while āzāda is used for “noble”; Persian āzād (ozod, etc.) has been borrowed into most other Neo-Iranian languages, but an independent form has survived in Kurdish aza, “brave”; Ossetic azat, “free”, is perhaps borrowed from Georgian.

The ostracon from the Qūmis excavation (Pl. I) bears inked characters in the Parthian script, and is palaeographically comparable with the numerous ostraca from the excavations at Nisā in Soviet Turkmenistan. Many of these bear dates reckoned according to the Arsacid Era of 247 b.c., typical figures being a.e. 194 (52 b.c.), a.e. 216 (30 b.c.), and so on. The Qūmis ostracon is thus likely also to belong to the 1st century b.c. The transliteration table for this script has been prepared by Diakonov and Starkova. Entirely diagnostic of Parthian, as against other derivatives of the Aramaic script, is the sloping left and bowed right leg of the letter pē, seen twice in the fourth line of the fragment.

In JRAS., 1932, pp. 789–814, the time of the comprehensive collection of Indian medical sciences is established approximately in the middle of the first millennium A.D. and later. In this connection a sketch of the local origin of the precepts chiefly current in the oldest Saṃhitās, which bear the names of Caraka and Suśruta (abbreviated: CaS and SuS), may be of interest. In the introduction (pp. 7–8) to his celebrated inquiry into Indian osteology, Hoernle answers this question: According to the tradition preserved in the Buddhist Jātakas, in the age of Buddha there were two great universities, Kāśi or Benares in the East, and the still more famous Takṣaśilā [the Taxila of the Greeks] on the Jhelam River in the West. Ātreya, whose doctrines are propagated in the CaS, lived at Takṣaśilā; the king of Kāśī instructed Suśruta in surgery. This would place the origin of surgery, as a science, in the Bast of India. Furthermore, Nemi, the lord of Videha (or Tirhut in the eastern province of Bihar) is regarded as the author of ophthalmic surgery.

We find in the Dīpavamsa (Chapter V. 39–48) a list of the eighteen sects (or schools rather) into which the Buddhists in India had, in the course of the second century of the Buddhist era, been divided. In the Mahāvamsa (Chapter V.) there is a similar list, evidently drawn from the same sources, but omitting (in Tumour's texts) numbers 1–7 of the older list. It is curious that precisely where these names ought to come in (at line 5), the text given by Tumour is evidently corrupt, a half-sloka at least being missing, and probably more.

The image of the Buddha which is the most widely renowned and the most revered by Buddhists throughout Tibet and Central Asia is the image in the Jo-wo-Khang, the Great Temple at Lhasa. This image has been mentioned by many writers. Sarat Chandra Das says, “The image is exquisitely modelled and represents a handsome young prince. The Kunyer said that the image represented the Buddha when at the age of twelve, hence the princely apparel in which he is clothed and the dissimilarity of the image to those seen elsewhere.” The Japanese monk Ekai Kawaguchi also refers to the image, but does not describe it. But, until Sir Francis Younghusband's Mission reached Lhasa in 1904, it had not been described in detail by anyone who had seen it. It was then seen by certain of the officers on the Expedition, and has been described by Colonel L. A. Waddell, who was with the Mission as Principal Medical Officer, in his Book Lhasa and its Mysteries (1905), and by the late Mr. Perceval Landon, who was with the Mission as the Correspondent of The Times, in his book Lhasa (1905). These two descriptions differ as regards every detail and cannot be reconciled.

This article focuses on some representations of Aurangzeb in the Nath Yogi lore; their ambivalence appears as a signifier of the complex relationships the Nath Yogis had with Islam. Aurangzeb figures both as a powerful enemy and as a clumsy devotee, he is depicted more as a symbol than as an historical individual character.

There can be no doubt that to Asiatic ingenuity we owe the beginnings of the world's principal types of Water Transport. Early man in Asia invented means of extraordinary diversity to enable him to cross rivers, coast along the sea-shore, transport the produce of his little fields and the spoils of the chase to the tribal barter centre, carry his family and his scanty belongings to a new settlement, go afloat for fishing or waging war or to escape from hostile raids.

In comparing Japanese and Korean with each other and with other languages, there are three things to be considered: —1st, their phonetic systems; 2nd, the functions of their grammar; and 3rd, the character of their grammatical procedures.

“An oriental Samuel Pepys”. The phrase has been lodged in my mind for the several decades during which I have been working, on and off, on this early Persian historian Bayhaqī. I am pretty certain that I read it originally in that monument of mid-Victorian Anglo-Indian scholarship, The History of India as told by its own Historians. The Muhammadan period, by Sir Henry Elliott and John Dowson. This multi-volume work consists of translated extracts, many quite lengthy, from texts illustrating the history of the Indian subcontinent, the greater part of them dealing with what was then some eleven centuries of Muslim rule there. In Volume II, the compilers presented several passages from Bayhaqī's work, The History of Sultan Maʿsūd of Ghazna, which had just appeared in a printed edition at Calcutta in the Bibliotheca Indica series, edited by the person who had in fact produced the pioneer catalogue of the Royal Asiatic Society's Arabic and Persian manuscripts, William H. Morley. Elliott made many translations himself, but sometimes employed local munshis, not always with happy results. Although Persian culture was still very much alive in India in the mid-nineteenth century, these munshis were far from being au fait with the early eleventh-century Persian style of Bayhaqī and were at times flummoxed by his idiomatic usages. One of my favourites here is the Persian saying ṭablī zīr-i gilīm mīzadand, translated literally and ludicrously in its context as “they were beating a drum under a carpet”. Why anyone should crawl under a carpet and beat a drum, in the midst of a high-level discussion between Sultan Maʿsūd and his administrators, the equivalent of a cabinet meeting, is rather baffling; the idiom, already used by Firdawsī in the national epic, the Shāh-nāma, means of course “to spread rumours clandestinely”.

I propose, in this paper, to review briefly the present stateof the question, and of the answer thereto. Within the last twenty years a great advance has been made with regard to it; and we owe this advance almost entirely to the researches of two savants, Hofraths Dr. J. Wiesner and Dr. J. Karabacek, both Professors in the University of Vienna. In the following review I shall state the results of those researches, together with such conclusions as appear to me legitimately deducible from them.

The P'hansigárs are a tribe of, perhaps, the most deliberate and decided villains that stain the face of the earth. I hardly know whether they should be called a tribe, for they have no distinct religion or prejudices; they admit into their fraternity persons of all castes and persuasions; and the gangs which are found in different parts of the country appear to have no general knowledge of, or connexion with, each other, further than the diabolical compact existing among a few of the members who may at any period have acted in concert in their trade of villany. The following few particulars I gathered from the examination of part of a large gang which inhabited a village on the western frontier of the Nizáms country, not very far from Bíjápúr.

A short time before my leaving Calcutta, a Maulavi, by name Gholaum Hosain, was introduced to me under the character of a great mathematician and astronomer. I found he was in the service of Mirza Khán Bahádur, the Mohammedan son of Mitrajít Singh, the well-known Mahá Rájá, of Takari, in Bahar. The Maulavi stated, that he had devoted himself to the study of mathematics and astronomy, not only as far as they are contained in the Arabian and Brahminical writings, but also as far as he could gain from the interpretation of European books, as given him by European friends, he himself being ignorant of English; that he had, under the patronage of Khán Bahádur, compiled a system of these sciences from all these sources, and that his patron had supplied him with a sum of money to publish this book at one of the lithographic presses of Calcutta. This was the purport of his present errand down the country, and he had already got about 100 pages carried through the press. His object in applying to me was to obtain a recommendation of his work to the Government Education Committee. He produced his MS., but it was much too long to examine minutely in the short time I had to remain in Calcutta, and in my then harassed state of mind and body. I saw enough, however, to convince me that it was a work of very considerable merit and information, compared with the author's opportunities. It commenced with the elements of geometry and arithmetic as known to the Hindús, and thence went on.In the course of the work are explained, the European methods of decimal fractions, logarithms, and trigonometrical tables. The author then gives a system of astronomy, first according to the Brahmins, then according to Ptolemy, and then according to Copernicus, together with an account of astronomical instruments, and the mode of calculating astronomical tables and almanacs. The whole MS., as will appear from the author's own computation, comprehends 900 closely-written quarto pages.

In the third volume of Anquetil du Perron's translation of the Zand-Avastá, there are versions of two small liturgical works of the Pársís, entitled by him the “Lesser Si-rozé,” and the “Greater Sirozé.” There is another Sirozé, however, possessed by the Pársís, which he does not translate. It treats of the qualities of the thirty days of the month, as auspicious or inauspicious. Though its intimations are absurd in the highest degree, it exercises great influence over the whole body of Zoroastrians. It is so much regarded by them, that there is scarcely a family without a copy, and there are few individuals who have not its precepts written on the tablet of their hearts. On this account, as well as because of the brief information which it gives respecting the Amsháspands and Izads, to whom the days of the month are sacred, it is not unworthy of the attention of Europeans. It exists in the Persian language; but there are several Gujaráthí versions, which are generally used. The translation which I give is very literal, and is formed from a collation of these versions, and a careful comparison with the original. I have added a few explanatory notes. The only general remark which I would make on the Precepts of Fate which this Sirozé contains, is that its framers seem to have made such a distribution of good and evil throughout the month, and its different days, as is calculated to render those who credit it, neither much elated, nor much cast down, on account of any of its portions. Blessings and curses are made to go hand in hand during the whole journey of the moon.

In the aftermath of the Mongol occupations of the largest and most populous societies of Eurasia, greater visibility of popular religion, more widespread vernacular language use, rising literacy, and fundamental shifts in the structure of rulership and the relationship of state and society could all be observed. Many historians have related these changes to a broader chronology of early modernity. This has been problematic in the case of Iran, whose eighteenth-century passage has not been adequately explored in recent scholarship. Our comparative review of ‘post-Mongol’ Iran and China suggests that this period marks as meaningful a break between a schematic medieval and schematic early modern history in Iran as it does in China. Here, we first consider both societies in the post-Mongol period as empires with secular rulerships and increasingly popular cultural trends, and look at the role of what Crossley has called “simultaneous rulership”—rulership in which the codes of legitimacy of civilisations recognised by the conquest authority are given distinct representation in the rulership — in marking the transition away from religious-endorsed rule to self-legitimating rule as a mark of comparative early modernity.

It has been claimed that the ninth-century shipwreck found near the island of Belitung, Indonesia, is that of an Arabian ship. The evidence for this is examined in detail, and found to be less than convincing. The identifications of samples of wood from the wreck are shown to be unreliable at species level. The construction technique of the ship appears to resemble that of the eastern Indian Ocean, not the western Indian Ocean. Various items from the wreck connect it with Southeast Asia: a piloncito coin probably came from Java. Very little from the ship suggests any link at all with the western Indian Ocean. Overall, the strongest probability is that the ship was built in Southeast Asia.

It is well known that Damascus was formerly celebrated all over the world for its manufacture of sword-blades, and it is recorded, that when Timúr Lang conquered Syria, in the beginning of the fourteenth century, he carried off all the manufacturers of steel into Persia; since which period, the fabrication of arms has declined at Damascus, and the successors of those workmen, being dispersed over the East, are said either to have lost the secret, or ceased to make blades of more than ordinary goodness. We must, however, first divest ourselves of all prejudice in favour of the exaggerated reports of their qualities, and remember, that at the time when the natives of the East were well acquainted with the art of working in iron and steel, we, and indeed all Europe, appear to have been comparatively in a state of perfect ignorance; the ancient swords of Damascus, therefore, when opposed to those of other countries, were probably found to be infinitely superior in temper and quality; which, combined with their great external beauty, stamped them for ages with so high a character for excellence, that they are even now handed down as heir-looms by Eastern princes to their posterity. The extraordinary prices that have been offered and obtained for them, sufficiently attest the estimation in which they were held, which is certainly not warranted in the present day, when swords of equal, or superior quality, might be manufactured at one-twentieth of the expense. In addition to the foregoing observations, the strength and great dexterity of the swordsmen must be taken into consideration, and much of the apparent superiority of these blades may be undoubtedly ascribed to this cause.

The following Itinerary, or account of the route from Kashmír, viâ Leh, to Yarkand, is translated from a little Persian MS., written by Ahmed Shah Nakshahbandí, at the request of Lord Elphinstone, and presented to that nobleman at Kashmír, in July, 1846. The author, Ahmed Shah, was the son of Khájah Sháh Niyáz of Kashmīr, a man of high reputation and sanctity, who was held in great esteem by the Mohamedans of Yarkand and the surrounding countries, where he had numerous disciples. Ahmed Shah had himself visited the countries he describes, and spent some time in the chief places, his religious character and reputation giving him peculiar advantages for travelling and observing in these countries.