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 writer of this paper is fully sensible how difficult it is to discover that which is studiously concealed, under the sanction of oaths, curses, and the (supposed,) impending vengeance of the gods; and how liable one is, even after the utmost care, to be mistaken in tracing the progress of any set of principles and schemes, which the fortunes or lives of the parties who have adopted them are concerned to hide, to varnish, to distort, and to misrepresent. He therefore offers the following remarks, not as the result of firm and unhesitating conviction, but as having a good deal of probability to support them, and as containing the substance of the best information procurable in his situation. He begs then to say a few words on the name, objects, government, initiatory ceremonies, secret signs, and seal of the said association, and to conclude with a few miscellaneous remarks.

In the present essay, it is my intention to treat of the heretical systems of Jina and Buddha, as proposed in the first essay of this series on the philosophy of the Hindus; and to notice certain other Indian sects, which, like them, exhibit some analogy to the Sánc'hyas, or followers of Capila or of Patanjali.

During my residence in North Hampshire, in the years 1819–20, I was led to pay considerable attention to a race of vagrant men, who, roaming about the high roads and lanes in the vicinity of Waltham, Overton, and Whitchurch, appear almost to be out of the protection of the law (whether in this or any other country), and are known throughout the world under the varied names—

The following notes upon the Vegetable Productions of the island of Ceylon have been thrown together in the hope that, although devoid of any originality, they may be deemed worthy the honour of a reading by this Society. The writer has been led to draw up this paper chiefly from the many inquiries made of him, as the Commissioner for Ceylon at the Great Exhibition, in reference to the produce of that colony. It would appear that whilst the larger articles of coffee and cinnamon are well enough known as staples of the Ceylon trade, but few have any knowledge of the less prominent produce of the island, more especially of those articles which are cultivated for local nse only, or for export to the neighbouring Indian states.

In January, 1862, Mr. A. A. Roberts, of the Bengal Civil Service, presented to the Society two copper plates inscribed with Bactrian Pali characters, said to have been found at Hussun Abdal, near Rawal Pindee, in the Punjab. These plates were submitted to the examination of Mr. Norris, and that gentleman at once picked out the names of Takhaśila nagara (Taxila) and Śákyamuni, proving the inscription to be one of more than ordinary importance. Having made a transcript of the document, he wrote a few notes upon it which were read at one of the Society's meetings, and he then suggested that the plates should be sent to me. The interest I had taken in these Bactrian inscriptions from the time of our joint labours on the Kapur di Giri edicts was well known to him, and was sufficient to ensure a careful if unsuccessful consideration of the newly-discovered inscription. In this recommendation the Society acquiesced and placed the plates at my disposal for examination and report. I now propose to state the results of my investigation.

In 1839 the British Government committed itself to an undertaking which practically amounted to the conquest, military occupation, and civil administration of a remote mountain land, inhabited by a savage and warlike race, animated by the strongest feelings of nationality. Yet it was all but wholly unprovided with the means of acquiring or imparting a knowledge of the difficult and peculiar language in which that nationality found its strongest expression and support. Such knowledge, indeed, was not absolutely indispensable for the purposes of official or social intercourse and correspondence. The requirements of current business were sufficiently met by the employment of Persian, generally known among the educated classes of Afghans, and strictly vernacular with that large population of Afghanistan which is Persian in its origin and Shiah by religion. But the inner life and distinctive character of the Afghans remained a sealed book for want of a knowledge of Pushtu. A vocabulary inserted at the end of Mounstuart Elphinstone's travels, a translation of the New Testament into Pushtu, and a brief grammatical sketch and vocabulary by Major Leach, constituted at that time the whole of the materials accessible to the English or Anglo-Indian student desirous of making himself acquainted with this language. These were scanty in amount, of little use for practical purposes, and of not much intrinsic value. The translation of the Testament was executed with haste and carelessness; and, though every allowance must be made for the zeal of the translators and the difficulties of a little-known, and, to them, uncultivated language, with the literature of which they were evidently unacquainted, such an error as the often-quoted rendering of “Judge not, that ye be not judged”, by words meaning “Do not practice equity, lest equity be practised towards yoū”, was more than mere inaccuracy in Pushtu, as it indicates fundamental ignorance of the real meaning of insāf, a word universal and of quite common and vernacular use in every language spoken by Mahometans. Leach's grammatical sketch goes a very little way in facilitating the student's progress, being slight, imperfect, and not always accurate or consistent in rendering Afghan sounds into Roman letters; but his dialogues are original, animated, and apparently idiomatic. An ode of Rahman, subjoined to his sketch, is so disfigured with bad misprints that it is of no use to any one who is not proficient enough to restore the text by means of the translation at the side: in other words, it is useless to a learner. As this work bears the official countersign of Mr. Torrens, certifying it to be a “true copy”, the responsibility of these misprints must be borne at least as much by the censor as by the author. The late Dr. Leyden appears at one time to have turned his attention to Pushtu, and to have succeeded in adding some knowledge of that language to his other great and varied accomplishments. A memoir by him on the Roshenian sect, in the 11th volume of the Asiatic Researches, contains some extracts from the Makhzan i Pushtu, the earliest extant work in the language, and the main authority for his subject. This, however, was not philology, and he added nothing to our knowledge of the language. A gallant and distinguished officer, Lieutenant Loveday, whose barbarous murder, at the instigation of the dispossessed Khan of Khelat, caused a deep and painful sensation in England at the time, is understood to have contemplated a systematic study of Pushtu, with a view to publishing the result; a project which was abruptly stopped by his untimely death.

In travelling through the eastern part of the province of Kattiawar, and in that division of it called Goheilwar (See Fig. A), after having traversed an extensive, perfectly level, and for the most part a desert plain, in a course from the north-west to the south-east, I found myself suddenly passing through a jungly tract of country, the vegetation of which, with the exception of gramina, was entirely composed of pílu bushes or trees, as they are named in the north-west of India—the ark, of the Arabs (Salvadora Persica of Linnæus). The surface of the country, through which my route had previously lain, was dotted here and there with a solitary tree of the Acacia Arabica, and consisted of a very deep alluvial soil, as evinced by the banks of several nalas and small river-courses, many of these containing a good volume of water; but from the almost complete level on which they run, all are very sluggish in their movements. Most of these streams, and also of the soil, are impregnated with salt, which in some parts covers the surface of the earth with an efflorescence like that of a strong hoar-frost. These streams all run to the eastward, to empty themselves into the gulf of Cambay; but, long ere reaching it, most of them are lost in the soft sandy soil in the vicinity of that arm of the sea.

This document is described by Dr. Hoernlé in a Report on the British Collection of Antiquities from Central Asia, reprinted from the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. lxx, pt. i, extra No. 1, p. 27. On the discovery of these documents Dr. Hoernlé's Note on the British Collection of Central Asian Antiquities, Oxford, 1899, should be consulted. The Persian leaf is now in the British Museum. There is with it another of about the same period, but almost illegible. They formed crumbled up lumps of waste paper, and required very careful unfolding and smoothing out.

Orthodoxy, as a rule, makes less appeal to the imagination than heresy, and this holds true of seventeenth-century Sumatran Suiism as of mysticism elsewhere. Some of the works of Shamsu'1-Dīn and Hamzah, the foremost exponents of the heterodox pantheistic mysticism of that time, have been published. al-Rānīrī, as an accomplished polemist, cuts a colourful figure whose Tibyān fī ma'rifat al-adyān has been photographically reproduced. The works of ‘Abd al-Ra'ūf, of Singkel, apart from Rinkes’ thesis and one or two monographs have been comparatively neglected. This neglect is not surprising. His works are largely translations and his favourite subject, the dhikr (recitation), does not arouse such a sjympathetic interest as the metaphysical speculations of the heterodox which find an echo in form as well as substance in the history of Western thought.

The following narrative is abridged from a Japanese book called “Nankai Kibun” (Notes of the Southern Ocean), which records the examination by the officials of Ohikuzen in Kiushiu, of a native of that province, named Magotarō, who had been cast away on an island near Mindanao, and, after a captivity of seven years, was ultimately brought back to Japan in a Dutch ship.

Maka terkadang kechil rupa dalam chermin itu sebab kechil chermin, dan terkadang panjang ia sebab panjang chermin; dan terkadang bergerak ia sebab bergerak chermin, dan terkadang bergerak ia sebab bergerak chermin, dan terkadang berbalēk ia, apabila ada chermin itu di-atas atau di-bawah; dan terkadang berbetulan kanan-nya dengan kanan yang berchermin (E. 148) tatkala banyak chermin, dan terkadang berbetulan kanan-nya dengan kiri-nya, apabila ada chermin itu di-hadapannya. Maka ada-lah sakalian itu menunjokkan kapada rupa yang kelihatan dalam (C. 56a) chermin, bukan ia sa-kali-kali diri yang berchermin dan bukan ia lain daripada-nya pun karena yang berchermin itu tetap jua ia saperti ada-nya, tiada ia berubah; hanya yang berubah-ubah itu kenyataan-nya dalam chermin jua sebab berubah-ubah penerimaan chermin: demikian-lah kita hendak mithalkan dengan tiada tashbih akan tajalli Hakk ta'ala pada hamba-nya berbagai-bagai ia, sebab berbagai-bagai hamba-nya dan segala hal merēka itu jua.

On trouvera dans le Journal, 1900, p. 345, une description sommaire de la petite collection de MSS. que C. Bendall avait empruntés à la Bibliothèque de Kaṭhmaṇḍu et dont il m'a laissé de bonnes photographies. La maladio, hélas! ne lui a pas permis de la publier dans son ensemble: il n'en a fait paraître que deux pièces, d'ailleurs infiniment curieuses, un fragment du Cullavagga et une page du Bhikṣuṇīprātimokṣa de l'Eglise du Mahāyāna. Mais de nombreuses notes manuscrites faciliteront ma tâche d'éditeur, et continueront pour moi le charme mélancolique d'une collaboration qui fut naguères la meilleure joie de mes études.