In many parts of the world there exist social relations between a man and his mother's brother which are in many ways closer than those between the man and his own father. Often these are associated with the condition of society best known as mother-right, in which the child belongs to the social division of his mother and her brother, to whom may fall the chief or sole direction of the life of the child. In other cases a similar close relation is found between maternal uncle and nephew when descent is no longer counted in the female line, and there is definite evidence1 that in some cases this relation is a survival of a previously existing condition of matrilineal descent.

This essay is concerned with the career of a somewhat obscure figure in the early history of Orientalism, Colonel Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier, who is however known both to aficionados of the early European manuscript collections in the West, as well as to historians of the more obscure aspects of the Enlightenment on the Continent. The occasion for the research on which this essay is based is, in large measure, a project intended to translate the extensive Persian letter-book that Polier (together with his amanuensis, or munshī, Kishan Sahay) produced during his long stay in India; this translation, of a text entitled I jāz-i-Arsalānī (which is preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris), has recently been brought to partial fruition by Muzaffar Alam and Seema Alavi, through the auspices of Oxford University Press (Delhi). In this context, it may be useful to reflect somewhat on the rather extraordinary career, and fascinating milieu, of Colonel Polier.

This article examines the interrelationship and interactions between the notions of Son of Heaven and Son of God with respect to sacral kingship in Inner and East Asia by first uncovering a previously unnoticed synthesis of the two in ancient Inner Asia. The author argues that the Chinese belief of “heaven” and related political and religious concepts may share a common origin with parallel notions in Altaic cultures, possibly intertwined with Indo-European elements. Nevertheless, by studying theophoric names, which existed in all major Old World civilizations except early China, he demonstrates the distinctness of Chinese civilization, as well as the extensive pre-Islamic Iranic influences in East Asia.

As is well known, Hülegü, Chinggis Khan's grandson and the founder of the Ilkhanate (r. 658–664/1260-65), never converted to Islam. Moreover, as the man who annihilated the Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258), that had led the Islamic umma for more than half a millennium, Hülegü was often portrayed—albeit mainly outside his realm—as one of the great destroyers of Islam. Yet around the mid-seventh/fourteenth century we find at least two different conversion stories relating to Hülegü in both Ilkhanid and Mamluk sources, both allegedly originating in Baghdad. This paper aims to present these narratives and analyse their origin and use in the context of the later or post-Ilkhanate period. I may say already at this stage that I have more questions than answers, and that my explanations as to why such stories were invented are rather speculative.

“If all you have to tell us is that one barbarian succeeded another barbarian on the banks of the Oxus or Jaxartes, what benefit have you conferred on the public?” Voltaire's question is an awkward one for anyone investigating the transmission and distribution of power in the XVth century Circassian Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria. Even so the question of factionalism and its role in succession crises and other crises in the history of the Islamic lands has to be tackled, for surely the prevalence of factions in the Near East and our lack of understanding of them does add a certain patina of dullness to much of Islamic history. Faction succeeds to faction as “Amurath to Amurath”, and though Macaulay could find the history of England and its latter part, the struggle of Whig and Tory, to be “emphatically the history of progress”, few people have felt similarly confident about the struggle of Ẓāhirī and Manṣūrī factions in medieval Egypt. It is hard to understand past events without imposing a pattern, and at the political level the gyrations of Egyptian factions do not lend themselves easily to the imposition of pattern.

The treatise of Jāḥiẓ, of which a translation is given in the following pages, was published at Leyden in 1903 by Brill. The editor was Van Vloten. But he died before completing the work; it was continued and sent to the press by de Goeje. Since then another edition has appeared at Cairo from the “Maẓba'a al-Taqaddum” by Muḥammad Effendi al-Sāsy al-Maghriby. I have used the Cairene edition for my translation. In the Leyden edition there are two other opuscula (rasā'il) besides the one translated here, namely those entitled “The Boast of Black People over White” and “The forming of Squares and Circles”. In the Cairene edition there are eleven rasā'il in all, including the three of the Leyden edition, the titles of the remainder being as follows:—

The Envious Man and the Object of his Envy.

The Superiority of Speech to Silence.

The Praise of Merchants and the Blame of the Work of Government. Love and Women. Keeping One's Promise.

Exposition of the Practices of the “Faction”. Gradations of the Competent.

Sidkeong Namgyal Tulku was a colourful figure in the history of Sikkim. This crown prince was an incarnated lama as well as a student at Oxford, and a member of the Royal Asiatic Society. This article considers the various roles of Sidkeong Tulku in the light of a Tibetan work by his hand, which has been previously not connected to his person. Written in 1909, it consists of ‘monastic guidelines’ (bCa’ yig) which are a clear witness to the time and circumstances they were written in. This traditionally framed work, authored by a supposed Buddhist modernist, addresses the education of monks, monastic economy, sex, and preaching to the laity. These guidelines shed light on the changing status of the monastery in Sikkim, in the midst of reforms and threats to Sikkimese sovereignty. In this article I examine the contents of these guidelines in the context of its author's eventful but short life, against the political, religious and social backdrop of a Buddhist kingdom in turmoil.

The history of early settlement of the East African coast is currently interpreted in widely differing ways. One view takes as its premise the idea that the coast was first colonized from Asia. This hypothesis, which has its roots in the work of XlXth century historians suggests that there was substantial settlement by non-Africans who established trading and religious communities. These colonies formed the basis of what has come to be known as the Swahili Culture. At first defensible peninsulas and offshore islands were chosen as safe refuges from the African tribes of the interior. Eventually contact was established between these new communities and the African coastal peoples, to the benefit of both parties. Raw materials were obtained from the hinterland of these trading outposts, which were traded and taken across the Western Indian Ocean on the seasonal monsoons. The foreign merchants married local African women and an Afro-Arab culture developed, building stone towns, mosques, and tombs, that still remain today along the coastline from Somalia to Mozambique.

Professor Langdon has pointed out to me that the Assyrian text published in Ebeling, KAR., No. 360, bears a close resemblance, alike in diction and in subject-matter, to Lehmann, Šamaššumukin, Taff. xxxvii f., edited in Streck, Assurbanipal, ii, 264–8, and it is almost certain that we have here two different but relạted accounts of the return of the god Marduk to Babylon with Shamashshumukin, in 668 B.C. In the following interpretation of KAR. 360, I am again very greatly indebted to Professor Langdon.

The medieval Chinese tradition tells us that a given Chinese character may change its meaning when its reading is altered slightly. Modern scholars have sought principles for these changes, and from those principles have reconstructed a skeletal system of early Chinese morphology – with such elements as derivation by tone change, causative infixes, transitivising prefixes, etc. Yet it is an arresting fact that some of pre-modern China's linguistically most astute scholars inveighed against the multiple readings on which this research is based. They seem to have held strong opinions, not always made explicit, about precisely how it is that Chinese characters represent language. These two views, modern and traditional, represent fundamentally different models of how early Chinese evolved into modern Chinese.

This article addresses the issue of passive resistance by the Jogi and Mirasi musician castes against the puritanical notions of their former patrons, Meos. After the Meo patrons embraced the Tablighi Jamaat's version of Islam, the Jogis and Mirasis feel pressured to give up performing. Their artistry is also their livelihood which they value very much. By using James Scott's understanding of ‘passive resistance’ and ‘hidden transcript’ this article shows the use of poetic art for passive resistance. In doing so, the Jogis and Mirasis do not compromise with the civility of the art and positively use the lyrics of their new songs against the Meo patrons’ versions of religious purity on one hand, and extremist Hinduism on the other. They, in fact, emphasize a version of righteousness that is universal and thus needs no organised religion.

In the year 352/963, according to independent evidence and the author's own testimony, the Samanid ruler Manṣūr b. Nūḥ sent an order via his major-domo and closest confidant, al-Fā'iq al-Khāṣṣa, to his minister Abū 'Alī Bal'amī, commissioning the latter to prepare a translation into court Persian of the famous historical annals written in Arabic by Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī. Bal'amī completed this task, producing a book whose popularity in many ways eclipsed that of the original text throughout the Persian-speaking world and beyond (being translated into various Turkish dialects and even, ironically enough, back into Arabic). Unfortunately, exploitation of this source by modern scholars has been hindered both by its identification as a “translation” of Ṭabarī's work and by the lack of a suitable edition of the Persian text. This article attempts to explore these problems and the extent to which they have been rectified by recent studies and editions of this important work.

It is mainly with the two principal sets nē, nō of Gujarātī and rai, rō of Mārwāṛī, and with their older forms, that I propose to deal in these pages. Since the right clue to the explanation of them—with the exception of rō, which presents no difficulty—has been missed by scholars as yet, I trust that the present investigation into their origin will be of use even to such as might hesitate to accept all my views unreservedly.

It is a great honour for me to be asked to give the Richard Barnett memorial lecture. I knew Richard Barnett well, and had the privilege of working with him at the British Museum for three years before his retirement. He was a great source of inspiration, and I and many others owe him a considerable debt of gratitude. I have chosen as my subject recent British Museum excavations in Assyria, partly because I believe this would have been of some slight interest to Dr Barnett. Both the British Museum and Assyria were close to his heart. He worked in the Museum for more than 40 years, and from 1955 to 1974 was Keeper of the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities. Throughout this time Assyria was a special interest, and Dr Barnett did some of his most important work on Nimrud ivories, the Assyrian reliefs and the Balawat Gates. Inevitably, the role of the British Museum in making these pioneering discoveries in the nineteenth century held a particular fascination for him.

This article provides a contextual analysis of the assassination attempt on the Timurid ruler Shāhrukh's life on 21 February 1427 in Herat. According to the contemporary Timurid chroniclers, Aḥmad-i Lur, a Ḥurūfī by profession, tried to kill Shāhrukh. Having survived the attack with light injuries, Shāhrukh reacted harshly and executed many of those who were accused of conspiring against him. During the interrogations, many other intellectuals who professed as a method of inquiry the ‘ilm-i ḥurūf (the science of letters) were also accused of participating in the conspiracy. In this article, I treat the assassination attempt as a moment of crisis in Timurid politics, study it in relation to the transformation of the intellectual landscape towards the mid-fifteenth century, and provide an in-depth textual and contextual analysis of the historiographical sources as well as the writings of those intellectuals who left a first-hand testimony of the subsequent interrogations. After a close scrutiny of the available evidence, I demonstrate that the interrogations of those intellectuals who practiced the science of letters predated the assassination attempt, and I argue that the assassination attempt was just an episode, albeit an important one, in Shāhrukh's attempts to control and regulate the emerging public sphere in Iran and Central Asia.

There has appeared a new trend in recent scholarship on the early modern Islamic world that analyzes the role of gender and sexuality in society and culture. Ruby Lal and Rosalind O'Hanlon have investigated women and gender roles in the sixteenth-century Mughal harem and the broader imperial court respectively. Mehmed Kalpaklı, Walter Andrews, and Khaled El-Rouayheb have studied the nature or the implications of sexual relationship among men in Istanbul as well as the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi have read Safavid and Qajar literature and visual arts through the lens of gender and power politics. Together these scholars have successfully highlighted the relevance of this methodology particularly in its application to the narrative sources that comprise the bulk of our documentations for the period (except for the Ottoman case of course), and it is to subject to such an approach a brief, but crucial, period in early Mughal history and historiography that the present article now proceeds.

The Western science and technology which invaded China during the mid-nineteenthcentury, in the wake of European military and economic aggression, entered a culture witha long indigenous tradition of natural philosophy, formed by extraordinary figures suchas Zhang Heng (78–139), Sun Simiao (581–682), Ge Hong (c. 21–341), Shen Gua (1031–1095) and Song Yingxing (c. 1587–1665). Moreover, as modern research has shown, China was, at least until about A.D. 1400, moreadvanced scientifically and technologically than Western Europe in many respects. Thesmall minority of late Qing scholars who showed any interest in the natural world or intechnology could console themselves that they were working within a noble but neglected side-stream of Chinese culture.

For some time I have felt constrained to set forth what I know about the Yezidis, or Devil-worshippers, because I have had special opportunities of studying their life. The present article is divided into two parts: (1) Yezidi books under the light of criticism; (2) outstanding features of the sect. The final portion of the narrative deals with some newly discovered documents.

The earliest steps that led to the exchange of ideas, skills, and material goods between the cultures of the East and the West will probably never be more than a matter of surmise; but the literary and archaeological sources of information that start as a slender trickle at the beginning of the Christian era soon develop into a mighty stream and disclose a tale of human endeavour and ingenuity which few historians can fail to find fascinating and stimulating. During the last half-century or so dedicated scholars such as Pelliot have devoted their major research efforts to the meticulous consideration of the minutiae involved in the subject; and, more recently, Joseph Needham has contrived both to continue the work of such predecessors and to draw some of the major conclusions that are the fruits of basic research conducted in several disciplines. Probably the full story of these exchanges can never be told; for the evidence is sadly deficient; balanced inferences that rely on information gathered from both East and West are rarely possible; and, maddeningly enough, the political restrictions of the 20th century now prevent the application of the modern techniques of archaeology, geography, and anthropology in areas where they are most likely to be successful.

Many changes have taken place in the delta since the middle ages, and the former geographical conditions require to be understood in order that the mediaeval history of Egypt may be followed. Besides, the mediaeval geography is of obvious importance as a means of arriving at the state of Egypt in ancient times. An adequate historical map of the mediaeval period is much wanted, and this paper is intended as a contribution towards a map of this kind.