That India is not the cradle of the Brahmanical faith, may be a proposition startling to many who are not acquainted with its ancient literature. To the orientalíst of the humblest pretension, however, it needs no proof. The predecessors of the Brahmans, it is admitted by all who hare considered their records and traditions, were first associated together as a religious fraternity in a country beyond the Indus, or exterior to the Himálaya mountains. Our greatest men are divided in their opinions as to the country from which they came. Sir William Jones brings them from Iran, or Central Asia; Adelung from a similar locality; Klaproth, from the Caucasian mountains; Kennedy, from the plains of the Euphrates; and Schlegel, from the borders of the Caspian Sea. The theories of these scholars are all plausibly supported; and they generally agree in this respect, that they take it for granted, that the Brahmans in ancient times were found in the territories immediately north of India. The occurrence of about three hundred Sanskrit words in the Persian language, the Hindú notion of the northern position of the residences of the gods, the situation of the Manusarovar, or Lake of Intelligence, still a celebrated place of religious pilgrimage, and the source of the river Brahmaputra, whose etymological meaning, the “son of Brahma,” is similar to that of the usual designation of the priestly class to whom I refer, are in favour of this agreement. After the Brahmans entered India, they continued for a considerable time to inhabit its northern territories. The “Holy Land” of Manu, which is of no great extent, lies between the Drishadwatí and Saraswatí. On the banks of the latter river, according to some authorities, lived Vyása, the reputed compiler of the Vedas and Puránas. In the north are to be found the shrines, junctions of rivers, and lakes, esteemed most sacred by the Hindús in all ages.

The Ṛg-Vedic hymn X. 95, describing the story of Purūravas and Urvaśī is of considerable interest and obscurity. It has attracted the attention of priests and scholars alike from the days of the Brāhmaṇas, with the result that different versions of the story have come down to us with unrestricted freedom. Geldner has recorded eight sources of the story: (i) the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa; (ii) the Kaṭhakam; (iii) Ṣaḍguru-śiṣya's commentary on the Sarvānukramaṇī; (iv) the Harivaṃśa Purāṇa; (v) the Viṣṇu Purāṇa; (vi) the Bṛhaddevatā; (vii) the Kathāsaritsāgara; and (viii) the Mahābhārata. To the above a few more works, such as the Vāyu Purāṇa, the Mātsya Purāṇa, and the Rāmāyaṇa may be added to make the list more comprehensive. However, Kālidāsa made the story more popular through one of his finest plays, Vikramorvaśīyaṃ.

The following article was originally suggested by a notice in Beal's “Catena of Buddhist Scriptures from the Chinese.” The sūtra is there selected as a type of the latest phase of Buddhist literature, not only on account of its own peculiarities, but owing to its religious importance among the Chinese, which caused the imperial rescript for its translation and general promulgation, of which an English version is there given. The two parts of which this sūtra is composed are mentioned as Nos. 15 and 16 of vol. 14 of the Tibetan “Gyut,” by Csoma Körösi in As. Res. xx. p. 529; the names of the translators fix its date as earlier than the ninth century.

Scholars have known of Ibn al-Azraq and his Ta'rikh Mayyāfāriqin since at least 1882, with the publication of F. Wiistenfeld's Die Geschichtschreiber der Araber und ihre Werke, but it seems that the history received its first thorough reading in 1902, when Amedroz published a summary of the recently acquired British Museum (now British Library) manuscript. Amedroz concentrated only on the latter folios of the MS, particularly those that cover the Marwanid dynasty, and in his interest in the second half of the work he has been followed by B. A. L. Awad, who edited the section on the Marwaīnids, C. Hillenbrand, who edited and translated the 18-odd folios that concern the early Artuqids, and A. Savran, who made some brief comments on the two MSS of the history. It is of course natural that the later sections of Ibn al-Azraq's work have attracted historians' attention, since it is here that our author, who was born in 510/III6–7, and who probably died sometime during the last quarter of the sixth century, has important things to say about northern Mesopotamia in his day. For this reason his history was used by later authors;8 as Hillenbrand has noted,9 here he fills a gap in the historical record.

In discussing the symbolism of colours and figures Professor Kirfel recalls that Leo Frobenius spricht einmal von dem Sinn der Zahl als symbolischem Ausdruck einer bestimmten Kultur. Nach ihm ist “die Zahl nicht etwas von den Menschen Gefundenes sondern von den Menschen Erreichbares aus der Welt des unsichtbaren Daseins” und insofern “als direkter Beleg” für die Wesensart einer Kultur zu werten … Er betrachtet die Vierzahl “als Ausdruck durch den Horizont begrenzten Raumgefühls aufder Plane”, das das Merkmal der “solaren Kultur” sei, und “Lage, Ruhe” und “bestehende Gestaltung” zum Ausdruck bringe. Fast den gleichen Sinn wie die Vier-hat aber auch die Fünfzahl: zu den vier Kardinalpunkten ist nämlich noch der Zentralpunkt, gewissermaβen der Nullpunkt der Weltkoordinaten, als fünfter hinzugetreten. Without going further into Frobenius' theorizing on a tetradic solar culture, or, in a different direction, into the possible associations of the number 16 with a lunar cult surviving in the pūjā, it is enough to mention the importance which four and its multiples have always enjoyed in India, as until quite recently even the national coinage bore witness.

The question of the admission of Indians to the Covenanted Civil Service was perhaps the most important single issue connected with the British empire in India during the 19th century. The administration and the political security of the raj both depended very largely on this civil service. It was for this reason that, in 1793, important administrative positions were restricted to Europeans. Natives were thought to lack political reliability and personal morality; an additional disqualification was their lack of familiarity with Western principles of judicial administration. The objectionable legal statement of discrimination was later replaced by an admirable series of pronouncements of equality. Nevertheless, the Indian Civil Service was still, in the middle of the 19th century, a European elite body both in composition and function. There thus existed a conflict between professed intentions and practical reality. This antithesis underlay the development of the issue from the committee-room cliché that it was in 1853 to the crucial political problem that it had become by 1879.

The connection of Naṣīru'd-dīn Ṭūsī with the Ismailites is a well-known fact, familiar to every student of Persian literature. Even a beginner cannot pass without paying attention to his important treatise on ethics, the Akhlāq-i-Nāṣirī. This latter work was composed for and dedicated to the enlightened Ismailite governor (ra'īs) of the province of Quhistān, Nāṣiru'd-dīn Muḥtasham, or 'Abdu'r-Raḥīm b. Abī Manṣūr, of Qā'in, who was a well-known patron of men of letters. The original version of the work (as Ṭūsī himself states in the preface to the book as it stands at present) was subsequently altered by him when he dissociated himself from the Ismailites; it included apparently a doxology with praises to Ismailite Imams.

Since my publication of the Bharaut inscriptions the Indian Antiquary, vol. 21, p. 225 ff., Professor von Oldenburg has subjected the Bharaut sculptures to a careful examination in a Russian article which Professor Lanman has made generally accessible by an English translation in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 18, p. 183 ff. Professor von Oldenburg succeeded in tracing in the Pāli Jātaka book three of the Bharaut bas-reliefs which had not previously been identified. The references to four other jātakas could not be given in my first list, because at the time when it was drawn up vol. 6 of the Jātaka book had not yet been published. The same volume enabled me to restore conjecturally one of the Bharaut inscriptions, while repeated perusal of vol. 5 yielded explanations of two bas-reliefs which had remained unidentified.

In his classic study of the transmission of Arabic science into Latin, which contributed so much to our knowledge of the “Renaissance” of the 12th century, Charles Homer Haskins was the first scholar to bring into clear focus the morass of bibliographical information given by Wüstenfeld and Steinschneider, and he was able to define, on the basis of fresh investigation of the manuscript material, the activity and personalities of individual translators. The bulk of his evidence rested on the translators' prefaces, which give some or all of the following information: the title and author of the Arabic original, the Latin translator, the dedicatee, and other works by the same translator, whether contemplated or already finished. Such information provides a very useful framework for assessing the œuvre of a particular translator. However, the edition and investigation of the texts themselves have yielded a certain amount of new information and, although Haskins's work has by no means been superseded, we are now in a position to clarify certain points and add to his conclusions.

Two evening meetings of the Royal Asiatic Society were held at the Society's Rooms, in Grafton-Street, on the 1st and 8th of June, when Dr. Hugh Falconer gave a discourse, in two lectures, on the ancient animal races of India, as indicated by the Fossil Fauna of the Sewalik hills. The first meeting was occupied with a general description of the Sewalik fossil animals. Dr. Falconer referred to the antiquity of the human race in India, and the spreading of its mythology, arts, and sciences, over other nations: they had extended to Greece and Italy through Egypt. There is a limit to antiquarian research, at the point where we cease to have indications of the human race. If we desire to dive further into antiquity, we have to fall back on the monuments and inscriptions constructed by nature, on the fossil remains of the extinct races of animals which formerly peopled the earth. Some of the Sewalik fossils appear to afford grounds for entertaining the presumption that it may be possible to connect the human epoch with very remote times. The Colossochelys Atlas, or gigantic fossil tortoise of India, discovered by Captain Cautley and Dr. Falconer, supplies a fit representative of the tortoise which sustained the elephant and the infant world in the fables of the Pythagorean and Hindu cosmogonies.

This article criticises the conventional interpretation of the first English translation of the Qing penal code by George Thomas Staunton, and proposes a different reading that stresses its role in promoting a positive image of the legal order in Canton on behalf of the East India Company. It suggests that in viewing the translation as a product of growing confrontation between two incompatible legal and cultural systems, our historical literature has radically diminished the scope of Staunton's comparative enterprise and his method of translation. Not only did Staunton exploit contemporary debates on penal reform to emphasise practical arrangements which overlapped across Chinese and British jurisdictions, he more importantly sought to valorise the Company's role in maintaining the jurisdictional status quo in what was patently an unstable and hybrid legal environment in Canton. However, the latter prerogative promoted a flattering and partial conception of jurisdictional ambiguity in Canton. It elided the Company's role in proliferating instability in Canton, and presented legal accommodation as a unilateral concession by the Qing from the severity of their own laws. This article addresses the intimate connections between the pluralist and pragmatic aspects of Staunton's project. It shows how, even though its pluralism has been forgotten, its pragmatic conceits concerning the origins of extraterritoriality have left a lasting impact on the historiography of Sino-Western relations.

In the diffusion of the sciences of the Saracens throughout Western Europe in the twelfth century, says Professor Haskins in one of his valuable contributions to the English Historical Review, “ England occupies a position of considerable importance. An English scholar, Adelard of Bath, seems to have been the chief pioneer in this movement of study and translation, while the existence of a certain number of dated treatises of his contemporaries and successors makes it possible to follow the spread of the new learning in England with greater definiteness than has so far been attempted elsewhere.” That these Arabian sciences played an important part in the intellectual awakening of England, there cannot be much doubt. Mathematical sciences especially attained a height with the Arabs which had never been reached before in Western Europe.

James Legge (1815–1897) is primarily remembered today as the heroic translator of the Chinese Classics (1861–1872, 1893–1895). Allowing for changes in stylistic taste, these massive translations are still considered the “standard” versions of works that “classically” and “scripturally” defined a so-called Confucian “great tradition” in China. Unfortunately a fixation on this singular scholarly accomplishment has tended to brand Legge as merely a great, though plodding, translator – someone primarily remarkable for his indefatigable habits of working. Certainly it was often felt that his contributions to the emergent Sinological Orientalism of the nineteenth century in no way matched the achievements of the great Parisian academicians (Abel Rémusat and Stanislas Julien); nor was he seen as a particularly significant figure in any other aspect of British tradition in the nineteenth century. Even worse, and seeming to make him a fit candidate for Lytton Strachey's debunking criticism of all insufferably righteous Victorian paragons of virtue, was that his identity as a sinologist and scholar was forever tainted by his original vocation as a Congregationalist missionary agent for the London Missionary Society.

In the spring of 1980, the author was asked to prepare a catalogue of the Persian manuscripts preserved in the library of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. During preliminary stages of this work a remarkable manuscript came to light which is the subject of the present article. This is the personal horoscope of Iskandar Sultan, the grandson of Tīmūr (d. 807/1405). Iskandar ruled in Fars, South West Iran, for five years from 1409 to 1414. He is best known for his interest in the arts and sciences and for his patronage of manuscript production.

These two caskets, relic bowls, with Kharoṣṭhī inscriptions in North-western Prakrit (Gandhārī) are in the collection of Professor Samuel Eilenberg. The larger casket (Plates I–IV) of dark grey steatite is in height 10.8 cm. with seven inscribed lines, the smaller casket (Plate V) of lighter grey steatite, 7 cm. with three lines. They are of Buddhist origin and similar to the Bajaur casket published by N. G. Majumdar in Epigraphia Indica, XXIV, 1937, 1–8, and commented upon by Sten Konow in Epigraphia Indica, XXVII, 1940, 52–8.

In 1908 and 1911 the late Lieut.-Colonel D. C. Phillott published in the Bibliotheca Indica two Persian works which he described on the title-pages as The Qawānīnu 'ṣ-Ṣayyad [sic, for 'ṣ-Ṣayyād] of Khudā Yār Khān 'Abbāsī and The Faras-nāma of Zabardast Khān. Curiously enough the person named on each title-page is not the author but the author's father. Colonel Phillott was evidently unfamiliar with what may be called the Ibn i Fulān Fulān formula [cf. PL. I, p. 21618] and so he misunderstood Dā'ūd ibn Yār- Muḥammad 'Abbāsī when he called himself Ibn i Yār-Muḥammad faqīr Dā'ūd (p. ix) and Ibn i Yār-Muḥammad 'urf Khudā-yār Khān Dā'ūd 'Abbāsī (p. xxi).

There are two rulers in Malaya who claim descent from a Bichitram (? = Vicitram), reputed kinsman of the Sri Maharajas of Sri Vijaya, the Buddhist empire (fl. a.d. 750–1350) that extended over Sumatra and Northern Malaya and for a while Java. The name Bichitram is whispered into the ear of every Perak Sultan at his enthronement as that of the ancestor of the Perak (and old Malacca) dynasty. And Bichitram, according to the Sejarah Melayu, was brother of the first king of Palembang (= Sri Vijaya) and Singapore, and was himself ancestor of the Minangkabau line, from which the Yang di-pertuan of Negri Sembilan claims descent.

In attempting to write a religious and political history of Ḥaḍramawt in the Middle Ages one inevitably encounters a number of methodological and historiographical problems some of which will be addressed in the present article. The first arises from the overall scarcity of historical documentation on the period in question. More importantly, the sources that are available are riddled with underlying agendas and biases, which often hinge on considerations of genealogy and clannish honour. These genealogical or clannish agendas and biases are evident in the sources dealing with practically every aspect of Ḥaḍrami history. However, they are especially conspicuous in the historical texts which describe the spread of the Shāfi'ī school of law in Ḥaḍramawt, the cult of local saints and the origins of local religious and educational institutions. In my recent study of Ḥaḍramī shrines and seasonal pilgrimages, I have brought out the genealogical underpinnings of the theological polemic around the cult of local holy men and women - a polemic that grew especially intense in the first decades of our century and flared up with a vengeance during the recent civil war between the Northern and Southern parts of unified Yemen. In this paper I will demonstrate how these hidden agendas have manifested themselves in the historical accounts of Ḥaḍramī Islam with special reference to the rise of the Shāfi'ī madhhab and the dissemination of Ṣūfism.

In the issue of this Journal for July, 1903 (pp. 467–493), Professor D. S. Margoliouth propounds a theory in explanation of the words Muslim and Ḥanīf, used in the Ḳur'ān, which is thus stated:—

“The suggestion, then, which I should offer for the explanation of these terms is that some twenty years before Mohammed's mission some sort of natural monotheism was preached by Musaylimah, whose followers being called Muslims [after the preacher's name] and Ḥanīfs [from the tribe of Ḥanīfah to which he belonged], these words were supposed to signify monotheist, and as such were adopted by Mohammed, who, owing to the comparative obscurity of Musaylimah, had at least at first no knowledge of their origin, and afterwards felt bound to assert positively that they were both in use in Abraham's time.”