This paper is the first assessment of the different sources and shapes in a selection of Gandhāran furniture. Two main types of furniture legs are discussed. These are thought to be originally wooden legs attached to chairs, stools, and beds that are depicted in Kushan sculpture from Gandhāran. The two types are defined by their decoration. The first type is the geometric, lathe-turned furniture leg, the second type of leg is carved, not lathe-turned and depicts figures. The foreign origins of both types are traced and analyzed. A list, plus illustrations of reliefs showing representative contexts for each type, is given. Several heretofore unpublished reliefs are included. In some cases the Gandhāran examples can be interpreted as well as their developments into Central Asian furniture types.

This article contributes to the established scholarship on Sir William Jones (d.1794) by providing a detailed overview and analysis of the Arabic and Persian manuscript collection that Jones acquired both before arriving in India in 1784, and during his time living in Kolkata. 118 manuscripts in Arabic, Persian and Urdu and 69 Sanskrit manuscripts, as well as nine Chinese manuscripts, were transferred to the Royal Society library by Jones in 1792. These were then transferred to the India Office Library in 1876 and are currently housed in the British Library. As well as an in-depth survey of these manuscripts, this article provides important information on the manuscripts which remained in the Jones's possession after 1792 and which were sold, along with the rest of Lady Jones's (d.1829) library, at auction in 1831 after her death. Within this overview of the Arabic and Persian manuscript collections, there will be a sustained focus on the methods of acquiring manuscripts and Jones's curatorial management of his library.

The fourteenth century saw the production of innumerable Islamic manuscripts, many of which were extensively and expertly illuminated. The period is well-studied, in particular, the products of the ateliers of Baghdad, Tabriz, Shiraz and Cairo. This article concerns a manuscript from a less well-known production centre, namely that of Erzincan. This manuscript is a copy of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī's Mas̲navī produced in 774/1373. Although discussed briefly in previous scholarship (and attributed to Erzincan), there is much more to say about this skilfully and extensively illuminated manuscript. This article examines the manuscript's text, codicology, illuminations, inscriptions and wider historical context. In doing so, it substantiates the manuscript's connection to Erzincan and adds to the growing body of literature concerning the arts of the book of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Rūm.

This article describes the argumentative steps in the halakhic give-and-take conversations in the Mishnah and Tosefta, which are two compilations written in Tannaitic language, the language that had been used in the first period of Mishnaic Hebrew. The argumentative steps in the conversations are examined, i.e., the connection between the arguments of the sages when they present their views in the conversations.

The analysis of argumentative steps in halakhic give-and-take conversations in the Mishnah and Tosefta is based on the model proposed by Muntigl and Turnbull (1998). This model has classified the four types of disagreement acts, which were found in naturally occurring conversations: counterclaim, contradiction, challenge and irrelevancy claim; and it also ranks the degree of aggressiveness of the acts. The study conducted by Blondheim and Blum-Kulka (2001) on a Talmudic text was also based on Muntigl and Turnbull's study.

The aim of this article is to try to assess the degree of aggressiveness of the halakhic give-and-take conversations in the Mishnah and Tosefta by means of an examination of the types of argumentative steps. The findings from these two compilations are compared to the findings of the two previous studies.

Based on the first English translation of the Old Tibetan document with the shelf mark Pelliot tibétain 1096 recto, the article analyses the internal organisation of a stage station (sluṅs) in the Central Asian colonial provinces of the Tibetan Empire. It examines officials and offices that constituted a stage station, as well as persons who were using its services. By comparing the information contained in the document with later reports of foreign travellers, the article reconstructs the organisation of a stage station. It also brings to light certain traits that were apparently common to the first historically attested relay system of the Tibetan Empire and the succeeding system introduced by the Mongols during the thirteenth century ce.

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.

The murder of the Prophet's chief Jewish opponent, Ka‘b b. al-Ashraf, led to grave consequences for the tribe of Banū al-Naḍīr and for the Jews as a whole. The incident ushered in a series of hostile Muslim-Jewish encounters that reached its climax in the battle of Khaybar. Despite the constructive study undertaken by previous scholars, there still seem to be some contradictory elements and vague accounts that have been either utterly ignored or for which a satisfactory explanation is lacking. In the light of certain striking pieces of evidence, scattered in unlikely places in the sīra and tafsīr compendia, the present study sets out to examine critically the extent to which the accounts of Ka‘b's murder can be trusted. It will be argued that what we are faced with is seriously distorted material with logical absurdities and discrepancies that cannot easily be reconciled. Apart from the historical reconstruction, special attention will be devoted to a momentous historiographical point—that our reports have been doctored for political reasons. This helps us adopt a more realistic view of the individuals whose names occurred in the accounts of the event in question.

This article looks at the continuing fascination with the idea of monarchy in Iran, dismissed and condemned after the revolution but gradually rehabilitated through an engagement with the Shahnameh and a reinvigorated interest in ancient Iran. The interest in Sasanian Iran, as the cradle for the development of Islamic civilisation, has in turn enabled a popular re-acquaintance with Achaemenid Iran, previously frowned on for its association with Mohammad Reza Shah but legitimised by the enthusiastic endorsement of the figure of Cyrus the Great by President Ahmadinejad. This political myth of Cyrus the Great reflects the changing political dynamics of the Islamic Republic and the need to appropriate popular nationalist iconography to the state.

In this article I suggest that, although many Jews perished during the wars between the Mamluks and the Franks during the thirteenth century's second half, and others migrated to different Jewish communities in the Middle East and Europe, some Jews migrated to Safed, Jerusalem, and perhaps to Gaza as well. A significant number of the Jews who lived in Safed and Jerusalem during the early decades of the fourteenth century were of a Western European origin but were not newcomers from Europe. I suggest that some of these were Jews who previously lived in Acre and Tyre and migrated to Safed and Jerusalem either shortly before the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem got its coup de grâce, or afterwards.

Yāska's Nirukta (ca. fifth-third century bce), the seminal text of the Sanskritic discipline of nirvacana or ‘etymology’, is one of the most important yet least studied late Vedic texts. Particularly little attention has been paid to Nirukta Chapter 7. This chapter outlines Yāska's views on Vedic deities and articulates the hermeneutic principles whereby they are classified and defined. It plays a crucial, yet underappreciated, role in the history of ancient India's theological and hermeneutical speculations. The absence of an accessible English translation, which tackles the text's many conceptual and linguistic complexities, is the main reason why Nirukta Chapter 7 has not received the attention it deserves. We offer the first complete annotated English translation in a century. A comprehensive introduction clarifies the structure and rationale of Chapter 7 and elucidates the salient features of Yāska's theology.

The term isrāʾ, based on the first verse of sūra 17, is typically rendered as ‘Night Journey’. There is little compelling evidence that this was the original meaning of the Qur'anic text, and medieval lexicographers and exegetes preserved a number of alternative meanings, such as that asrā was a denominal verb meaning ‘to travel through the uplands (al-sarāh)’. Another explanation is that asrā is a denominal verb of the noun sariyya (pl. sarāyā), a military expedition. By drawing on early historiographical descriptions of sarāyā and South Arabian inscriptions, which give evidence that the word sariyya is of Sabaic origin, the Qur'anic meaning of asrā was evidently something like ‘to send on a royal expedition’. Early Islamic Arabic poetic texts also offer extremely compelling evidence that the first Muslims were familiar with some of the key concepts of South Arabian royal authority as they appear in Sabaic inscriptions.

This article contains ethnolinguistic observations and materials on the so called zâr cult, as practiced in present day Hormozgân province, Iran. The cult, which is spread across the Persian Gulf and central and north-east Africa, consists of practices and rituals of placation with which a category of spirits known as zâr and referred to as winds are warded off from a victim. The article, in particular, aims at offering an accurate description of the sub-lexicon associated with zâr in local Hormozgâni dialects, an aspect of research which has not been taken into consideration up to now.

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.

Various models of interreligious relations have been proposed in recent scholarship, including most prominently the several varieties of inclusivism, exclusivism, and pluralism. One abiding presupposition shared across these models takes the religious adherent (or community of adherents) as a unified individual (or collective of such individuals). This assumption overlooks an important feature of the mystical strains of religiosity, which is to negate selfhood. This article seeks to problematize standard scholarly models of interreligious relations by working through and applying to them such mystical understandings of (non-)selfhood, with particular focus on the Islamic mystics Abū Yazīd al-Bisṭamī, Abū l-Qāsem al-Junayd, ʿAbd al-Karīm ibn Hawāzin al-Qushayrī, Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār Nayshābūrī, and Muḥyiddīn Ibn al-ʿArabī. Based on this textual study, I propose an alternative to interreligious dialogue more adequately termed ‘polyglot monologue’ or, in order to avoid pluralistic implications, ‘omnilogue’.

In his study of Arabic phonetics, Asbāb ḥudūṯ al-ḥurūf (The Causes of the Genesis of the Consonants), Ibn Sīnā briefly surveys some speech sounds found in languages other than Arabic, among them one particular to Khwarizmian, an Iranian language attested primarily in glosses to Arabic manuscripts of the 13th century. This study attempts to elucidate the sound Ibn Sīnā describes both through reference to his own system of phonetic terminology and through comparison with extant material in the Khwarizmian language.

The Royal Asiatic Society in London houses a collection of magic lantern slides of China dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By investigating a selection of lantern slides, this article explores their epistemological nature and their wider relations to socio-cultural and political systems of power. These lantern slides highlight the complexity of our ways of seeing and representing that are embedded into particular historical and ideological systems in which meaning is both shaped and negotiated. This article argues that images are powerful conduits in disseminating and, if unchallenged, maintaining particular notions and ideas.

Modern historians of Persia's Safavid period (1501–1722) have long assumed that there was an interregnum between the death of Shah Ismāʿīl I in 1524 and the date when his son Ṭahmāsp came of age and established direct control in the 1530s. This idea of an interregnum takes two forms in the historiography. According to one narrative, during this time the Qizilbāsh amirs were disloyal to the young Ṭahmāsp and tried to seize control of Persia for themselves. According to the other, there was a war of succession in which Qizilbāsh factions supported different sons of Ismāʿīl I. Both of these narratives co-exist in the contemporary historical literature even though they disagree. Based on a close reading of the early Safavid chronicles, this article demonstrates that both narratives are incorrect and there was no interregnum. The Qizilbāsh continued throughout Ṭahmāsp's minority to respect him and treat him as their leader. Unsurprisingly, given his youth and inexperience, he deferred matters of state to his amirs. Nevertheless, his amirs derived their legitimacy to rule from him, and when leadership passed from one amir to another, it did so only with Ṭahmāsp's approval. Moreover, there was no dispute over the succession during Ṭahmāsp's minority.

This article presents and analyses two previously unknown sources on Raja Krishnachandra of Nadia (1710–83). While the raja has long been famed in Bengal as a patron of brahmans, scholarship on him has had to contend with a lack of evidence. The two new sources, reports of conversations between Krishnachandra and Europeans, furnish insights into his mind and milieu. They support recent arguments that he used brahmanical patronage to buttress his authority, and deception to deal with the ascendant East India Company. Their greatest contribution, however, is to reveal that the raja sought an active engagement with foreign intellectual traditions. They suggest that eighteenth-century Hindu learning, far from being inherently hidebound or insular, was amenable to outside influences.