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.

To the curious book of which the full title stands at the head of this article, I have already alluded in my communication to the Journal of January, 1899, on The Sources of Dawlatsháh, pp. 51–53. I now propose to give such account of its contents as is possible within the limits here prescribed. For this purpose I have made use of the Cambridge Codex (belonging to the Burckhardt Collection) marked QQ. 225. Though the book is a rare one, at least three other manuscripts are known — two in the British Museum (see the old Arabic Catalogue, pp. 418 and 581) and one (marked A. 1741) at Gotha. The last was used by Professor Nöldeke, in his reference to the Niháyat, at pp. 475–476 of his excellent Geschichte … der Sasaniden. He describes it as “in the main a quite arbitrary recension of Dínawarí, though here [namely, in the Romance of Bahrám Chúbin] it had before it an essentially fuller text than this,” and briefly characterizes it as “das seltsame, ziemlich schwindelhafte Werk.”

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.

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.

The first season of excavations at the medieval Islamic site of Ghubayrā in Kirmān Province took place between late March and the end of May 1971. The excavations were made possible by the kind permission of the Ministry of Art and Culture, and the Iranian Archaeological and Folkloric Services. The excavators record their sincere gratitude to H.E. Mr. Mehrdad Pahlbod, Minister of Art and Culture, and to Mr. A. Pourmand, Director-General of the Iranian Archaeological and Folkloric Services; to Mr. Khurramābādī and Dr. Na‘īmī of that service; and to Mr. Enayatullah Emirloo, who came to Ghubayrā as our Representative. We render thanks too to the local office of the Department of Ferhang va Honar at Kirmān, and especially to its Director, Mr. Mehdi Zamānī. To Mr. Muḥammad Sādeq Dānesh, District Commissioner of Bardsīr, our special acknowledgements are due for his constant thoughtfulness, and his readiness to give assistance in all moments of need.

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.

Some hasty observations, collected during a rapid march that I made in 1824, between Punah and Kittor, gave rise to this memoir, which, though brief and imperfect, may not altogether be devoid of interest, since the geology and statistics of few countries are less known than those of India. Connected as this portion of the globe now is with the political and commercial prosperity of Great Britain, the resources of the country, the mineral treasures of its rocks, the capabilities and productions of its soil, the condition of the inhabitants, and their prospect and means of attaining a higher scale of civilisation, deserve the attention of the legislator, merchant, philanthropist, and man of science. Its statistics and geology are yet desiderata: and though the portion of information here communicated be but a speck on the ocean that lies before us, it will perhaps contribute something towards a clearer view and more accurate chart of the whole, which may be brought, I hope, to perfection in the course of time.

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.

About four miles from Larnaca, in Cyprus, on the western shore of thegreat salt lake from which the town. (Túzla) takes its Turkish name, standsthe Khálat-i-Sulṭán Tekyé, a much - frequented Moslem shrine. The situation is picturesque. The noble outline of the mountain of the Holy Cross (Santa Croce or Stavro Vouni) bounds the view on the west; andthe domes and minaret, embowered in. garden and grove, are not without grace, especially when seen reflected in the still waters of the lake. The shrine is held in great veneration by Moslems of every country; vessels carrying the Ottoman flag salute it as they pass, and the gardens are a favourite place of resort on Musalmán holidays. The whole is dedicated to a lady known as Umm Ḥarámbint Milḥán, whose body lies in this holy place.

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.

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.

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.

The Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum has among its collection a small manuscript (no. Sloane 3014; size 19 × 23 cm; foil. 23) entitled Verzeichnis der Malabarischen Bücher. It is written in German in a thin ornate hand on watermarked paper, and is obviously a catalogue of Tamil books, some of them well-known classics. The term Malabarisch (Malabari in English), which the author uses for people and language alike, is the name by which Tamil was generally known among the Portuguese and the Europeans who reached India soon afterwards. At one place (book no. 47) the author calls the language Tamul which, according to Caldwell, was the term employed by the French. The name of the author is not mentioned in the manuscript. There is a note in the Department's Catalogue of Sloane, Birch and Additional Manuscripts dated 1782 which reads: “Verzeichnis der Malabarischen Bücher: i.e. Catalogus linguâ Germanicâ, a Missionariis Evangelicis in urbe Tranquebar, an. 1709 compositus, quo recensentur 112 librorum Malabaricorum, inscriptiones breviores eorumque contenta indicate.” To this the List of Oriental Manuscripts, Vol. I, in the Department of Oriental Printed Books and Manuscripts adds: “see Bibliotheca Rostgardiana … vendenda Hafniae, Anno 1726 … pars altera, no. 852.”

This district takes its name from Dārā [Darius] the Great, son of King Bahman ibn Isfandiyār.

Dārābjird.—This city was founded by Dārā, son of Bahman. It was built circular as though the line of circumference had been drawn with compasses. A strong fortress stood in the centre of the town, surrounded by a ditch kept full of water, and the fortress had four gates. But now the town lies all in ruins, and nought remains except the wall and the ditch. The climate here is that of the hot region, and there are date-palms. The streams of running water are of bad quality. A kind of bitumen [mūmīyā] is found [near Dārābjird] at a place up in the mountain, which bubbles up and falls drop by drop. Also there is a rock-salt found in these parts which is of seven colours where it comes to the surface of the ground.

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.

Mr. Thomas has lately done good service to Pahlavî archæology, by collecting all the best copies of the Sassanian inscriptions, that are known to exist, from the various books of travels and unpublished papers in which they have hitherto remained comparatively hidden and neglected. If his tentative translation of the Hâjîâbâd inscription is likely to be less useful, it is probably owing to his treating the language as an unknown one, and only to be interpreted by a free use of all available lexicons, aided by a variety of hazardous guesses. But there is good reason for believing that the language of these inscriptions is not unknown, as the composition, or rearrangement, of most of the Pahlavî literature of the Parsîs, is traditionally ascribed to the time of the Sassanian rule; if, therefore, this tradition be correct, there ought to be a close resemblance between the language of the inscriptions and that of the Pahlavî books, after allowing for probable alterations made in the books, by successive copyists.

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.

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