My first paper being descriptive of the various vessels of India, on the coasts of Malabar and Ceylon, I shall now proceed to describe the sea-ports, and the resources of the forests, on the coast of Malabar; and also, the facilities for building vessels of different descriptions, particularly at the port of Cochin, and those places which I have visited during my residence of five years in the country.

A short time before the departure of Colonel Rawlinson from England, at the close of last year, that gentleman gave me leave to copy and publish the paper casts which he had made of the Scythic portion of the Behistun Monument of Darius, together with any memoir on the language which I might compile. I have availed myself of his permission, and the following paper is the result of my labour.

For about 150 years scholars of unusual temerity have asserted that themes found in Buddhist texts, many of them celebrated in surviving Buddhist sculpture, can be found in the New Testament in more or less recognizable forms. If this were true, as in the case of Japanese philosophy showing through the work of M. Heidegger, students of the New Testament, already overburdened with conspissated conjectures, would be obliged to enter into a field which is not only unfamiliar to them, but, as a rival, unsympathetic. Few would take on such an adventure gratis. It has been shown elsewhere that parallels can be sorted into those which could have arisen anywhere, being invented many times over (such as the Golden Rule); those which are unlikely to have been invented more than once, but which can be attributed to one culture or the other, without hope of our deciding which is earlier; and finally those which are completely at home in one culture (say the Jewish) and exotic in the other (say the Buddhist), so that the conjecture that the latter “borrowed” from the former is attractive.

This study examines a little-known case of Enlightenment knowledge transmission centred on the rock-cut monument of Darius I at Bīsotūn in western Iran. It discusses a report on the monument published by the cartographer and historian Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville, which originated with the Decalced Carmelite monk Emmanuel de Saint-Albert (born Jean-Claude Ballyet); who transmitted it to Isaac Bellet, a doctor involved in secret negotiations in Constantinople; who in turn sent it to Louis, Duke d'Orléans, in Paris; who passed it on to d'Anville. The collison of scholarly interest, political service and scientific personality offers a fascinating case study of the Enlightenment ‘republic of letters’ in action.

In recent years the image of the Mongols has undergone a steady change. This shift reflects a growing interest in the development of the Chinggisid Empire and its assimilation of the peoples and cultures that it absorbed and conversely the absorption, not always voluntarily, of things Mongol by the sedentary cultures which acted as the Mongols’ hosts. It was not only military technology, cuisine, medicine, art, and the practicalities and instruments for enhancing the quality of life and commerce which were exchanged but the intellectual ideas and ideals which underpinned the life styles of those who were encountered. Chinggis Khan famously aspired to provide his wives and children with the fineries of life and the best the world had to offer. But it was not just the material world that he aspired to but also the intellectual luxuries of scholarship and learning. Throughout the Chinggisid Chronicles there are references to wise men and learned advisors who were consulted on the great decisions but also not infrequently there are references to debates often described in language more reminiscent of jousting tournaments or duels than intellectual exchange. These learned debates, usually between clerics of rival faiths, were staged by various princes in courts throughout the empire for sport and entertainment. Their popularity highlights aspects of the regimes’character.

This paper will consider the nature of these debates and the traditions from where they might have emerged and at the same time it will consider the role of ‘wise men’ in Chinggisid society.

This paper seeks to contribute to understanding of the dynamics of reference relation and subordination in Tibetan grammar. As a way of shedding light on this complex topic, it examines a translated sūtra, the Ye shes rgyas pa'i mdo, which contains numerous stories relating interactions and conversations between a variety of characters. A close reading of several representative passages of this text reveals some of the systematic structures of subordination. Despite not being outlined as a principle in traditional Tibetan grammars, subordination is seen here to be clearly reinforced by, and at times entirely encoded in, the use of the converb –nas to express coreference, and in the verbal noun and converb structures –pa dang and -pa las to connote cross-reference. The paper thus aims to show how attention to the functioning of subordinating structures serves the reader in the interpretation of complex passages where such structures at times provide the only key to the attribution of agency.

Although a great deal has been written concerning St. Thomas's connexion with India, it has so far resulted only in barren controversies and inchoate theories. The finding of the “Gondophares.” coins in the Cabul region raised great hopes of a final settlement of the problem; but apart from the (itself doubtful) identification of a single name in the Ada Thomae, it has shed little light on the mysteries of Christian origins in India. Nay, it has had positively injurious results, inasmuch as it diverted the attention of scholars into fields far remote from the familiar haunts of the Thomistic tradition. South India is the quarter from which we should expect fresh evidence: the north has no known claims to any connexion with the Apostle. In the south live the Christians of St. Thomas—the so-called “Syrians” who for more than a thousand years have upheld their descent from the Apostle's disciples. There also we have what has been believed from immemorial antiquity to be the tomb of St. Thomas, with various lithic remains of pre-Portuguese Christianity around Madras. South India has a remarkably ancient tradition of St. Thomas; and it is a living tradition, not a dead legend. It can be traced back at least to the sixth century a.d., and it still lives in popular memories, not only of Christians, but of others not recognizing the claims of Christianity. The existence of this tradition is known and recognized; but no organized attempt has yet been made to explore it.

This article aims to clarify an obscure passage in Plano Carpini's text, and subsequently in C. de Bridia's one, referring to a crushing defeat of Chinggis Khan, which has so far not been identified with certainty. The record of such a defeat is found in identical terms under the pen of Jūzjānī, and it actually appears that this strange narrative follows the pattern of the Mongol myth of origin, which is also common to the myths of the Türks, of the Kimeks and others. Here the argument is made that these accounts written outside the Mongol territory are therefore not only the result of confusion and distortion, contrary to what has long been thought. They testify to the existence of a legend of Chinggis Khan, built in an imperial propaganda effort directed at all the nomadic subjects of the Mongol Empire, and which placed the birth of the empire and the story of the origins contained in the myth on the same symbolic level.

Albeit with some deterioration in recent years, Malaysia has a state with high levels of capacity that has achieved sustained economic growth through a commitment to macroeconomic stability and other pro-business measures. Recent comparative historical work argues that this state capacity is an institutional legacy of a specific model of British colonisation. While Malaysia is an amalgam of areas formerly under direct and indirect rule; the former – a model of colonisation characterised by the construction of a legal-rational bureaucracy with extensive geographic reach – was more prevalent. Prior to the transition to independence, the British increased the “direct” nature of their rule by creating a powerful central government that brought the various territories together. And, a concerted transition of power to a cohort of “bureaucrats-turned-politicians” ensured that the new nation's leaders inherited an intact state apparatus. However, a disproportionate number of these senior bureaucrats hailed from Johor, a state formerly under indirect rule - a colonial model associated with small, neo-patrimonial states with limited capacity. By using colonial sources to map the contours and composition of the Malayan state under British and, subsequently, Japanese rule, this article will explore the reasons for this paradox.

Five manuscripts from the collection of the Institute of Oriental Studies, St. Petersburg contain compositions which are connected in one way or another with the name of the outstanding medieval astronomer and astrologer Abū Ma‘shar Balī (born in Bali on AH 20 Safar 171/10 August 787 AD, died at Wasef on AH 29 Ramazan 272/9 March 886 AD).2 According to existing catalogues these five manuscripts are the only ones among those kept in the city collections that contain Abū Ma‘shar's works.

My object in the following paper is to give a brief account of the wild tribes dwelling in the tract of country lying between the Brahmaputra and the Kaiendwen, Namtonai, or Ningthi, as it is indifferently called, the great western branch of the Irrawaddy.

I shall not attempt to give any description of the manners and customs of these tribes, but shall confine myself to indicating the localities which they inhabit, their probable numbers, their principal villages, and the names by which they are known among themselves and to the people of the plains; this last is very important, as many instances have occurred where inquirers working in different parts of the same country have described what is essentially one and the same tribe under different names, and the result has been that people residing at a distance have in more than one instance supposed them to be distinct tribes.