Calicut was the most important port in southwest India during the late fourteenth and the fifteenth century. Its rulers, the Zamorins, maintained a vast network of trading relations extending from the coast of East Africa to the Indonesian archipelago and the Far East. This is amply documented in the accounts of foreign travellers, practically all of whom passed through the Malabar ports on the lengthy voyage from west to east and back. Marco Polo, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, 'Abd al-Razzāq, to name but a few, figure most prominently in a long line of writers whose reports describe various aspects of old Colychachia, as Calicut was then called by Nicolo di Conti, an Italian traveller.

Annette Susannah Beveridge (1842–1929) was one of the outstanding oriental scholars of the early twentieth century. The work which established her reputation is her translation of the Bābur-nāma, the autobiographical memoir of the first Mughal emperor, published in 1922 by the Royal Asiatic Society. It was the first English translation from the Chaghatai Turki in which Babur wrote his famous account. A monumental work of scholarship, it is all the more remarkable for having been completed at a time when Chaghatai language studies were in their infancy. The translation is characterized by utter reliability and precision, exhaustive footnotes and numerous appendices: Western and Asian scholars continue to consult it as the standard translation of this classic Timurid text. Yet, despite the stature of her work, little is known about Beveridge herself, an unusual figure in the British orientalist landscape if only because she was a woman who raised four children and learned oriental languages when she was past the age of 50.

Professor A. B. Woodside's recent study of Vietnamese government and society in the first half of the nineteenth century is likely to become immediately a standard work for the teaching of South-East Asian history, as well as a point of departure for further research. It is the first attempt by a Western scholar to analyse the institutional developments of a period in which Viêt-Nam attained its greatest measure of “Confucianization” and also its greatest territorial extent as a unified country. The “Đại-Nam” of the later years of Minh-Mang (1820–41) included not only the whole of present-day Viêt-Nam, united for the first time in 1802, but also (after 1836) a large part of Cambodia as well as a portion of eastern Laos. The institutional changes of his reign included the reinvigoration of the examination system, the creation of new organs of central government, and a thorough overhaul of the machinery of provincial administration. In terms of its own previous history, it was by no means a weak or declining Viêt-Nam which found itself face to face with European power in the 1850's and 1860's. By offering a study of government and society in this period, Professor Woodside has gone some of the way towards filling a major gap in Western-language literature on Vietnamese history.

Writing systems are used as, and considered to be, important tools and symbols of political discourses of their time. This article presents a historical overview of the alphabet changes in Azerbaijan and shows how the alphabets were associated with the discourses of modernisation, nationalism and national identity construction. In the early twentieth century, the discussion on the need to shift from the Arabic alphabet to the Roman was actually an extension of the wider debate on national identity and language coupled with the will to modernise and progress. In 1940, the Soviet regime imposed the shift from the Roman alphabet to the Cyrillic in a top-down manner. This change was neither negotiated nor discussed among the intellectuals and there was almost no room for the expression of critical views. With the introduction of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s, intellectuals started to question to what extent the Cyrillic alphabet and the Russian language could represent the Azerbaijani language, civilisation, and national identity. In 1991, Azerbaijan adopted the Roman alphabet. The case of Azerbaijan shows that alphabet changes are symbolic acts to deny and/or reject the previous political and cultural heritage and its legitimacy and tools for undermining its prominence in the new processes of transformation and change.

Texts stating in plain words the opinions of ancient Mesopotamian scholars concerning the shape of the universe have proved elusive, and consequently the question of whether they believed the sky to be flat or domed has never been settled. In 1975 Professor Lambert summarized the comments of earlier scholars on this topic and noted that textual support for the concept of a vault of heaven was lacking in cuneiform sources known to him at that time. Since then, the topic has elicited comment, but no serious attempt to assemble evidence in support of one view or another. In this paper I propose to bring together evidence from a range of sources and argue that in ancient Mesopotamia the sky was thought to be a rotating sphere with a polar axis.

Mayyāfārīqīn, like many a Moslem city, was not without its historian, but hitherto he has been a name only—Ibn al-Azraq al-Fāriqi—known to us by the quotations from his history in the biographies of Ibn Khallikān. Now, however, the British Museum has acquired a nearly complete copy of the Ta'rīkh Mayyāfāriqīn, Or. 5,803. Its date of composition is 572 a.h. The MS. is written in a good hand, and wascopied probably at Damascus, and in the seventh century of the Hijra. It contains 200 folios of about twenty-two closely written lines a side: the first eight folios, to 17 a.h., are wanting; a gap, covering the years 567–9, follows folio 194, and the years 571–2 are wanting at the end.

Since writing the letter on this subject which appears in the January number of the J.R.A.S. I have examined the British Museum MS. Or. 3,248 more carefully, and have obtained a clue to its authorship. Dr. Rieu and Professor Denison Ross considered the work to be anonymous, and regarded the name at the end—Muḥammad ‘Alī, son of Nūra—as being probably that of the owner or copyist. I am inclined to think that it is the name of the author, and that the work is more recent and less valuable than has hitherto been supposed. No doubt the writer has used some old records, and it would appear from a marginal note that a manuscript called the Qissa Ṣafavi, and which seems to have been lost, was the basis of the work. It is also likely that he used the TārīkhShāhī of Abdullah Marwārid, but I think that Or. 3,248 cannot have been put together earlier than the first half of the seventeenth century. We know from Mr. Denison Ross's paper in the J.R.A.S. for April, 1896, that the work must have been composed, in whole or in part, after 946 A.H. (or 1539), as it records the death of Muḥammad Zamān Mīrzā, which occurred in that year during the flight after Humāyūn's defeat at Causā by Sher Shāh. But there are two marginal notes in the manuscript which have hitherto escaped notice, and which show, I think, that the work must have been written at a still later period, and also that the author did not expect or intend that he should remain anonymous. These notes are not perfectly intelligible, for the margins have been clipped in binding (before the MS. came into the Museum), and consequently some important words are missing, but their general purport can be understood.

Up until the British departure from India, in 1947, hundreds of Indian princely states succeeded in maintaining a semi-autonomous existence beneath the wide umbrella of British paramount power. These states, which were scattered over the whole subcontinent, ranged from large and imposing to tiny and insignificant, and were dominated by Hindu, Muslim and Sikh ruling elites.

Britain's tentatively built diplomatic ties with Tibet received a jolt on 28 June 1913 when four Tibetan boys and their chaperone Kusho Lungshar went to meet George V, King of England and Emperor of India at Buckingham Palace. Lungshar and the boys brought with them an extensive range of gifts and letters from the thirteenth Dalai Lama, inadvertently giving the British government a diplomatic headache: not only could this potentially have been interpreted as a breach of the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention, but what should be given in return? By bringing together recently identified objects and archives now located in the British Museum, the British Library and the Victoria and Albert Museum, this paper will focus on the products of this encounter: the gifts. They will be considered here as statements of independence, signifiers of ‘Tibetanness’ and as examples of the developing protocols constructed by Britain in response to its encounter with Tibet.2

In the final chapter of his novel, The First Circle, Alexander Solzhenitsyn extols the virtues of the felt boot: “A pair of felt boots are the two best friends a prisoner will ever have … Woe then to anyone whose feet are not shod in felt boots! … But the prisoner wearing his own felt boots has not a care in the world.” Solzhenitsyn writes for those unfamiliar with the extremes faced by the society he is describing. Similarly, but far removed in time, we are accustomed to learning a great deal more about the uses of felt among nomadic peoples from travellers who have purportedly visited them than we do from such rare accounts as The Secret History of the Mongols (SH) which emanate from sources close to the nomads themselves.

The value of wood as a medium for making implements for secular and religious purposes has been known to mankind since the dawn of civilization. Some examples have survived till contemporary times. The fact that wood is available in abundant quantity, easily procurable and also eminently easy to fashion into the required shape must have been responsible for maximum use being made of it. The sruk and sruva, wooden spoons used by Vedic ritualists, continue to be of the same material and shape today. So also scholars are of the opinion that the earliest iconic presentations and temple edifices were made of wood. In view of the indispensable nature of wood as a medium of art, śilpaśāstras and āgamas embody elaborate information concerning the types of wood fit for art production and the methods for procuring them. It is well-known that art in wood is a legacy of very ancient traditions. The present paper makes an attempt to trace succinctly the art heritage of Tamilnadu in wood with special reference to temple cars, tēr in Tamil and ratha in Sanskrit, and to evaluate the scope for research in iconography.

Halper 331 is the fragment of a codex that has been styled the ‘oldest dated document of the Cairo Genizah’. It preserves the opening of a Jewish legal document dated to the year 1182 (Seleucid era), which appears to have been copied into this codex, probably as a formulary, not long after this date, in the late 9th century. In this article, the text of this fragment, in Aramaic and Hebrew, is edited, and its identification as the beginning of a marriage contract (ketubbah) is evaluated. Its Egyptian provenance is questioned, partly because the earliest evidence for the introduction of the Seleucid era by Jews in Egypt dates from the mid-10th century. The article surveys the history of Jewish dating methods in early medieval Egypt and the Near East, in an attempt to clarify this question. The specific date of the document deviates from the rabbinic calendar, but agrees with that of the contemporary Jewish Near Eastern sectarian groups of Abū ʿImrān al-Tiflīsī and Ismāʿīl al-ʿUkbarī; this document could thus uniquely attest one of these sectarian Jewish calendars.

Casual references in the chronicles of the time show that the Turkish kings of Delhi recognized, and on occasion utilized, the local functionaries—the headmen and registrar accountants of villages and parganas—who formed an integral part of the Hindu administrative system. No references to these functionaries have been traced under the Afghan kings, but they reappear in the Mogul period, the literature of which enables us to form some idea of the position and duties, as then understood, of three out of the four. The village headman, renamed muqaddam, represented the village in its dealings with the officials, and he was required in particular to be active in agricultural development by bringing the waste land of the village under the plough. The village registrar-accountant, who retained his Hindī name of paṭwārī, kept the records and accounts of the village, and was required to assist the officials in the assessment and collection of the revenue. In the same way the registrar-accountant of the pargana, renamed qānūngo, kept the records of the pargana; and when assessment was made on the village as a unit, his estimate of its capacity to pay was one of the indispensable data. The remaining functionary, the chaudhrī or headman of the pargana, scarcely appears in the chronicles of the period, while the administrative literature contains practically nothing to show what he was expected to do, or how he was remunerated; indeed the only reference to him which has been traced in the Āīn-i Akbarī is the statement (Jarrett, ii, 228) that in the province of Berār the chaudhrī was known as desmukh. This statement shows that the chaudhrī was a familiar figure in the north, but it shows nothing more.

I have given in the following pages some of the results of a careful study of the text of Dhammapada, rendered necessary by the preparation of a Páli Dictionary. In endeavouring to elucidate some of the obscure or difficult points of this important text, I have given prominence to a few passages enabling me to test the theory of Nirvâna which I propounded last year in the columns of a periodical.

The project of writing the “Ancient History of Northern India from the Monuments” has long occupied my thoughts, but the duties of my office do not permit me, so long as I remain in active service, to devote the time and attention necessary for the execution and completion of so arduous an undertaking. There is, indeed, little prospect that my project will ever be fully carried into effect by me. Be that as it may, I have made some small progress in the collection of materials, and have been compelled from time to time to make detailed preparatory studies of special subjects. I propose to publish these studies occasionally under the general title of “Prolegomena to Ancient Indian History.” The essay now presented as No. I of the series is that which happens to be the first ready. It grew out of a footnote to the draft of a chapter on the history of Candra Gupta II.

The three minarets in the Kirmān region, those of the Masjid-i Malik in Kirmān, the Masjid-i Jāmi‘ in Zarand, and the Masjid-i Jāmi‘ in Nigār, have already been noted in a number of publications, but have so far not formed the subject of a separate article. Diez, referring to the period of Turkish dominance, says that in Kirmān, Yazd, and Shīrāz there are no lofty round towers, but, despite the lack of dating inscriptions on any of the minarets, it is nevertheless possible to date them to this period, two with reasonable accuracy and the third by association.

En, 1887, Léon Heuzey consacra au kaunakès une étude fondamentale dont il n'est pas superflu de reproduire ici les passages essentiels, car cet article n'est pas mentionné dans plusieurs travaux récents dont j'aurai ci-après à discuter les conclusions.