This article discusses the language of the Xūz mentioned in Arabic sources, endorsing the view that it is the latest attestation of the Elamite language. Drawing on models from historical sociolinguistics, it also studies the problem of mutual acculturation between speakers of Elamite and Persian in antiquity.

Victor Place was appointed as a consul to Mosul in 1851, where having arrived in 1852 he started excavations at Khorsabad. Financial problems forced him to stop this activity towards the end of 1853. As the Interior Ministry appointed him to another post in 1854, he wanted to transport the Khorsabad finds before he left Mosul. However, the roads were extremely unsafe because of the Muntafiq Arab tribes’ revolt. The local authorities repeatedly warned Place about this problem, stressing that he should wait until after the revolt was over before leaving. But despite these warnings, Place transported the Khorsabad finds from Mosul to Baghdad by keleks (rafts). The plan was then to transport them to Basra from Baghdad. Place set off on the river with a fleet made up of four keleks and a ship. Smuggled goods loaded on the ship made it heavier and attracted the attention of looters. On 21 May 1855, the fleet was attacked by bandits in the region of Kurna, located between Baghdad and Basra. The ship and two keleks sank at the spot, while the remaining two keleks arrived at Basra with some of the rescued goods. Various attempts to retrieve the sunken finds then followed. This article accordingly considers new data on the Kurna accident, drawing on Ottoman archival sources, particularly reports written at the time that discussed the possible causes of the accident and the negligent actions linked to it. As the destroyed memory of Khorsabad makes clear, archaeology cannot be rushed.

This article discusses a Sufi-inspired reformist movement that was set up in Chakrala (Pakistani Punjab) by Maulana Allahyar during the second half of the twentieth century. Attention is paid to the polemical religious context in which this movement arose, in part linked to the proselytising activities of local Shias and Ahmadis. Allahyar's preaching in the town created sectarian divisions within Chakrala's syncretic religious traditions. His reformist ideas also were articulated through a tablighi jamaat (missionary movement), which penetrated the armed forces of Pakistan during the military rule of Ayub Khan. Against this backdrop, the article also discusses the interface between Islam and the army, as this relationship played out in Indian prisoner-of-war camps holding captured Pakistani soldiers in the wake of the 1971 war, and so points to ways in which the mutual performance of mystical practices by Allahyar's Jamaat created a cohesive moral community.

This paper traces the history and usage of the theory of Sinicisation in western and Chinese scholarship, and discusses the intellectual trends underlying the different discourses in which the theory has been adopted. Since early 20th Century, the theory of “Sinicisation” has evolved and was adopted into three distinct historiographical discourses to construct different arguments. The first discourse is about the historical acculturation of border peoples and assimilation of domestic peoples to Chinese language, culture and economic life; the second one argues an inherent superiority in Chinese culture specifically produced cultural change across eastern Eurasia to promote nationalism; the third discourse emphasizes the diversity and mixture of the people living inside historical and contemporary China to construct and stabilise the polity. Every discourse rooted in its own intellectual trend, and also faces different criticism. Followed with examining criticisms of Sinicisation since the 1950s, this paper concludes by discussing the relationships of the three discourses of Sinicisation.

The present short study publishes five hitherto unknown letters written by the Ottoman historian Paul Wittek (1894–1978) to the American Middle Eastern historian Sydney Nettleton Fisher (1906–87). Fisher was a graduate student of Wittek for a few months in 1938; the letters were written during two short periods (1938–9 and 1946–9), when Wittek was attached firstly to the Institut de Philologie et d'Histoire Orientales et Slaves at the Université Libre, Brussels, and secondly, from 1948 onwards, to the University of London. In the intervening years (1940–6), Wittek was a political refugee twice over in England. The letters manifest the development of a close friendship between Wittek and Fisher who, as two supplementary letters written to him by the British Arabist and Islamic scholar H. A. R. Gibb show, was also active during the war years in attempting—unsuccesfully—to facilitate Wittek's acceptance in the U.S.A. as a political refugee.

The Kan narrative presents a series of events that are believed, by many Cambodians today including top leaders, to be the historical contestation for kingship between a commoner named Kan and members of the royal family during the early sixteenth century. Discussing the contents, the formats, the epistemology, and key figures bound up in the Kan narrative, this article provides insights on its contextual origins and reception as well as the texts that recount it. Rather than a proven historical episode, the narrative was effectively re-constructed by two groups of chronicle writers during the early 1900s in order to promote ideas about ‘treason’ and ‘loyalty’ to the throne. Uncovering the contextual origins and reception of the narrative not only allows us to understand the process whereby a long-held body of local scholarship lying outside the scholarly practice of ‘history’ in the present-day sense was used to shape collective knowledge, but also to see its profound impact on colonial and post-independence collective memory and culture.

This article deals with a Sogdian medical text in the German Turfan collection obtained from Toyoq. The recto of the document appears to contain two prescriptions for treating irregular fever and a disease involving the urinary bladder. The names of both diseases, and several ingredients used, suggest the text is closely linked to Indian medicine, especially Āyurveda. In contrast, the verso is a translation of a passage discussing dropsy in a seventh-century Chinese medical work, the first so far identified Sogdian text translated from a Chinese classical text. Despite its short content, this Sogdian medical text offers intriguing insight into the multi-cultural background of Sogdian medicine in Turfan.

In this paper I postulate that the original function of the srāošāuuarəza- is the recitation of the formula sraōšō astu (srōš barišnīh), and provide an analysis of the function of this formula in the Long Liturgy. It has an Indo-Iranian background and plays an important role in the Long Liturgy. Because of the dependence of previous editions on the exegetical manuscripts, the formula has never been recorded in the different variations it displays in the liturgy. Some instances have never been edited at all, and others only partially, leading to an incorrect understanding of several texts included in this formula. Furthermore, I present some thoughts about the materials, problems, and methods for the study of the Avestan priestly college and its evolution.

Three archival photographs recently made public by the French National Library depict men associated with an event taking place in colonial Laos around 1920. However, upon examination of the pictures and textual sources, combined with contemporaneous documents, it turns out that the pictures are actually from Tonkin (colonial northern Vietnam) and may depict Batchai (Pa Chay Vue) a celebrated Hmong messiah in 1918 when he met with colonial authorities in an ultimate negotiation attempt before launching a four-year rebellion. Batchai famously led a violent revolt against Tai and French power in Tonkin and Laos between 1918 and 1921, which has been documented in French military reports. No photograph has ever been found of the rebel leader and his supporters and this find in itself would be of significance, especially for the Hmong diaspora in the West for whom Pa Chay Vue has achieved near-mythical status as a major folk hero. This article examines whether or not this is him; but beyond the simple task of identification, it proposes interpretations for the events that suggest a more complex affair than French military archives have ever been willing to tell, including the hypothesis of an administrative cover up.

This article revisits the question of Indian South Africans as a means of looking at a small selection of events1 situated within the dynamics between India, Britain and South Africa from 1860 to 1960, which were particularly influential in moulding the status of membership born within these interstitial spaces of the British Empire. Adopting a wider rather than a nationalist perspective, this discussion contributes to the growing global history scholarship looking at the relationship between India, Britain and its dominions.

A fresh look at the 1888 Sikkim Expedition using both Chinese and English language sources yields very different conclusions from that of previous research on the subject. During the course of policymaking, the British Foreign Office and the British Government of India did not collaborate to devise a plan to invade Tibet; conversely, their aims differed and clashed frequently. During the years leading to war, the largest newspapers in British India gave plenty of coverage to the benefits of trade with Tibet, thus influencing British foreign policy and contributing indirectly to the outbreak of war. The Tibetan army was soundly defeated in the war, while the British troops suffered only light casualties. Although the Tibetan elites remained committed to the war, the lower classes of Tibetan society quickly grew weary of it. During the war, the British made much use of local spies and enjoyed an advantage in intelligence gathering, which contributed greatly to their victory. Finally, although the war was initially fought over trade issues, the demarcation of the Tibetan-Sikkim border replaced trade issues as the main point of contention during the subsequent peace negotiations. During the negotiations, Sheng Tai, the newly appointed Amban of Tibet, tried his best to defend China's interests.

The immensity of the corpus and diversity of genres of Classical New Persian in Judeo-Persian garb is remarkable, comprising a wide-ranging multitude of genres from translations of the Tanakh and rabbinic works to chronicles, lexicographies, religious poetry, translations of medieval Hebrew poems, and a large corpus of non-Jewish Classical Persian literature transcribed in Hebrew script. Yet, Judeo-Persian literary corpora remain incompletely catalogued as well as unsatisfactorily studied. While detailed studies of the genres of Judeo-Persian literature-in-transcription, as well as comparisons with literature in the common Perso-Arabic script, are still desiderata, this article aims to undertake a preliminary survey of the extant Judeo-Persian versions of the Dīvān of Šams od-Dīn Moḥammad Ḥāfeẓ of Shiraz (d. 792/1390) and address some contextual aspects of its popularity among Iranian Jewry.

The Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC), which was mainly controlled by British residents in the treaty port of Shanghai, and protected by the British Foreign Office, came under serious challenge from the Guomindang (GMD) (the rising Nationalist Party of China) from 1927 onwards. The Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP)—an imperial police force with powers to arrest, prosecute and detain—was forced to collaborate with the GMD, and practice unlawful arrest, extradition and re-indoctrination of Communist suspects and convicts. This resulted in the erosion of state powers and the management of prisons. This article argues that the dismantling of British colonialism began to take place in Shanghai during the inter-war period at the expense of some English legal conventions, as demonstrated by SMP violations of existing legal practices and humanitarian commitments. Second, it also suggests that English judicial conventions had an unintended impact on some Chinese civilians, who were keen to safeguard their rights during their detention and trial in and beyond the Shanghai Legation. This article, therefore, offers a new periodisation of British decolonisation and a re-examination of colonial legacy in East Asia.

This article documents the evolution and survival of an institution that has persisted nearly two and a half millennia until the present day. This institution, the Mandæan calendar, has evolved since its origins in the early Hellenistic period, and has been faithfully maintained since 472 ce at the latest. Its essential structure, 12 equal months of 30 days extended with the addition of five days to maintain its correspondence with the passage of the seasons, has evidently not changed since its initial adoption. After introducing the basic elements of time-keeping among Mandæans today, the article addresses the system of days, months, years, eras, and ages employed in the Mandæan scriptures, and correlates them with the present Mandæan calendar as well as the Julian and Gregorian calendars.

This article discusses some manuscripts copied and described by E. W. West in his Notebooks held at the Royal Asiatic Society, with special reference to the texts contained in the Pahlavi codex MK.