If I were to offer one specific reason for our meeting today, beyond a general and justifiable intention to commemorate the contribution made to early Ottoman historical studies by the late Professor Paul Wittek, it would not be that the year 1987 marks any of the usual anniversaries in the life of our subject. Wittek, a Fellow of this Society, was the first occupant of the Chair of Turkish in the University of London, from 1948 to 1961. It is still seven years short of one hundred since he was born, on 11 January 1894, in Baden, to the south of Vienna, the son of a Gymnasium headmaster; and it is less than a decade since The Times recorded the death, at the age of eighty-four, in an outer suburb of London, of this quintessentially Austrian scholar.

It will probably be long before the dīwāns of the Arabic poets are fully utilized by compilers of Moslem history. Widely read in Eastern countries, they are rarely attractive to European taste, trained on quite different models. European editions, such as might be expected to make the most of the historical and archæological matter which they contain, are not in many cases likely to be attempted; and the Oriental editions, though sufficiently trustworthy in point of text, usually provide the historical student with little in the way of help. Guided by the example of Mr. Guest, who indexed Maḳrīzī for this Journal, the present writer hopes to make the access to some of these dīwāns rather easier, by furnishing them with indices of places, persons, and certain other matters. The first dīwān with which he will deal is that of the leader of the great Abbasid trio which consists of Abū Tammām, Buḥturī, and Mutanabbī.

Among the sharpest contrasts between East and West has been their different approach to the problems of physical science. The West, aiming low, concentrated on the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir of Life, conceivably attainable ends, and arrived at modern science. The East aimed higher at the grand source of power, from which all the rest would follow, and it arrived practically nowhere. This power was sought in knowledge of the Seal of the Great Name, the seal containing the Ineffable Name of God, which was believed to have given Solomon his power over the Djinn, the birds and the winds.

By the Great Ming Emperor the Karma-pa GŽu'u la'i ta'i ba'u hva waṅ ta'i śiṅ rtsi tsa'i hu'o was invited and was made chief of all the ban-dhe (Buddhist monks) in the Empire. At Liṅ-gu svi-sde (temple) he performed a great service of prayers for the Great Imperial Father, Tha'i Ju, and the loving Queen-mother in order to deliver all creatures in the world from the round of transmigration and from hell. The service began on the fifth day of the second month of the fifth year of Yun Lo. On the first day there appeared an iridescent cloud of five colours, beautiful to see, expanding and contracting in various ways, in brilliance like the Wish-granting Gem. Also, above the mchod-rten (stupa) of Relics a ray of light, like the full moon, shone out unblemished and flickering a little. Also, two bands of golden rays rose above the dwelling place of the Precious Essence of all Bygone Buddhas, the Religious King, Powerful through Great Compassion, the Karma-pa gŽu'i la'i ta'i ba'u hva waṅ zi then ta'i śin tsi tsa'i hu'o, the place where he performed the ceremony after having made the dkyil-'khor (mandala).

I now proceed to discuss in detail the ascertained facts of each reign, inscriptions, of course, being the principal source of information, and in doing so shall permit myself a certain amount of latitude in digressions upon cognate topics. The inscriptions of the greatest value for establishing the genealogy of the royal family are Nos. 3, 8, and 19–22 of my List.

This article is an attempt to establish critically the synchronisms which appear to exist between the mediaeval portion of the Ceylon chronicle Mahāvaṁsa and the results of South Indian epigraphical research. The definite dates to which a number of Chōḷa and Pāṇḍya kings can now be assigned are due to the laborious and difficult calculations of my late friend Kielhorn, while several of the synchronisms were discovered by another old friend and fellow-worker, Rai Bahadur V. Venkayya, the melancholy news of whose sudden death at Madras on November 21, 1912, reached me while I was collecting materials for this article from his learned Reports.

Among the ancient monuments of India, few are of more interest than the tōps or stūpas at Sāñchi - Kānākheḍā, about 5½ miles south-west from Bhelsā or Bhilsā, in the Gwāliar territory, and some 20 miles north-east of the capital of the Bhopāl State. There is now a railway station close to the spot, and most of the trains stop there. The various notices of the remains here are scattered in numerous publications, and some notice of them may perhaps be usefully combined with the history of the stūpas since their discovery.

The extract from the Narrative of his Travels by Ebu ‘Abdu-’llāh Muhammed of Tangier, commonly called Ibnu Baṭūṭa, an English translation of which appears below, relates to his experiences in the province of Sindh, and touches on matters of local history and geography which may interest some readers, and be thought deserving of such elucidation as may be possible. These matters are noticed in the remarks subjoined to the extract, a form of comment which I have thought preferable to the alternative of interrupting the narrative by frequent and copious footnotes.

The nature of Akbar's arrangements for the assessment of the land revenue in the newly acquired province of Bengal is a matter of some historical importance. It concerns the eighteenth century as well as the sixteenth, for the controversies which marked the early years of British rule found common ground in the revenue roll attributed to the year 1582; and, now that the famous Fifth Report of the Select Committee of 1812 is being studied so widely in India, it is desirable to know just what Todar Mal did, and just where Grant and Shore took erroneous views regarding the nature of his action.

The interest which attaches to Kanishka is manifold. Primarily it is Buddhist. Kanishka convoked the fourth great Buddhist Council, the Council held in Kashmir, which gave consistency and official sanction to the doctrines of Northern Buddhism and led to its adoption by the Yue-che, who in their turn became ardent propagators of the faith, diffusing its light among the nomads of Central Asia and introducing it to the knowledge of the cultured Chinese. The Buddhists in the north-western corner of the Panjāb preserved the memory of their royal patron; they adorned his memory with miracle and legend; they placed him by the side of Aśoka, the first great foster-father of their religion; and vague reminiscences of Kanishka lingered in this region to the time of the learned Alberūnī and of Kalhaṇa, author of the metrical Chronicles of Kashmir.

Cambodia was a kingdom in which the English East India Company took only a limited and spasmodic interest in the seventeenth century so that little attention has been devoted to its activities there. References to the Company's Cambodian settlement in the 1650s have usually been erroneous or misleading. Dr. John Anderson made the first serious mistake when he wrote of an English factory in Cambodia between 1654 and 1659, and later English writers, particularly E. W. Hutchinson, have followed him. Dutch historians also have been affected: H. P. N. Muller, in his preface to De Oost-Indische Compagnie in Cambodja en Laos, cites Anderson as his authority for stating that in 1656 the Dutch Company bought the English factory established two years previously. As we shall see, servants of the English Company were sent to Cambodia from the presidency at Bantam in 1651 and withdrawn by order of the directors in 1656; the Englishmen in Cambodia after that date were private traders using the Company's name for their own ends. The episode now to be recounted was therefore an isolated incident with no long-term consequences, but with some intrinsic interest.

The History of a Loyal Heart (Xin shi) is allegedly a work by the Song loyalist, Zheng Sixiao, written to bemoan the fate of the Song empire after its conquest by the Mongols. There have always been doubts about its authenticity, however, and many scholars have believed it to be a forgery. The arguments for and against this have remained inconclusive, and the work has been commonly used as a source for the history of the Song–Yuan transition period. This article adduces compelling evidence to show that there can be very little doubt that it is a late-Ming forgery. Some of the implications of this conclusion are briefly addressed.

IF anything could make Sir Richard Burton turn in his grave, it would be to know that all the time he was having his unpleasantness with the authorities of the Bodleian, there reposed in that library an Arabic MS. containing the “Story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves”. Ever since Professor Ethé made his catalogue of the additional Arabic MSS. in the Bodleian, the treasure was waiting to be lifted by anyone who should take the trouble to run over that catalogue in its still manuscript form. But it is plain that no student of the Arabian Nights had done so, until, in September of 1908, Professor Ethé's catalogue was most courteously put into my hands, and I discovered that the one of Galland's stories of which absolutely no Oriental trace had ever been found, and the possibility, even, of the existence of which, as an Oriental story, had been denied, had been lying in the Bodleian in Arabic since 1860. I had just returned from a vain search for MSS. of the Nights in Cairo, Syria, and Constantinople to make this find in Oxford.

THE Instructions of the Second Caliph to the Judge Abū Mūsā al-Ash'arī are edited by several Moslem writers, with the differences which seem inseparable from Oral Tradition. The earliest existing copies are those produced by Jāḥiẓ (ob. 255 a.h.: Bayān, i, 169, ed. Cairo), by Mubarrad (210–85: Kāmil, i, 9, ed. Cairo), and Ibn Ḳutaibah (213–76: 'Uyūn al-akhbār, p. 87, ed. Brockelmann); to the next century belongs that of Ibn 'Abd Rabbihi (246–328: 'Iḳd Farīd, i, 33, ed. Cairo, 1293); to the same century or the next belongs the edition of Māwardī (362–450: Aḥkām Sulṭaniyyah, pp. 119–21, ed. Enger); and to a much later period that of Ibn Khaldūn (732–806: Muḳaddimah, i, 184, ed. Cairo, 1284; p. 221, ed. Beyrūt, 1900). According to Mubarrad the Instructions were very widely circulated; he has glossed a few of the expressions, but by no means provided a complete commentary. Glosses to one or two of the phrases are to be found in the Nihāyah or “Dictionary of Tradition” of Ibn al-Athīr. The document was translated into German by von Hammer (Über dic Länderverwaltung unter dem Chalifate, Berlin, 1835, pp. 206, 207) after Ibn Khaldūn; the same text was followed by de Slane in his translation of the Prolegomena (Notices et Extraits, xix, 449), and Professor Gottheil (History of the Egyptian Ḳāḍīs, p. vii). Finally the Beyrūt editor has vocalized the whole text.

This article examines the conduct of Richard Goodlad, the East India Company's collector in Rangpur, north Bengal, upon the outbreak of a peasant rebellion in his district during 1783. It uses his reaction to this event to illustrate the nature of the Company's district bureaucracy and its relationship with the central colonial authorities in Calcutta during the later eighteenth century.

The article considers the aims and limitations of the European officials who were sent out to administer Bengal's districts, detailing their priorities and practices within a weak and decentralised state structure. Ultimately it argues that the relationship between these local and central components of the colonial state was, prior to the Company's rise to subcontinental hegemony in the early nineteenth-century, profoundly shaped both by widespread military under-resourcing, and by the primacy of personal interest among its local officials.

In the Address delivered by him at the Second International Congress of Orientalists, in 1874, Prof. Max Miiller remarks, “No real advance has been made in the classification of the Non-Aryan Indian dialects since the time when I endeavoured, some twenty years ago, to sum up what was then known on that subject in my letter to Bunsen, ‘On the Turanian Languages.’” A table of the Indian languages is given by Max Müller in that most popular work of his, eight editions of which have already been published, the Lectures on the Science of Language. A very few lines are devoted to these languages in the Lectures: for further particulars we are referred to the above-mentioned letter on the Turanian languages.