The al-Jawf oasis lies at the northern extremity of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and although closer to ‘Ammān than to al-Riyāḍ, it is nevertheless reckoned by some to be a part of geographical Najd. Within the oasis is the settlement known as al-Jawf or Jawf 'Amīr, which is the ancient town of Dūmat al-Jandal, famous in early Islamic history. In the district, the town of al-Jawf is still referred to by the local people as Dūmat al-Jandal. Dūmat al-Jandal is no longer the main town of the area, having declined when Sakāka to the north-east became the seat of the amīrate. Today much of Dūmat al-Jandal appears to be deserted and the houses ruined, although it was clearly formerly a large settlement whose extensive farms and gardens are still cultivated (Plate I). The whole al-Jawf oasis and Wādī Sirḥān to the north are rich in pre-Islamic monuments and inscriptions which have been documented to some extent and standing on the acropolis of Dūmat al-Jandal is the largest of all these monuments, Qaṣr al-Mārid, dated to the 3rd century A.D., but with later additions (Plate II).

A notice of alaf b. Aḥmad is contained in Ṣafadi's Wāfi bil-Wafayāt (Paris, 2, 064, 22a). The pedigree does not differ from that given by ahabi, but some further information is given about alaf, and on the authority of Yāqūt — presumably, therefore, from his Mu‘jam al-Udabā. We are told that Khalaf was at one time a rationalist in doctrine, when he became notorious for his persecution of members of the contrary sect. And Yaḥya b. ‘Ammāra, who was in Sijistān at the time, had to make his way to Harāt in the disguise of a woman.

The traveller in Egypt who wishes to visit the Mosque of Amr may now leave Cairo either by train or carriage, and step out in the immediate neighbourhood. But he who prefers the most picturesque and interesting route will either ride or walk, and taking the street which runs parallel to the Khalīg, or Canal of Cairo, will pass out of the town by the gate of Sayyida Zeinab. Following the road past the picturesque little Mosque of Zein al Ābidin, he will pass under the Aqueduct, and proceed along the track which leads him through a country of mounds and dust-heaps past the Mosque of Abu-s-Suūd to the N. front of the building which he seeks (see Plan I.). Here let him ascend the mound which lies outside the huts by which the facade of the Mosque is shut in, and, facing towards them, take a general view of the scene. To his left he looks over a dusty space of comparatively low-lying ground, to the Aqueduct under which he passed twenty minutes ago; on his left front the citadel of Cairo stands out in the distance beyond a large expanse of high dust-mounds. Straight before him is the Mosque, but he can see little of it excepting the higher part of the two minarets, the mass of huts shutting out the view of the low walls; but behind the Mosque, at some two miles' distance, the limestone cliffs of Mukattam gleam in the sunshine: while further to the right the eye rests on a dusty height crowned by disused windmills.

The date of Kaniṣka is not a subject which I should have expected to be discussing in public. It is one of those long-standing problems in regard to which one at an early stage conceives an opinion or receives a bias, but which, either for lack of decisive evidence, or because the mind, after considering many conflicting views, is incapable of an act of faith, one leaves in the sphere of things unsettled. I myself should have been well content that the finishing stroke should be dealt by the spade, which even now is probing the ruins of Taxilā. Moreover, at the time when Mr. Kennedy first propounded to me his conclusions, I was fresh from the perusal of Professor Oldenberg's paper, which seemed to have said the last word in the discussion. If we have now invited a debate, and one at closer range than a trimestrial journal allows, the responsibility rests with Mr. Kennedy's extensive articles, their confident tone, and the interest which they have evoked.

At the end of January of the year 1258 A.D., after a siege of more than a month, the Mongol array stormed and took possession of Baghdad; then, on or about the 18th of February following, the thirty-seventh and last Caliph of the House of Abbas, Al-Musta'ṣim-billah, was by order of Hūlāgū put to death. Concerning the manner of his death the accounts differ; unfortunately there has come down to us no narrative by an eye-witness of these events, for the only really contemporary historian, the author of the Ṭabaḳāt-i-Nāṣirī, was a native of India and wrote at Delhi.

Whilst engaged as a Research Student on “Mediaeval Arabian Musical Theory ” at Glasgow University, I had the good fortune to have access to several libraries, and among them the Bodleian, where I compiled for my needs a short but detailed catalogue of the Arabic musical MSS. in this famous library. As this catalogue may be of use to orientalists and musical antiquaries, I take this opportunity of giving it publicity.

I do not propose on this occasion to initiate a general discussion concerning the authenticity of the plays discovered and edited by the late Mahāmahopādhyāya Gaṇapati Śāstrī and by him attributed to Bhāsa. Hitherto the matter has run rather a normal course, first enthusiastic acceptance, then opposition, then suggestions of a via media. The debate has evoked some treatises which will retain their value even after a consensus is reached. The various questions are, we may assume, familiar to all scholars here, the question of the formal characteristics of the dramas, of their titles, of the Prakrit and the Sanskrit, of imitations in or by other literary works, of references and citations in anthologies and works on poetics, of the history of the stage in the Kerala country.

The original home of the founders of the royal dynasties of the Hittites was the country of Kussar. It was of Kussar and Kussar only that Khattusilis, the ancestor of Subbi-luliuwas, the founder of the second dynasty, was king (KB. iii, p. 30); so, too, was “the lord” Labarnas or Tabarnas, the founder of the first dynasty (c. 1900 b.c.). From his death-bed in the city of Kussar Khattusilis I issued his last testament to his son and successor Mursilis I, and the only territorial title of the unnamed “great king” in whom Dr. Forrer is probably right in seeing Mursilis I is “king of Kussari”. The state records carefully preserved the annals of a still earlier monarch, Anittas “king of Kussara”, who describes in them his conquest of the Hittite-land.

When Muslim forces under the Ghurid sultan, Mu'izz al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Sām, made their first major breakthrough into Hindūstān in the 1190s, they brought with them two institutions that had long since taken root in the Islamic world. One was the iqṭā' or assignment of land or its revenue, in some cases in return for military service (sometimes misrepresented as “fief” on the Western European model). The other was the mamlūk, or military slave. Mamlūk status, it should be stressed, bore none of the degrading connotations associated with other types of slavery: mamlūks – generally Turks from the Eurasian steppelands – were highly prized by their masters, receiving both instruction in the Islamic faith and a rigorous training in the martial arts, and were not employed in any menial capacity. The mamlūk institution, whose origins go back to the first century of Islam, came into vogue from the first half of the third/ninth century, as the ‘Abbasid Caliphs built up a corps of Turkish mamlūk guards and their example was followed, with the disintegration of their empire, by the various autonomous dynasties that sprang up in the provinces. Turkish slave officers themselves went on to found dynasties, as in the case of the Tulunids and the Ikhshidids in Egypt and the Ghaznawids in the eastern Iranian world. The institution surely entered upon its heyday in the seventh/thirteenth century, with the military coup of 648/1250 in Cairo: a group of mamlūk officers overthrew the last Ayyubid sultan of Egypt and inaugurated a regime in which slave status was the essential qualification for high military and administrative office.

1. A block of stone inscribed with a Greek ( = Gk.) version of the latter part of Aśsoka's Rock Edict ( = RE) XII and the beginning of RE XIII was discovered at Kandahar in Afghanistan in 1963. The text was published in 1964 by D. Schlumbergerand again in the same year by É. Benveniste ( = B.) in Journal Asiatique (=JA). A condensed version of these two articles, in English, was published in Epigraphia Indica (= Ep. Ind.) in 1968.

This is a preliminary account of Abu'l-Qāsim al-Bustī's refutation of Ismā'īlism with what information is available about the author as a background.

The present short study examines the problems encountered in the translation in England of Ottoman documents addressed from the Porte or from the North African Regencies to the English Crown in the latter part of the seventeenth century. In particular it studies in some detail the translations undertaken, and the problems faced by, the polymath scholar Thomas Hyde (1636-1702/3), Librarian of the Bodleian Library in the University of Oxford and translator of Oriental documents to the Crown, but reference is also made to translations undertaken by William Seaman (1606/7-1680) and his son, and by the Rev. William Hayley (c.1657-1715).

Chance molested by caprice has dictated the selection of the characters studied in the following paper, and now that their tale is told and the MS. copied, I find myself wishing I had made a different list and followed another method.

The unsatisfactory modern compositions in European languages which profess to treat of the life and reign of Akbar all omit many things which ought to be mentioned, and fail to give a true view of Abkar's personality. The design of writing a life of Akbar more veracious than any now current has long been present to my mind, but may never be fulfilled, although I have made considerable collections for the purpose. However that may be, it seems worth while to devote a special article to the consideration of the enormous cash reserve accumulated by Akbar, which is one of the numerous facts of importance neglected by historians and biographers.