Patronage by the royal court of religious institutions and foundations is one of the hallmarks of the development of India under the rule of the Gupta and Vākāṭaka kings (4th–5th centuries). This patronage was extended also to religious movements other than the king's own persuasion. The evolving culture of religious tolerance and enthusiasm is apparent in the temple monuments of the time. In this article we focus on four archeological sites where these developments become best visible: Udayagiri, Māṇḍhaḷ, Rāmagiri (Ramtek), and Mansar. The close relationship of the Gupta and Vākāṭaka realms is investigated in its local settings. Renewed attention is given to the ‘Mandhal Inscription, Year 5’ of the Vākāṭaka king Rudrasena II and the deity on whose authority the charter was issued: Muṇḍasvāmin. It is argued that the name Muṇḍa refers to no one else than the Gupta queen of Rudrasena II, Prabhāvatī Guptā. During the last decade, excavations in Mansar (5 km west of Ramtek) have brought to light the state sanctuary of the youngest son of Prabhāvatī, Pravarasena II. The findings there are placed within the tradition that can be traced back, through Rāmagiri and Māṇḍhaḷ, to the religious foundations in Udayagiri.

The foreign relations of Iran from 1800 to 1921 have on the whole been discussed in terms of diplomatic relations between states, of ‘Great Power’ policy, and of the impact of the world economy upon a comparatively weak and traditional society. A brief survey of the existing literature reveals that Iran's lack of progress has been attributed among other factors to her form of government, foreign interference and to her predicament as a buffer state between the British and Russian empires. The traditional power structures of Iran, as dominated by an absolute monarchy intent on personal interest with a concomitant lack of realism when engaging in war, was, in Ramazani's view, the origin of the country's weakness. Kazemzadeh saw the subject from the point of view of Anglo-Russian rivalry at the highest levels, and argued that both powers sought to impose hegemony on Iran by a variety of means, including, putting pressure on the Shah and chief ministers, using commercial concessions and exercising intimidation. The competition of Britain and Russia was so intense that each was determined to undermine any plan of development proposed by the other, opportunities were numerous, as, for example, in the introduction of railways. Yapp, to some extent, questioned this argument by pointing out that British interests were more complex than those of the Russians; on the one hand a stronger Iran was a more efficient buffer-state, but on the other hand it could undermine British influence in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf. Yapp also noted that the British and Russian presence gave advantages to Iran in terms of the development of international trade, the control of internal disorder and in the imposition of regional security. Greaves saw Britain's diplomatic connections with Iran as dominated by her preoccupation with the defence of India, and believed that its attitudes to Iran were neither consistent nor strong. Issawi, in his study of economic development, also presented a more complex picture which emphasises the variety of the factors involved, and also the fluctuations in the economy over the period. He pointed out that trade did grow steadily, that the country benefited from new technology, for example the telegraph and the construction of the Suez Canal, and that it lived within its means. On the other hand, involvement in the international economy from 1890–1914 led to rapidly increasing foreign financial and political factors, which undermined the county's independence. Wright provided a different approach in that, while acknowledging the baleful effects of aspects of Anglo-Russian rivalry on Iran, he was more concerned with the experiences of a variety of ‘English’ amongst the Iranians, and thus offered a study of interaction between foreigners and Iranians at a level below that of international politics.

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.

In the aftermath of 1857, urban spaces and cultural practices were transformed and contested. Regional royal capitals became nodes in a new colonial geography, and the earlier regimes that had built them were recast as decadent and corrupt societies. Demolitions and new infrastructures aside, this transformation was also felt at the level of manners, sexual mores, language politics, and the performing arts. This article explores this transformation with a focus on women's language, female singers and dancers, and the men who continued to value their literary and musical skills. While dancing girls and courtesans were degraded by policy-makers and vernacular journalists alike, their Urdu compositions continued to be circulated, published, and discussed. Collections of women's biographies and lyrics gesture to the importance of embodied practices in cultivating emotional positions. This cultivation was valued in late Mughal elite society, and continued to resonate for emotional communities of connoisseurs, listeners, and readers, even as they navigated the expectations and sensibilities of colonial society.

The commitment of North-West Frontier Province Pakhtun religious politics towards the quest for a society and state governed by religious leaders was directed through the colonial period, and into the national period, predominantly by the ulama known as Deobandis. These ulama took their title from the madrasa Darul Ulum Deoband in the United Provinces in north-India and came to prominence through championing Muslim interests in colonial NWFP. After the partition of the Indian subcontinent and the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the United Provinces remained in India, separating Pakistani scholars trained in Deoband from Indian Deobandi theologians, and indeed from the school itself. But these ulama continued to call themselves Deobandis and were central to the successful demand for the constitutional declaration of Pakistan as an Islamic state; and brought Islam to bear on national and provincial legislation from positions in parliament. Increasingly well-organised and well-funded, NWFP Deobandi ulama established madrasas and mosques in the province, strengthening the preserve of religion and their own authority. When the Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation began in 1978, a section of the resistance organisation working in exile in Peshawar gravitated towards these Deobandi institutions, drawing the Deobandi ulama of the NWFP into the jihad. Sustaining links to the Afghan fighters even after the withdrawal of the Soviets, the NWFP Deobandis contributed to and encouraged the emerging organisation of the Taliban, becoming champions of their reactionary brand of Islam.

With the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe the west has been confronted with the existence of several, little-understood Muslim ethnic groups in this region whose contested histories can be traced back to the Ottoman period and beyond. Previously overlooked Muslim ethnies, such as the Bulgarian Turks, Bosniaks, Pomaks, Kosovars, Chechens, and Crimean Tatars, have begun to receive considerable attention from both western scholars and the general public. Much of the interest revolves around the question of the identity of these Muslim communities and the history of their formation as distinct ethnic groups. The history of the formation of these groups has in many cases been contested terrain as Bulgarian authorities, for example, attempted in the 1980s to prove that the Bulgarian Turks were actually “Turkified Bulgarians”, as the Greek government sought to demonstrate that the Pomaks (Slavic Muslims) were actually Islamicized Greeks, and as Bosniaks were labelled “Turks” by their Serbian nationalist foes in spite of their Slavic background.

The reign of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Khān (1880–1901) is considered by most historians to have been the foundation stone of modern Afghanistan and consequently much has been written about this formative period of Afghanistan's history. However, despite the extensive literature available on his reign, several important features about the Afghan Amīr appear to have been either overlooked or ignored.

One of the classical difficulties of the student of the history of the Islamic Middle East, as contrasted with his colleagues in the European field, is the lack of archive material. While the western medievalist, for example, has at his disposal a mass of records, central and local, public and private, political, administrative, judicial, and ecclesiastical, the orientalist has to rely for the most part on literary and archæological sources. In many fields of history his findings are in consequence often vague and general; they are in the main limited to the public and external life of the communities and individuals he studies. Only the events and personalities important enough to achieve literary mention are known to him, and then only through the reflecting medium of literary sources. Even the great figures, with few exceptions, remain dim and formalized outlines, while for the life of the people he has to rely mainly on occasional hints and scraps of evidence. Large numbers of individual documents survive in isolation—some in the form of inscriptions, others quoted in the texts of the chronicles; but only for one period after the rise of Islam is any important body of original documents available—and the light they have shed on the period from which they derive has deepened the surrounding darkness. The Egyptian papyri of the early Islamic period have imposed a rewriting of much of the history of the early Caliphate, as recorded by the chroniclers and jurists. Yet even the papyri are not archives in the true sense of the word.

A. K. Majumdar says: “It is not possible to establish on historical evidence any link between the Āḻvārs and Caitanya. … It is, however, quite possible that his parama-guru (preceptor's preceptor) Mādhavêndra Purī was influenced by the Āḻvārs.” Other authors have put forward similar suggestions, but are equally unable to substantiate their assumptions. A. Gail states categorically: “Bhakti in the form of emotional-suggestively created identification with figures from the Kṛṣṇa legend was systematically developed in the rasa theory of Bengal Vaiṣṇavism, after preparation by the Āḻvārs.” But he has to concede that no proof for this statement is available: “Nothing seems to be known of any connexion between Bengal Vaiṣṇavas and Āḻvārs.” S. Das Gupta had earlier drawn certain parallels between Caitanya's school and the Āḻvārs.

This article examines how Shah Wali Allah of Delhi (d. 1762), one of the most prominent scholars of eighteenth-century India whose thought has continued to be influential in many Muslim circles to the present day, conceptualized the interplay of political power and religious authority. Though several of Wali Allah's numerous writings have received considerable scholarly attention, this aspect of his political and religious thought has, oddly, been much neglected. A close reading of Wali Allah's writings reveals him to be keenly interested not just in the immediately relevant issues of the chronic political instability afflicting his age but also in the broader, theoretical, questions of how political power undergirds the moral force of religious norms and institutions. It is his unusually blunt but robust recognition that power is part of what enables a religious tradition to evolve and change that this article explores. That recognition—buried in writings that purport to be about the merits of Islam's first caliphs—has other important implications, too, notably for an understanding of the broad political context in which the sacred law itself undergoes change.

“When Red Pigeons Gathered on Tang's House” (Chi jiu zhi ji Tang zhi wu 赤之集湯之屋) is a Warring States period bamboo manuscript written in the script of the Chu state. It concerns figures that are well known in historical legend: Tang 湯, the founder of the Shang dynasty; his wife; his minister Yi Yin 伊尹, here called by the title xiaochen 小臣 [minor servitor]; and the last king of the Xia dynasty, here called simply the Xia Lord (xia hou 夏后). These figures have their familiar identities, but the tale recorded in the manuscript is unique and has no apparent political or philosophical import. The protagonist, Xiaochen, is Tang's cook, but he does not play the role of founding minister raised up by a future king. Moreover, he is associated with a nexus of motifs associated with shamans, including spirit possession. He acquires clairvoyance after eating a soup of magic red birds (jiu 鳩, [pigeons] or hu 鵠 [cranes]) intended for Tang. After fleeing from an angry Tang, he is possessed by a spirit-medium raven. He then cures the illness of the Xia Lord by having him move his house and kill the yellow snakes and white rabbits under his bed. One rabbit escapes and the story concludes that this is why parapets are placed on houses, suggesting that the context of the story was the construction of a building. Thus, it may have been similar to a historiola, narrated in a ritual to sanctify houses after the placement of the parapet, thus preventing illness among the inhabitants.

The reign of Sultan ‘Alā’ al-Dīn Kayqubād (1219-1237) is depicted by both mediaeval and modern sources as the apogee of the Saljūq Sultanate of Rūm (Anatolia) (c. 1081–1308). The later court historian, Ibn Bībī, reflected subsequent generations' perception of ‘Alā’ al-Dīn when he recorded that “the earth has never borne a king the like of him, nor have the high heavens looked down on such a one”. Above all, his reign was remembered for the great military conquests that unified much of Anatolia under Saljūq rule. To the north, south and east neighbouring principalities, both Muslim and Christian, were either annexed outright or reduced to tributary status in a series of memorable campaigns.

The revised text of the Charles Beckingham Memorial Lecture, Ibn Battūta and the Mongols, delivered to the Royal Asiatic Society on 13th January 2000 by D. O. Morgan.

In a recent publication of great interest M. Zakeri has reopened the question of the identity of the Abnā' who appear in the early 'Abbāsid army. Once assumed to be the physical descendants of the 'Abbasid caliphs, or the 'Abbāsids and their adoptive members and clients, the abnā' al-dawla/al-da'wa/al-shī'a were shown by Ayalon in 1964 to be “in all probability, the descendants of the Khurāsānīs who brought the 'Abbāsids to the throne”. This has been generally accepted. In Zakeri's opinion, however, the Abnā' were not “Sons of the Revolution”, but rather sons of Sāsānid horsemen (asbārān): their ancestors had been members of the lower nobility that furnished the cavalry of the Sāsānid empire after Khusraw I's reforms. In Zakeri's opinion the revolutionary troops consisted primarily of such recruits, and so the conventional view is in one sense quite correct: the Abnā' did indeed end up as sons of revolutionaries. But the conventional view, according to him, obscures the fact that the Abnā' belonged to a distinct social group: it was by allying themselves with Sāsānid asbārān that the ‘Abbāsids came to power.

Hülegü (d. A.D. 1265) and his successors were known by the title īlkhān, which has provided modern scholars with a convenient label for the dynasty. In general, īlkhān has been glossed as “subject” or “submissive” khān. There is less agreement, however, over the circumstances in which īlkhān was adopted by Hülegü. This, in turn, is connected to the more general discussion on the manner in which Hülegü's dynasty was established. Without purporting to resolve these questions, in the following article some evidence is offered which sheds light on these matters.

The following translations are from the texts in my Assyrian Medical Textsfor sick men suffering from ear-trouble.

No. 80. AM. 34, 4 (K. 2422) + 37, 2 (K. 7096 + 9059 + 11916 + 16434) + 35, 4 (K. 10787) + 4, 7 (81–7–27, 61, already translated as a fragment, No. 14, PRSM. 1924, 15); AM. 33, 1, and 34, 1 (K. 3215 + 3666 + 8109 + 10453) + 36, 1 (K. 3696 + 7221 + 10767 + 11788) + 12, 2 (K. 10019) + 34, 5 (S. 379); AM. 97, 6 (K. 3486); AM. 38, 4 (K. 6661) + 37, 10 (K. 10498) + 38, 1 (K. 13492). From an examination of these four pieces of tablets it seems reasonably certain that they form parts of the same original whole. At the same time it should be observed that AM. 37, 2, rev., has three air holes in the body of the text, and that these occur in the others only in the vertical lines whch divide the columns. Three of the above are in KMI. 18, K. 6661, K. 10498, and 19, S. 379.

In 1405 Sino–Iranian relations hit a nadir. Tīmūr (1336?–1405), never one to bother with the niceties of diplomacy, had detained and executed Chinese ambassadors sent to his court by the Ming emperors Hung-wu (r. 1368–98) and Yung-lo (r. 1403–24) in 1395, 1402 and 1403, had amused himself by regularly insulting Emperor Hung-wu, publicly calling him the “Pig Emperor”, and had finally decided to invade China to claim it for himself and Islam. Fortunately, for all concerned, Tīmūr drank himself into a stupor on the night of 18 February 1405 and expired at his base camp at Utrār where his troops were assembling for their march to China. The Chinese campaign was immediately abandoned as succession suddenly became a more pressing matter. It would continue to occupy Timurid energies until 1411 when Tīmūr's fourth son, Shāhrukh (1377–1447) gained control of the empire.

Grenard has said, “it is largely because of human nature's delight in superlatives, that the world's famous captains have always been given perfectly fabulous hosts. Great generals must have huge armies. The names of Genghis Khan (Chinghiz Khan), Timur, Alexander, and Xerxes mount like wine to the brain of the historian. His figures become figures of speech: ‘one hundred thousand’ becomes his minimum. He soon leaps to ‘one million’. He does this with a sense of relish but also because he knows that his reader will tremble with pleasurable awe at the passing of a conqueror who leads countless warriors.”

This article argues for a radical revision of later Gupta chronology based on a review of the primary evidence. The paucity of dated material has meant that historical reconstructions of the period have been based on late-Victorian assumptions about the nature of society and kingship. Removing this ideological framework allows not only for a revision of chronology — a traditional historical concern — but for a new understanding of Gupta kingship and the constitution of state.