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.

The transcription of the Cuneiform signs presents a problem much more difficult than that of the transcription of the ordinary Semitic alphabetical scripts. The object of transcriptions of Cuneiform signs is not merely that of obtaining phonetic perfection, but it must also distinguish the signsemployed for the same sounds. In the earlier stages of Assyriology Delitzsch and others adopted the system of accentuating the signs, and before a larger number of homophones were discovered this system sufficed, and has beenadopted for the transcription of both Sumerian and Semitic texts. But at present there is complete anarchy among Assyriologists in transcribing Cuneiform texts. A tablet of the Rassam Collection in the British Museum, which the writer recently copied through the kindness of Sir Ernest Wallis Budge, groups together the homophonic signs. On this tablet there are, for example, eight different signs for the phonetic syllable eš. nine for še, eleven for gir, and eighteen for ge! It is not possible to devise eleven and eighteen different accents for thesevalues. The writer, therefore, proposes to introduce the method of numbering the signs with inferior exponents, eš1 eš2 eš3; ge1, ge2, ge3, etc., following a suggestion made by Dr. A. Walther, ZA. xxix, 147. [The idea was taken from Weissbach.]

Sweet smelling plant materials have attracted human attention since ancient times. It was realised that some plant materials have a better aroma when placed on burning firewood, which is how rituals all over the world came to include both plants and incense. The ceremonial feeding of the perpetual fire in Zoroastrian fire temples, performed five times in 24 hours, is called būy (aroma). The ancient Iranian scriptures – the Avesta and scriptures written in Pahlavi – all mention aromatics and several kinds of incense.

Central to this article is an Arabic letter written on papyrus in an Egyptian prison in the late ninth or early tenth century ce. The author complains that he and his companions are being kept in terrible conditions and that they have received insufficient support from outside prison. Interestingly, he indicates that there is a strong inclination among the group to offer themselves as slaves in order to find relief from their crushing living conditions. By doing so, they would have transgressed Islamic law of that time, which forbade the enslavement of free inhabitants of the Realm of Islam. The letter is a unique source for the social history of slavery, especially self-enslavement, in Abbasid society. This article presents, translates, and annotates this letter and offers a detailed study of its contents.

The Synaxaria, as also the Menologia, are not among the oldest of hagiographical texts, and consequently their use in public worship in Oriental churches is relatively modern. In the case of the Coptic—Alexandrine Church with which I am now dealing, at the date when its I Synaxarium was composed, Arabic had for long past; taken the place of Coptic as the living language; indeed, in my view, its compilation was an outcome of that religious and literary movement which, from the thirteenth century onwards, gavefresh life and improved order to the Church of Alexandria. The question of the immediate sources of this work—one not as yet ripe for treatment— cannot be dealt with in this place; it may, however, be pointed out that the Synaxarium, as the product of Arabic speaking people, could be easilyput together from all the hagiographical works in use throughout Eastern Christendom by speakers of that tongue. Hagiographical literature is to a great extent a monastic product, and its Greek branch had for its main centre Palestine, and the convents of St. Sabas and of Sinai—witness the names of Cyril of Skythopolis, of John Moschos, of Sophronios, Patriarch of Jerusalem, etc.

Writing in Isfahan in 729/1328-9, Ḥusayn b. Muḥammad b. Abī l-Riżā ʿAlavī Āvī produced a translation into Persian of the eleventh-century Arabic Risālat Maḥāsin Iṣfahān (‘Epistle on the Merits of Isfahan’) of Mufaḍḍal b. Saʿd b. al-Ḥusayn al-Māfarrukhī. This article explores the context for and purposes of Āvī’s translation-adaptation with particular reference to the extensive system of networks active in western Iran during the reign of the Ilkhan Abū Saʿīd (r. 716-36/1316-35). It is proposed that Āvī intended his translation to provide a means of entry into the urban élites and an affiliation with the administrative circles associated with the vizier Ghiyāth al-Dīn Muḥammad (d. 736/1336), a son of Rashīd al-Dīn Fażl Allāh, who occupied a position at the apex of this system of networks.

This article focuses on the relationship between property developers and architects in colonial Hong Kong in the 1920s to 1930s, identifying a successful collaboration within the architectural development company, the Crédit Foncier d'Extrême-Orient (CFEO). Benefiting from new plots of land made available on the Kowloon Peninsula and the opportunity to plan new neighbourhoods for both Western and Chinese clientele, the directors of CFEO negotiated with their in-house architects regarding land speculation and residential typology preferences while targeting the middle-class market. The company's demolished buildings left a crucial gap in the urban history of Hong Kong and China's treaty ports only recently uncovered through archival research by the author. Drawing upon in-depth primary data research and interviews with the architects’ descendants, this article probes into early twentieth-century residential development in Hong Kong, revealing how certain Western entrepreneurs and architects experimented with unique adaptations of architectural typologies suited to the local environment in the Chinese urban landscape.

On p. 174 of the late Dr. King's History of Sumer and Akkad there is reproduced the design of a cylinder seal of Lugalanda, the patesi of Lagash. In his chronological list in Appendix II to this volume, Dr. King gives the date of Lugalanda as circa 2850 b.c. In the centre of the seal design will be noted a curious geometrical pattern, to which the following reference is made on p. 176:—“Another peculiarity which may here be referred to is the employment on the larger seal, below the inscription, of a sort of arabesque pattern, an ingenious and symmetrical combination of straight lines and curves, the course of which may be followed without once passing along the same line a second time.”

34. The general evolution of the PI consonants, together with the special question of dialectical differences arising therefrom, has been set forth by Dr. Bloch. It will be sufficient here to note the chief features in that development, with special reference to Gujarātī.

It is at a relatively late date that the writing of history begins in the Arabic literature. The Arabs of the earliest period of Islām seem to lack all historical sense, and their theologians proved entirely hostile to historical studies. The impetus towards such investigations was not given until the second half of the second century A.H., when, under the ‘Abbāsides, the Arabs came into close touch with the Sāsānides, whose political ideas and civilization were accepted by the caliphs of Baghdād. Persian customs, Persian knowledge pervaded the empire and brought forth one of the most remarkable phenomena of history: the subjugation of the conqueror by the conquered, possessed of higher intellectual gifts.

This article examines the different mechanisms of the circulation of Chinese ceramics in the Middle East during the Abbasid-Chinese ceramic exchange during the eighth–tenth centuries ce. Although trade has been used conveniently to denote the circulation of Chinese wares in the Abbasid Caliphate, it is not the only mechanism that existed. There were also other possible processes of circulation, such as ceramics sent as tributes, diplomatic gifts, and samples, and secondary distribution through looting and pilgrimage. Not all Chinese wares shipped to the Middle East were luxury goods. Different types of Chinese wares had different functions and commercial and aesthetic values in the Middle East. It is an oversimplification to describe the circulation of Chinese wares in the Middle East as merely the result of the luxury goods trade.

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.

In medieval Islamic times and afterwards, the kuttāb was a modest institution for elementary education, with most emphasis being placed on learning the Qurʾān by heart―hence a ‘Qurʾānic school’ in English. Thus far, the topic of the kuttāb has been addressed by only a few modern works, leaving inadequately researched a number of critical related issues. This article is an attempt to give insights into the intellectual development of Muslim pedagogy in such archetypal primary schools. It looks into the teaching programmes and methods adopted for that intellectual preparation as well as their assumptions, rationales, implications, and consequences. The kuttāb's objectives are usually thought of as being universally identical, to help in the formation of a good Muslim. The picture, however, was more multifaceted, and the objectives, as well as means of their realisation, were moulded based on what a ‘good Muslim’ would mean according to those in command. Administrating the katātīb was a source, and a symptom, of competitive rivalry between the different intellectual tendencies in medieval Islam, who jostled for control over these critically significant institutions. The article thus delves into the intellectual, cultural, and socio-economic contexts in which primary education materialised and was practiced in pre-modern Islam.