In tracing back the orign of nations beyond the period embraced by the special histories of Greece and Rome, we reach the interval in universal history, during which four great nations are known to have floursihed, and to have extended their relations, political, millitary, or commercial, over the various regions of the globe. These are the races of India, China, Phœnicia, and Egypt. The two latter have long ceased to exist as distinct nations; or rather have been absorbed in other nationalities; whilst the two former, beside constituting the most numerous portion of the human race, have continued their ethnical existence to the present time. That other races of men inhabited the countries which have since been occupied and peopled by these races anterior to them may be considered certain; but no data exist from which it can be inferred that any considerable monarchy, or empire, was ever founded in any of these countries, prior to the clear, national establishment of those races, respectively, in India, and Egypt. The three former are the nations of Asia, who, whether by the antiquity of the civilization attributed to them, or the permanent influence they have exerted in the history of mankind, must be regarded by modern writers as the earliest races that have established themselves as great nations, whose peculiar languages and institutions mark them as the most distinct divisions of the human species, from whose records all researches in general history and ethnology must commence. Of the Chinese and the Phoenicians I shall have as little to remark as of the Egyptians.

The name Ilqāy appears on small monetary weights for 1251 and 1252 in Cairo at the beginning of Mamlūk rule. This person was a high official in the treasury, responsible for regulating monetary transactions. However, the name is not Arabic but Mongolian—and at this point, the Mamlūks and Mongols were contesting the Middle East. This article traces the meaning of the unique name and its appearance in Mongol history. It then discusses the hypothetical way in which Ilqāy developed Mongol coinage in his early career. The violent purges of the Mongol civil war may have forced him to escape and enter Egypt's financial system. This biography is hypothetical since there is no literary evidence for mint activity and personnel at this time. Nevertheless, the unusual name and timing create a mystery that invites special consideration.

Placing Tipu Sultan of Mysore's personal dream register in its textual and historical contexts reveals an internal logic to its structure and content that scholars have not previously recognised. An analysis of the manuscript as a whole suggests that it was compiled no earlier than 1795, as part of a range of strategies adopted by Tipu to ameliorate the position in which he found himself in the late 1790s. Isolated by his regional contemporaries and under increasing pressure from the British, he drew on a range of divinatory practices in an attempt to understand, and perhaps even influence, the outcome of events.

The article examines the material relating to the early reception of the eighteenth century Hindi poet Ānandghan (Ghanānand). Ānandghan's poetic ideas were not far from those expressed in Persian literature, popular at that time in India. Apart from an abundance of idiomatic usage and paradoxes his approach to love reflects his taste for Persian poetry: the beloved can be either a woman or an undefined God, or even Krishna. Ānandghan's ‘openness’ towards Persian poetry earned him disrepute. In this article three early schools of criticism of his quatrains are distinguished: those of his opponents, of his fellow-devotees and of Brajnāth, the secular connoisseur. All three parties expressed their views on Ānandghan through poetry sometimes employing bitter or pungent language.

This is the story of how G. A. Naqvi (Indian Police, 1926) of the United Province (UP) was affected by the events of 1947–1948 in British and independent India and Pakistan and had to become what he did not wish to be: a private citizen in Pakistan. It shows how he, like so many others, had to become reconciled to the idea of British India breaking-up into independent India and Pakistan. This process changed forever the relationship between institutions of the Indian State and individual lives of Indian Muslims; the ‘long’ Partition of British India prompted new questions of legitimacy, citizenship and sovereignty, while producing “displacement, disruption and disappointment”. This was especially so in the so-called ‘Muslim-minority provinces’, among which the UP held the pre-eminent position and to which Naqvi belonged. After 21 ½ years of service, Naqvi found himself unwanted in both India and Pakistan, in a time of deepening communal divide, suspicion and hostility. A much sought-after officer during the Second World War, how was he to know that over 1947–1948, not one of the four governments to which he was and/or could be affiliated with would want to have anything to do with him.

Colonial and postcolonial historians writing in English relied upon an emancipated slave's eighteenth-century Persian text, Tahmās Nāma, to construct the history of the Punjab in the same period. In this process, they have mistranslated the text and the genre. Rather than reading Tahmās Nāma as factual history or as a moral text of refinement, this article argues that if we return to the original account, in Persian, we see that the text is primarily auto/biographical. While this auto/biography does provide some insight into eighteenth-century political history of the Punjab and Mughal Hindustan, it—more importantly—sheds light on the ethnic, religious, social, economic and gendered lives of the author, Miskin, and the people whom he includes in his narrative. These intersecting and overlapping identities have been erased, flattened or misrepresented in translations of the text. Based on a re-reading of the auto/biography in its original language, this article considers how identity and slavery—conceptual categories of the present that are elided in the mistranslations—function in the text, and how those categories were understood, negotiated and leveraged during the eighteenth century.

A Letter from a man called Ishkun-Dagan has been published by M. Thureau-Dangin in Revue d'Assyriologie, xxiii, pp. 23 ff. Another letter of this man has recently been presented to the Trustees of the British Museum by Dr. N. L. Corkill, formerly Civil Surgeon, Baghdad, who very kindly allowed me to study and copy it at Baghdad; it is now numbered 121205. The tablet was obtained in Nasiriyah, and though the statement of the fellaḥ to whom it once belonged that it was found at Sinkarah is of no value, it certainly came from a site in the Muntafik area, very possibly from illicit excavations which are known to have been conducted at Warka. The tablet was probably found at the same time and in the same place as the tablet now in the Louvre, so that they were found in the archive of the sender, not of the addressee, a curious circumstance for which many parallels could be cited. The writing is delicate, very accurate, and large. Owing to an accident when I was examining the tablet at Baghdad, after making my copy of the text which was then complete, the tablet was broken and some signs have now been injured in lines 21–4.

Sir Charles Bell has given in this Journal (July, p. 710) a detailed account of this important book on Tibet, which, though already edited in Italian by Puini, has remained for many years insufficiently known. It is not, therefore, my purpose to write a new review of the book.

In the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, October, 1894, I showed that the Kelishin inscription (No. lvi) was a bilingual, the Assyrian transcript of it having been discovered by M. de Morgan, and I was thereby enabled to confirm some of my interpretations of Vannic words and grammatical forms and to correct others. My conclusion was disputed by Drs. Belck, Lehmann, and Scheil, but the question has now been decided in my favour. Dr. Leopold Messerschmidt, together with Dr. Belck, has made a careful examination of a cast of M. de Morgan's squeeze in the light of the fresh materials obtained by Drs. Belck and Lehmann in their scientific mission to Armenia, and the result is to prove that the Vannic and Assyrian texts are close representatives one of the other. The revised texts have been published by Drs. Belck and Messerschmidt in Anatole I (1904), and Dr. Lehmann has written upon them in the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, lvi, 4 (1904), pp. 825–829.

This article explores the Central Asian adaptation of the ʿAqāʾid al-nisāʾ which has survived as a single copy within a manuscript codex located at the Beruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent (Uzbekistan). Not only does the Central Asian adaptation of the ʿAqāʾid al-nisāʾ lift ‘the iron curtain’ from the little-known world of rituals and customs practised by women in early modern Central Asian societies, it also serves as an important source to balance the androcentric view of gendered history of the early modern Persianate world, while challenging the preconceived notions of women's agency and authority in pre-modern Muslim societies.

I am to-day at Ser Yazd, eight farsakhs south of Yazd, on my road to Kennan…. As I suppose the Gabrs interest you most, I will begin my rambling letter with them. I heard at Shiraz, where there are occasionally a few Gabr shopkeepers, that in Kermán there are only a few illiterate Gabrs; so when I at Darebjard heard that the road lies for six days through a complete desert, without any habitation, or the least cultivation, I determined to go straight to Yazd, which would be passing over ground that had been travelled by few or no Europeans before. I found at least on my map many places laid down wrong, even Yazd; and I am now on the road to Kermán, only on account of my having heard at Yazd, that though there are there only one hundred houses, (or about four or five hundred Gabrs), still they have from olden time a good many books, far more than there are in Yazd; whether it be true or not, I shall tell you by and bye.

In 1789 James Augustus Grant wrote that he had resided for several years in Benares as a free merchant under the protection of the East India Company. He evidently specialized on trade with the Gorakhpur district of Oudh. “I have for some time past and by the force of unremitting exertion and a great expense been enabled to establish factories in Gorruckpoor, etc., in the [Nawab's] Dominions for the manufacture of cloths, sugar, opium, etc., and I effected these establishments without any interest or influence except that which became the result of my own industry.” He had incurred considerable initial losses and expenses, chiefly in propitiating various Indian functionaries and landholders and especially the Nawab's land-revenue officers (amils). The amils seem mostly to have farmed the privilege of collecting the land-revenue on short leases and to have been constantly changing, a fact which made all business concerns highly precarious.