As explained in the note on p. 74, the reading of this name is uncertain, especially with regard to the second element, due, the other transcriptions being ul-e (the ordinary values of the two characters of which it is composed) and rue. I have chosen the transcription in the title because it seems to be the most probable and because, some sort of transcription was a necessity. Other possible transcriptions, due to what seem to be variants, will be found on the page which I have quoted.

The murder of the Prophet's chief Jewish opponent, Ka‘b b. al-Ashraf, led to grave consequences for the tribe of Banū al-Naḍīr and for the Jews as a whole. The incident ushered in a series of hostile Muslim-Jewish encounters that reached its climax in the battle of Khaybar. Despite the constructive study undertaken by previous scholars, there still seem to be some contradictory elements and vague accounts that have been either utterly ignored or for which a satisfactory explanation is lacking. In the light of certain striking pieces of evidence, scattered in unlikely places in the sīra and tafsīr compendia, the present study sets out to examine critically the extent to which the accounts of Ka‘b's murder can be trusted. It will be argued that what we are faced with is seriously distorted material with logical absurdities and discrepancies that cannot easily be reconciled. Apart from the historical reconstruction, special attention will be devoted to a momentous historiographical point—that our reports have been doctored for political reasons. This helps us adopt a more realistic view of the individuals whose names occurred in the accounts of the event in question.

This article sets out to delineate the process that led to the establishment of Mayo School of Arts in Lahore in 1875. It lays down the context within which the plan to set up art institutions in India was conceived. Contrary to Krishnan Kumar's view whereby the coloniser and the colonised constituted an adult-child relationship the coloniser, in that particular relationship took the role of the adult whereas the native became the child which had been a salient feature of the educational and academic landscape of British India. By challenging Krishna Kumar, this article while drawing on the inferences of Partha Mitter and Hussain Ahmad Khan, argues that in the realm of art instruction the analysis of colonial strategies of adjustment and readjustment provide useful insights about the administrative constraints and cognitive failures of the colonial administrators in the nineteenth-Century Punjab. Challenges like space-selection for MSA campus, appropriate Curriculum for the students and their inadequate language skills stared its founder Principal Lockwood Kipling (1837–19011) in the face. This forms the major focus of the article.

How did people in Tang dynasty China view textiles and how did they conceive of their value? Those involved in production could calculate the value in terms of the costs of raw materials, labour and the loom used to weave a particular textile. They might add to this the costs of workshop supervision and maintenance, distribution and marketing, and they might expect to see some benefit – a profit – in the process. However, most people would be end users, and would reckon the value of textiles by eye, if not also by hand, and what they considered to be the market value. Some might have expert knowledge, but many would not. The non-expert evaluation by eye and hand would likely include aspects such as colour, pattern, level of workmanship and intricacy but would probably also reflect some awareness of status and fashion.

The number of subjects now labelled as Oriental and the increasing development of knowledge concerning each, of these subjects, make it materially impossible for an individual to derive more than a fraction of the advantages offered by a Congress such as that recently held at Leyden. There were no fewer than nine sections (in fact, there should have been ten, a special section for Islamic Art having been eliminated) and over 200 papers were read during the five days that the Congress lasted, some of the sections sitting nearly five hours a day. It was inevitable that keenly interested delegates should again and again have to choose between equally attractive papers, especially where the third section (Central and Near Asia) and the eighth (Islam) were concerned.

Among the objects of Natural History, which attracted the attention, and excited the wonder of the followers of Alexander the Great, when that illustrious conqueror Carried his victorious arras across the Indus, was the Banyan, or Indian Fig-Tree. It is well known that that extraordinary man, whose talents, as well as achievements, have certainly no parallel in history, was generally imbued with a love of science, and, as Pliny expresses it, inflamed with a passion for Natural History.* To his great preceptor, Aristotle, he had delegated the care of digesting, and elucidating, the vast materials that were collected, in the king's progress through a quarter of the globe, which, to the inhabitants of Europe, was absolutely a new world.

One of the most interesting and valuable of all the objects-which were presented half a century ago by the late Sir Charles Nicholson to the University of Sydney, for the purpose of forming a nucleus of a “Museum of Antiquities”, is a stele inscribed in two kinds of writing, Egyptian and Karian.

THE lofty chain of the Western Ghats bears much the same relation to the land of Bhārgava-kṣetra, a Sanskrit name of the coastal country of Kerala or Malabar, as the gigantic Himālayan range bears to the land of Bhārata-varṣa, or the Indian continent as a whole. This huge and impervious mountain-barrier, shutting off the low-lying seaboard region from the high table-land of the Deccan behind, has made it a separate world in every respect. The face of Nature, with its luxuriant growth of palms nurtured by the abundant tropical monsoons, differs from that of any other part of the Indian Peninsula. The language, Malayālam, though a branch of Dravidian speech, is confined to this region.

“Soon after my arrival in Nipál (now six years ago), I began to devise “means of procuring some accurate information relative to Buddhism: “for, though the regular investigation of such a subject was foreign “to my pursuits, my respect for sci ence in general led me cheerfully “to avail myself of the opportunity afforded, by my residence in a “Bauddha country, for collecting and transmitting to Calcutta the “materials for such investigation. There were, however, serious “obstacles in my way, arising out of the jealousy of the people in “regard to any profanation of their sacred things by an European, and “yet more, resulting from the Chinese notions of policy adopted by this “government. I nevertheless persevered; and time, patience, and “dexterous applications to the superior intelligence of the chief minister, “at length rewarded my toils.

In a recent issue of J.R.A.S. (2, 1982, 205–207), Tadeusz Skorupski reviewed my Tamang Ritual Texts I, Preliminary Studies in the Folk-religion of an Ethnic Minority in Nepal (henceforth “TRT”). His criticism is based on some postulates that I question. And since ours is a controversy between two disciplines, namely philology and anthropology, I think it worthwhile to examine more closely some of the arguments put forward by Skorupski. The point at issue is our approach to texts of an oral tradition.

Though neither Tibetans proper nor “Bhotias”, the Tamangs speak a language of the Bodic Division (in R. Shafer's terminology), and one component of the religious tradition is Tibetan Buddhism, which in the past exercised some influence on components of the oral tradition, such as shamanism and exorcism. An adequate interpretation of oral tradition, particularly in the diachronic perspective, necessitates some sort of cooperation between the Tibetologist and the anthropologist. Thus, my reply to the Tibetologist Skorupski is a programmatic rather than a polemic attempt.

If everyone—so to speak—is now reading and quoting Chorasmian, the credit most fully belongs to J. Benzing. He has with this volume made available in a readily usable form the greater part of the linguistic material known to exist for Chorasmian, a very important but hitherto largely neglected Middle Iranian language.

IT is only with the greatest diffidence that I offer the following notes on the document, in a hitherto unknown script, of which a facsimile is appended in the accompanying plate. My remarks may appear premature, and in any case the results obtained are very slight, but it was thought advisable to publish them as a preliminary notice, in the hope that some more competent scholar might be able to help in the decipherment.

The relations existing between China and Tibet have been for such a length of time of so intimate a nature, that, better than any other people, the Chinese are in a position to give us reliable information concerning this secluded and interesting country; for, though we possess such valuable works as Markham's Tibet, various papers by Father Desgodins, the reports of the native travellers employed by the great Trigonometrical Survey of India and those of Sarat Chandra Das, who has within the last ten years twice visited Tibet, these do not by any means cover the whole field of Tibetan geography and ethnography, and all the information we can obtain supplementing or corroborating these works must be valuable and worthy of our attention.