Composed somewhere between 1040 and 1054, Fakhr al-Dīn As'ad Gurgānī's metrical romance of Vīs and Rāmīn celebrates the adulterous love of Queen Vīs and the King's younger brother, Rāmīn. In his introduction the poet informs us that the tale of Vīs and Rāmīn enjoyed great popularity in his time although it was not widely understood in its Pahlavi version or satisfactorily rendered into New Persian. Based on a lost Pahlavi original, Gurgānī's version takes place in ancient Zoroastrian Iran. Scholars have variously identified its setting as Sasanian (A.D. 226–651) and Arsacid Iran (247 B.C.–A.D. 224). Perhaps our scant knowledge of the Arsacid nobility prevents us from deciding between an Arsacid and a Sasanian setting; moreover, even if the story is of Arsacid origin, its subsequent adaptations and interpretations must have altered its original characteristics.

On the reliefs of the Gandhāra School, in all scenes where Gautama is shown, and thus in constant association with him, there appears a figure which has been the subject of much discussion. He is called Vajrapāṇi by reason of the thunderbolt which he either grasps by its middle, or supports on the palm of his hand. This thunderbolt is the exact copy of the weapon which Indra, or Sakka, holds; but in these sculptures it is not so much a weapon, to my mind, as it is a symbol of divine authority, which is a matter of importance for the interpretation of the figure.

The general injunction in the Ḳurān to “eschew evil and do good” was held sufficiently definite to be the basis of a jurisdiction distinct both from that of the Ḳaḍi and of the police (shurṭa). Māwardi contrasts its powers with those of the Ḳaḍi's court and of the Maẓālim tribunal; but it may be that in practice the distinction was of small account, for I have found no trace of the Muḥtasib's authority ever being called in question, nor indeed much definite trace of its exercise. The wide and minute range of its duties should have made it an important factor in commercial life, but perhaps in this, as in other fields, Māwardi's work includes theory unsupported by much practice.

In the monograph by Professor Sayce and myself, The Tablet from Yuzgat in the Liverpool Institute of Archœology (I believe the document is now in the Louvre), which forms vol. xi of the Asiatic Society Monographs (see pp. 15–19), I discussed the possibility of Kassite being a language more or less akin to Hittite. In dealing with this question, I made use of the well-known tablet discovered by the late Hormuzd Rassam in 1882, and published in transcription by Professor Fried. Delitzsch in his Die Sprache der Kossäer (Leipzig, 1884). To all appearance this important inscription has never been printed in the original character, and as its appearance is held to be desirable, I now place before the British public the copy which I made in 1882 or 1883.

IN my “Notes on the Śaiva Siddhāntam”, published last year in Le Muséon, I called attention to the fact that the living faith of the majority of modern Tamils is in almost every respect, and certainly in all essentials, the same doctrine that was taught in Kashmir about the beginning of the eleventh century by Abhinava-gupta; and I endeavoured to indicate what, in my opinion, the links are which join the modern theology of the South to the ancient teachings of the North, and ultimately to the school which is represented by the Śvetāśvatara Upanisad. In further illustration of this view I now present the Paramārthasāra of Abhinava-gupta.

Colonial scholars and administrators in the latter half of the nineteenth century were the first to subject South Asia to modern historicist scrutiny. Using coins, inscriptions, and chronicles, they determined the dates and identities of numerous kings and dynasties within an apparently scrupulous empiricist framework. From the 1930s, with the widespread rise of nationalist sentiment, South Asian scholars began to write about their own past. The particular configurations of colonial and early nationalist historiography of South Asia have proved immensely consequential for subsequent generations of historians. Not only did this historiography value certain types of evidence, particularly Indic language epigraphy, Persian chronicles, and archaeology (while at the same time devaluing others like literature and religious texts), it set some of the enduring thematic and topical parameters which have shaped the course of the field. The initial focus was on the careers and personalities of rulers or the genius of races as the key causative forces in history, but eventually dynastic history became the dominant mode of writing about the past.

One of the subjects beloved of Chinese artists is a venerable figure in an attitude of profound reverie shown as part of a wild and romantic scene of forest, crag, and torrent. Sometimes below his rocky hermitage there stretches a plain with far-off shadowy outlines of ordinary mortal habitations, of which the faint remoteness suggests the gulf separating him from mundane cares and vanities. Looking at such a one, instinct tells us that he feels, to use the words of Shelley, “as if his nature were resolved into the surrounding universe, or as if the surrounding universe were resolved into his being.” He belongs to a strange race, variously named by Western writers Fairies, Immortals, Genii, Rishi. And here may it be remarked in parenthesis that neither “fairy” nor “immortal” is a term that exactly fits them; nor, indeed, does Arabic jinn or Sanskrit ṛishi. They are a race peculiarly Chinese and apart. Hence it would seem most appropriate to call them by their native name hsien, now commonly written , a pictogram representing perfectly the essence of their cult—the primitive contact of man with Nature typified by the mountains. Hsien, therefore, they will be termed in these pages.

This article explores the conditions and treatment of the ordinary refugees—survivors of the 1947 partition violence—in the Pakistan Punjab relief camps, in particular the circumstances of women, children and those who arrived with terrible wounds, yet received at best rudimentary medical assistance when the emergent Pakistan state was still working out its responsibilities in the process of transition. A large number of them succumbed to the epidemics which swept refugee camps. The impact of cholera on the camp population will be addressed in a discussion of the episode in Hanfia School Camp. This created the circumstances for the second major theme of this article—the adoption of children. Little if anything has previously been written about the extent of adoption following partition, or on its mixed motivations and social implications. Finally, the article considers the governmental responses to the camp population and state provision to the orphan refugee children. Much of the previously un-used material in this article is both harrowing in its character and disturbing for sanitised nationalist historiography. It is necessary however to address it in order to provide a full appreciation of the ‘lived experience’ of the partition.

This year witnesses the completion of a task begun soon after the inception of its forty-two years of publishing texts by the Pali Text Society. I refer to the completion of its editions of that third section of the Buddhist canon entitled the Abhidhamma Piṭaka, and of its editions of the Commentaries on that section. In 1883 the fourth of the seven Abhidhamma texts appeared : the Puggala-Paññatti. In the present year the Society brings out the conclusion of the seventh text: the Paṭṭhāna, and the belated Commentary on the second text: the Vibhanga.

IN the following pages an attempt is made to present the substance of Māwardi's chapter on the office of Ḳāḍi in his Aḥkām Sulṭāniyya, ed. Enger, Bonn, 1853, pp. 107–28, together with some illustrations of how the rules and requirements there laid down were conformed to in practice. The “crux” of the chapter, ‘Omar's instructions to the Kāḍi, pp. 119–20, has been removed by Professor D. S. Margoliouth (see ante, pp. 307–26), and his help has been forthcoming in the case of other difficulties. Māwardi's entire treatise on Moslem political law is in course of translation by Count Léon Ostrorog, and the merits of the earlier of the two published instalments of the work have been pointed out in the Journal, 1901, p. 906. The later instalment covers chapter v of the treatise, the one immediately preceding that on the office of Kāḍi. That chapter may be taken to represent the Moslem ideal, and it is of interest to consider to what extent the ideal was transmuted into fact. The task is not easy. Of Moslem legal procedure we know but little, the nearest approach to law reports being the notices of judicial proceedings in works dealing with the lives of judges. Such a work is the history of the Ḳāḍis of Egypt by Abu ‘Omar al-Kindi (ob. a.h. 350; B.M. Add. 23,226), now being edited in the “E. J. W. Gibb Memorial” Series by Mr. A. R. Guest, and the edition will include extracts from a ninth century work on the same subject—the Raf' al-Iṣr of Ibn Ḥajar Asḳalāni, Paris Ar. 2149, in which are preserved large portions of the work composed in continuation of that of al-Kindi by Ibn Zūlāḳ, ok a.h. 387, of which no copy is known to exist.

This article considers the Islamic-era sources that report the history of the last Sasanian kings. It focuses on scenes that seem to indicate Christian influence and asks what this tells us about Christian transmission of the Middle Persian royal histories and about the position of Christians in the empire more broadly. In particular, it discusses three scenes from al-Ṭabarī: his presentation of Hormizd IV as a ‘pluralist’ monarch; the changing attitudes of Christians to Khusrau II and the presentation of Khusrau's short-lived successors.

It is doubtful whether there has existed in our time any European who possessed so extensive and so profound a knowledge of Persia as the late Sir Albert Houtum-Schindler, who died at his house at Fenstanton, Hunts, in his 70th year, on June 16, 1916. And he was one of those generous scholars who, while seemingly taking more pleasure in the acquisition than in the publication of knowledge, waa ever ready to place at the disposal of all students the rich stores of his learning. To this generosity Lord Curzon, in the Preface to his valuable work on Persia (London, 1892, vol. i, pp. xii–xiii), bears eloquent testimony in the following words:—

“Of these coadjutors the first, alikein authority and in the extent of his assistance, has been General A. Houtum-Schindler, a gentleman who, after filling many important posts in the Persian Service, is now acting as adviser to the Imperial Bank of Persia in Teheran. To the advantage of long residence in the country he adds the erudition of a scholar and the zeal of a pioneer. He has personally revised nearly every page of these volumes, besides supplying me with much of my original information; and I tremble to think how many errors they might have contained but for his generous and never-failing cooperation. Few men so excellently qualified to write a first-rate book themselves would have lent such unselfish exertion to improve the quality of another man's work.”

In 1916 P.Y. Saeki devoted a page of his book “The Nestorian Monument in China,” to a short thought experiment which linked a Persian by the name of Li-mi-i 李密翳 who was present in Emperor Shōmu's 聖武天皇 court and whose arrival was mentioned in the Shoku Nihongi 続日本紀 with a priest named on the Nestorian Stele. Since that first suggestion, several scholars have expounded the idea that Li-mi-i and another figure who arrived alongside him, Kōho Tōchō 皇甫東朝, were Christians and/or missionaries. In this paper I assess these claims, returning to the Shoku Nihongi in order to suggest that there is a lack of data to establish them as true. I then seek to explore the origins of this theory situating it within the joint context of Japan's imperial expansion and her modernization. Whilst the latter cannot be conclusive, I hope that it may shed light on the significance of the theory which can be seen as a search to discover Japanese history, a statement of the equality between Japanese and Western histories, or an attempt to justify imperial aims in China academically.

The vicissitudes of a Jewish secretary, whom his master, an Emir in Damascus, compelled to adopt Islām and to accompany him on his pilgrimage to Medinah and Mekkah, are described in a number of skilfully wrought Hebrew poems printed here for the first time. They are extant in two manuscripts, Oxford MS. Heb. f. 3 and 4 (see Neubauer-Cowley's Catalogue of Hebrew MSS. at the Bodleian, vol. ii, Nos. 27262–4 and 2766). They are designated as Ḳaraite hymns (so on the backs of the binding), but have really no connexion whatever with this sect. The handwriting seems to be of the fourteenth century, but furnishes no conclusive evidence.

The history of learning among the Arabs in the great age, i.e. from about a.d. 700 to 950 or about 80 to 340 of the Hijrah, is not so well known that we can afford to neglect any source which promises to throw light on it.

This article examines four important turning points (1952, 1961, 1982 and 2000) in Pakistan's history. In each case, the government of the day, faced with serious challenges, solicited/received advice from the bureaucratic leadership. In each case, the latter placed before the former options that, though often different from conventional wisdom or popular prescriptions, offered real hope of a long-term solution to some of Pakistan's problems. And on each occasion, this advice was rejected or ignored by the politicians, arguably at great cost to the country and to its rulers. This article employs a historian's hindsight and argues that at key points in Pakistan's history the bureaucratic leadership did what it was supposed to – provide sound advice based on empirical appreciation of Pakistan's predicament and the enlightened self-interest of the government. Today, it is widely perceived that Pakistan's senior civil servants do not even bother to advise the politicians in power. Indeed, Pakistan's crisis of state cannot be overcome unless the esprit de corps and professional integrity of the civil service are rebuilt. The consequences of failure on this front are so greatly negative for the entire region that focused and sustained efforts are needed to rehabilitate Pakistan's bureaucratic leadership.

[No questions of greater practical importance, perhaps, have ever occupied the attention of the British government in India, than those of the allodial rights of the inhabitants, and the amount and species of revenue which it might be justified in claiming from them. There are certainly none, among the vast number of peculiar and delicate cases connected with the government of our possessions in that country, which have elicited so much conflicting opinion, which have been more ably argued by men of the highest talent and information, or which have appeared more difficult of solution.