Homonymy in verbal roots in Sanskrit is a recognized phenomenon. Well-known examples of this are found in such cases as the following: ūh- ‘to remove’, ūh2 ‘to consider’; kṛt-1 ‘to cut’, Kṛt-2 ‘to spin’; gā-1 ‘to go’, gā-2 ‘to sing’; ci-1 ‘to gather’, ci-2 ‘to observe’; dhā-1 ‘to place’, dhā-2 ‘to suck’; bhuj-1 ‘to bend’, bhuj-2 ‘to enjoy’; vṛ-1 ‘to cover’, vṛ-2 ‘to choose’. In the case of vas- we find three homonymous roots (vas-1 ‘to shine’, vas-2 ‘to clothe’, vas-3 ‘to dwell’), and in the case of dā- no less than four (dā-1 ‘to give’, dā-2 ‘to divide’, dā-3 ‘to bind’, dā-4 ‘to clear’). In such cases the various meanings are so distinct from each other that the separation into two or more roots is done without any difficulty, and there is no doubt that we have here different roots, although they are identical in form. In practice, of course, the homonymy is considerably restricted by variation in inflection and derivation (vásati, váste, uccháti, etc.).

The Mohammedan law was for several centuries the general law of the territories now forming the British Empire in India. It still enters to some extent into the dealings of Mohammedans with each other, and, being founded on texts of the Koran and sayings of the Prophet, is binding on their consciences in all cases to which it is applicable. It has a direct bearing on their conduct to foreigners; and it is therefore of great importance that it should not be in conflict, but in harmony, if possible, with the law of the place on a matter that so nearly affects themselves and their fellow-subjects, as the duty which they owe to the Government.

One of the most interesting migrations on record is that of the Yuehti from their old seats in the north-west of China to the site of the Greek kingdom of Bactria. Its interest is increased rather than diminished by the fact that we can trace its origin by the aid of authentic records, as well as from the knowledge that it was but one in a series, the original exciting cause of which still remains veiled in an obscurity apparently only to be pierced, on the one hand, by the geologist who shall work out the changes in the physical geology of Asia, within the human period, or, on the other, by the comparative mythologist, who, placing side by side the myths and traditions of its ancient inhabitants, sees, though dimly, some sort of order rising out of what, at first sight, is a veritable chaos.

The history of Central Asia before the days of Jingis Khan is singularly complicated and obscure; and if we are to make our way among its mazes, we can only do so profitably by concentrating our attention on the larger empires which then floúrished, and integrating the scattered facts that have survived to our day about the lesser powers around them. The empire which held this dominant position at the accession of Jingis was that of Kara Khitai, a short-lived, but also an important power, which held sway with more or less authority from the Caspian to the borders of China, and thus formed in some measure a model, upon which the later Mongol Empire was framed, assisting, also, very considerably in its formation, since, when it fell, a large, disciplined and compact territory was added to it. With your permission, I propose to collect together so much of its history as I can meet with, and to clear up some difficulties that attach to it.

In the Journal for the year 1902 a summary was given of the description of Persia and Mesopotamia found in the Nuzhat-al-Qulūb, a geographical and cosmographical work written by Ḥamd-Allah Mustawfi in 740 (1340). In the course of next year I hope to publish (in the series of the E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Fund) the Persian text of the geographical chapters of this work, and this will be followed by a full translation, with notes to elucidate geographical questions. Ḥamd-Allah, who is our earliest systematic geographer writing in Persian, collected his materials from the works of the earlier Arab geographers, and from various Persian monographs which had been written each to describe a single province of the Moslem Empire; and it is found that the texts of some of these monographs, thereto adding somewhat of his own knowledge, after much curtailment and a rearrangement of the order in the articles, he has transcribed almost verbatim, to form the various chapters of the Nuzhat. A good instance of this method of writing a new book is the chapter describing the provinces of Fārs and Shabānkārah, which in truth is little but a shortened transcript of the Fāre Nāmah, a work written two centuries before the time of Ḥamd-Allah, and of which the British Museum possesses an excellent MS.

Ancient tombs and hoards across the Eurasian steppe call for a thorough revision of art-historical categories associated with pastoral societies from Mongolia to Crimea. This study focuses on one such category. “Animal style” is an umbrella term traditionally used to categorise portable precious metalwork ornamented with dynamic scenes of vigorous animal fights and entwined zoomorphic designs. With its emphasis on irregular animal anatomies and deeply rooted in a “pars-pro-toto” mode of expression, steppe imagery of fantastic fauna presents a useful case study in broader investigations of composites in the ancient world and their diffusion across cultural spheres. This study views beasts through a binary lens, the structured monsters of Greco-Roman thinkers and the organic composites of nomadic steppe artisans. In the Western canon, “composites” existed within a politically-manufactured framework of governable “otherness”, in which fantastic fauna conveys a certain tension with the exotic, unknown and uncontrollable East. Meanwhile, in the visual rhetoric of steppe artisans, monsters represented a tension with the (cyclical) shifts occurring in one's biota rather than the tumultuous events in one's constructed environment. This paper explores how the contrasting steppe pastoralist and sedentary imperial world-views came to define the various functions and meanings of “composites” in Eurasian Antiquity.

The Lāmas, as is well known, have preserved in very full form much archaic Indian lore, now otherwise imperfectly known or altogether lost. And a valuable feature of such Lāmaist literature is the frequent use of bilingual names, where the Sanskrit name is supplemented by a most careful etymological translation into Tibetan, thus enabling us to fix the etymology of many of the Hindū and Buddhist mythological and historical names, regarding which vague guesses are often hazarded. These Tibetan etymologies, though not necessarily the true ones, are certainly those which over a thousand years ago were the current traditional etymologies in India. And as, even apart from etymological features, categorical lists of little known personages, mythological or prehistoric, are helpful to students of both Buddhism and Hinduism, I here give a list of Nāga Rājās from the Mahācyutpatti, in the bsTan-hgyur (Tén-gyur) section of the Lāmaist Scriptures. This list, which may be compared with that in the Vāyu Purāna, seems to include many of the Vedic terrestrial Nāga Kings, the aboriginal enemies of the primitive Aryans, whose more direct descendants are now confined chiefly to the remote hills of Nāgpur, Chhoṭa Nāgpur, etc., etc. Tibetan literature contains much information about these Nāgas, one of Buddha's titles being ‘King of the powerful Nāgas.’

Having been led from the interest which has attached to Mr. Colebrooke's opinion, on the subjects discussed in Professor Whitney's paper, to examine the very copious memoranda on Hindu astronomy, which are in my possession, I think I am in a position to clear up some of the points which have given rise to this controversy. It seemed to be so improbable that Mr. Colebrooke should have taken such pains to identify the constellations named in the passage of the Jyotish, and have so pointedly referred to the double observation of the solstices as determining the epoch of the observation, while he was really grounding his opinion on the position of another asterism, that I thought the subject merited a closer scrutiny.

From 1764, when the British position in Bengal was established beyond challenge, until 1842, when the Treaty of Nanking gave Britain the island colony of Hong Kong, the shortest route between British and Chinese territory lay across the Himalaya mountains. Until the Gurkha War of 1814–1816, the southern slopes of the Himalayas and the states that lay along them formed a narrow buffer between British territory and Tibet. As a result of the Gurkha War, British influence was brought right up to the Tibetan border, through the annexation of Kumaon in the western Himalayas, and through the establishment of a vague protectorate over the tiny hill state of Sikkim. Tibet had been evolving into a Chinese dependency since the beginning of the eighteenth century. This process, nearly complete by 1750, reached its final stage in 1792, when Tibet became, to all intents and purposes, an integral part of the Chinese Empire. The British in India were well aware of their proximity to this outpost of the power of the Chinese Emperor. In a period when British dealings with China were confined to trade at a single port, Canton, in conditions that were far from ideal, it would have been most surprising if no attempts had been made to develop Anglo-Chinese relations across the far from impassable barrier of the Himalayas.

Ancient Arabic poetry in general is rightly regarded in Arab circles as one of the paramount monuments of Arabic literature, and it is of course also held in esteem among Western scholars. For the most part, however, this admiration does not, in effect, extend to the specifically historical poetry quoted – sometimes in vast quantities – in the works of such historians as Ibn A‘tham al-Kūfī, al-Balādhurī, and al-Ṭabarī. It is readily apparent that this verse is often of extraordinary difficulty, that some represents retrojections from later times, and that many poems (in particular the later forgeries) are of an inferior quality; but the often-heard views holding that the historical poetry is, as a whole, of no particular historical importance or literary merit are simply false.

The following particulars on the origin and early history of the Banu ‘Oḳayl are from Ibn Khaldūn, vol. ii. p. 312, vol. vi. p. 11, etc. (Bulak Edition).

I may perhaps allow myself to begin by reminding the reader that Eastern writers invariably represent the Ismailian Arabs as the posterity of ‘Adnan, descendant of Ismail, and the people of each tribe as the actual children of one or other of the Arab Patriarch's posterity, after each of whom the tribe is usually named. But it is obviously unnecessary, to say the least of it, to regard the genealogies attributed to the tribes as anything more than the real or reputed pedigrees of their chiefs.