Jayavarman II is the famous Khmer ruler who, in the first half of the 9th century and after a hundred years when Khmer overlordship had been in abeyance, was consecrated on Mount Mahendra “to ensure that the country of the Kambujas would no longer be dependent on Java and that there would be no more than one sovereign who was cakravartin”. His inscriptions have never been recovered, but Khmers in later times remembered his reign as the time when their ancestors, his supporters, were rewarded with estates. Historians are today tending to regard the reign as a somewhat less significant period in Khmer history than earlier generations of historians had supposed. Its conventionally accepted length (802–850) is no longer taken for granted. The king's cult, inaugurated on Mount Mahendra, may not have been as innovative as was originally believed. Even the extent of the king's temporal power has been revised. In 1952 Dupont, clarifying the king's chronology, came to the conclusion that his territorial authority had been exaggerated and that his bid for overlordship had failed.

Inhabitants of the Mongolian Plateau have been staunchly nomadic. Cities rarely existed before the Russian hegemony, and at that point they first attached themselves to pre-existing Buddhist monasteries. The exception to this general pattern was the Uighurs, who had an empire in the eighth and early ninth centuries. They built several cities, extended and maintained a flourishing trade network, established sufficient agriculture and developed urban manufacturing. Although historians have pointed out these significant distinctions, few have fully considered the thoroughly revolutionary impact of this Turkish group on steppe culture. One result in the Orkhon Valley was the foundation for Karakorum, the only permanent seat of the imperial Mongols in the thirteenth century. That city occupied the same site and, in the early seventeenth century, served as building material for the major religious centre of Erdene Zuu accompanying the re-introduction of Buddhism. Therefore, the Uighurs affected the physical heartland of their empire for a millennium and the habits of the people to this day.

The well known tradition in al-Bukhārī, told on the authority of al-Zuhrī—'Urwa— 'Ā'isha, about the conversation between the Prophet and Khadīja after he received his first revelation contains at the end a phrase variously interpreted by Muslim scholars and translated in modern times in various manners.

This article explores the processes by which medieval Sufi masters and holy men established themselves through their physical and spatial settings and left their mark on the religious and sacred topography. Focusing on Damascus from the mid-6th/12th to mid-8th/14th centuries under the reign of the Zangids, Ayyubids and early Mamluks. The article offers observations on three parallel developments: the genesis and growth of a local space around masters of the Path, the spread of endowed establishments designed by their founders to support the mystics and their rituals, and the incorporation of venerated shaykhs' tombs and shrines into a growing inventory of regional and local sacred sites. Special emphasis is placed on the variations in the very nature of the local sites and spaces that came to be associated with Sufism, their patterns of development and geographical spread, the functions they served and their symbolic message. Through this investigation, the article casts light on the concrete signs of the creation of diverse Sufi spheres in pre-modern Damascus and develops an understanding of the tangible material manifestations of the overall prominent status that Sufism came to hold during a period of intense religious activity.

We have considered Kanishka, so far, only as an Indian king, whose existence is revealed to us through the incidental mention of him in inscriptions and the accounts of the Yue-che (Tokhāri) given by the Chinese. And we have found that his permanent achievements were twofold. A barbarian prince, he became a convert to an alien faith, and set an example which was followed by his tribe; he also instituted an era which, although essentially Buddhist, was accepted by the Brāhmans and the Jains, and has endured to the present day. So far we might regard him merely as a prototype of many a barbarian chief of the West in the early centuries of the Middle Ages. We have now to consider him as an important figure on a much larger stage, a connecting link in the history of the earliest commerce between China and Europe. I have already brought forward direct evidence to prove that he flourished in the latter half of the first century B.C. I shall now show by two independent lines of research that he cannot be assigned to any other period. The basis of our study is the coinage of Kanishka and his successors, more particularly of Huvishka. This coinage is quite striking in its novelty.

The recent discovery of a comparatively large collection of inscribed wooden and bamboo strips in north-west China has aroused considerable interest on the part of Chinese scholars, as the material concerns both the extension of the Han government and the early methods of textual compilation in China. As the material finds are not available for inspection, the following notes can be no more than a summary of the information given in the few Chinese articles that have been published on the subject.

Although the rāgamāla miniatures are well known among art historians, scholars have hitherto paid little attention to the texts occurring on them. This remarkable fact might be attributed to the indifference of the art historians, for whom the chief interest lay in the paintings themselves. It should, however, be borne in mind that to those scholars who were also interested in the texts—as for instance O. C. Gangoly, who in the second volume of his famous book Rāgas and Rāginīs traced a number of Sanskrit dhyānas and Hindī dohās appearing on the front or reverse of rāga miniatures—the musical treatises to which these texts often refer were almost inaccessible, because most of them existed only in manuscript. Only very recently have a number of saṃgīta texts been edited.

This article examines seemingly monotheistic, polytheistic and dualistic features of Zoroastrianism from the point of view of the Zoroastrian creation myth. Exploring the personality of the principal deity, Ahura Mazdā, the origin of the spiritual and material worlds and the worship of the Yazatas, it is argued that Zoroastrianism has its own particular form of monotheism.

It would have been better that the explanation following should have formed an introduction to the series of papers under this heading, rather than a belated interjection at or near their end. But at any rate circumstances require that the explanation should not be further delayed.

This paper is about an Old Indian judicial institution called paṇa (“wager”). Within a court proceeding, a judicial wager is a certain sum of money that a conflicting party offers to pay if he ends up losing his case. This paper explains the rationale of judicial wagers by showing that they may signal truthfulness.

Political as well as military experience in India, was the making of Arthur Wellesley. In 1797 he landed at Fort William, Calcutta, an unknown Colonel of twenty-seven, a rank achieved by aristocratic connection and by purchase. In March 1805 he sailed from Fort St George, Madras, a Major General and a KCB. The battle of Assaye in September 1803 with other military events of that year had laid the foundation of British paramountcy in India. The story of the Assaye campaign has been told many times; the attempt is here made to highlight some political interactions that flowed from a major delegation of authority to Arthur Wellesley by his brother Richard.