Beginning in the seventh century, the expansion of Islam brought with it an outpouring of peoples from the Arabian Peninsula. While the composition of these Islamic armies became more diverse as the religion spread through the Near East and across North Africa to Western Europe, there were clearly elements of both the urban Arabian population, of which the Prophet was a member, and the rural Bedouins, whose migrations from their original homeland continued sporadically for several centuries. This slowed during the period of Turkish hegemony, but it left a scattering of enclaves identifying themselves as ethnic Arabs throughout the Islamic world.

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.

It is characteristic of Iranian revolts and rebellions that they usually occur when the state is perceived to be weak and unable to enforce its authority. Naser al-Din Shah was an arbitrary ruler like all his predecessors. But, the consequences of arbitrary rulers were not all alike either for themselves or for the country. Much depended on their personalities as well as the circumstances in which they lived. For example, the fall of the Safavid state and its dreadful consequences for Iranian society and economy were largely due to the personality traits of Shah Sultan Hosain which combined extreme promiscuity and intemperance with common superstition, susceptibility to influence, and timidity and indecisiveness at moments of crisis. Otherwise, the state would not have fallen so swiftly and miserably in the face of rebellion by some of the poorest and most backward nomads of the far eastern provinces of the empire.

To facilitate & promote all enquiries which may be calculated to enlarge the boundaries of General Science is a Duty imposed on the British Government in India by its present exalted situation & the discharge of that Duty is in a more especial manner required from us when any material addition can be made to the Public Stock of useful knowledge without involving considerable expence.… [T]his desirable object will never be attained unless it shall be made the Duty of some Public Officer properly qualified for this Service to collect information & to digest & publish the results of his researches.

Temür has been many things to many people. He was nomad and city-builder, Turk and promoter of Persian culture, restorer of the Mongol order and warrior for the spread of Islam. One thing he was to all: a conqueror of unequalled scope, able to subdue both the vast areas of nomad power to the north and the centres of agrarian Islamic culture to the south. The history of his successors was one of increasing political fragmentation and economic stress. Yet they too won fame, as patrons over a period of brilliant cultural achievement in Persian and Turkic. Temür's career raises a number of questions. Why did he find it necessary to pile conquest upon conquest, each more ambitious than the last? Having conceived dreams of dominion, where did he get the power and money to fulfill them? When he died, what legacy did Temür leave to his successors and to the world which they tried to control? Finally, what was this world of Turk and Persian, and where did Temür and the Timurids belong within it?

For several years now the Lafayette Project has been compiling a data base of portrait photographs from the Copy I collection at the Public Record Office, Kew (PRO). The Lafayette Project was founded to further the cataloguing of historic photographs and funding by the Elm Trust has enabled the project to set new standards for the documentation of historic photographs based on careful analysis of an image and its contents as a historical source. The data base is a means not only of investigating portraits but also a starting point for entering into the wider scope of the collection to pursue historical research.

In the Introductions to the Full Reports of his expeditions to Chinese Central Asia, Sir Aurel Stein (186–1943), professional as always, was careful to acknowledge the assistance of all involved with the production of the reports. Most of his colleagues in the academic world were men who to this day retain their positions as great scholars in the history of oriental studies. The people who helped Stein in the remote sites of Xinjiang live on through his affectionate, and often humorous, descriptions of them scattered throughout the Full Reports and the popular abridged accounts of his expeditions. Yet very little is known of the people who worked on a day-to-day basis with Stein, unpacking the many cases he sent to the British Museum, sorting through the various groups of often unfamiliar material, documenting the Stein collection, arranging exhibitions of objects and photographs relating to Stein's expeditions, as well as carrying out personal favours for Stein, such as posting on his spats and packing tea tablets bought on his account at the Army and Navy Store.

The term Timurid is generally understood to comprise all Timur's descendants who reigned or competed for power in western Turkistan, Iran and Afghanistan in the century demarcated by the deaths of Timur in 1405 and Sultan Husayn Bayqara of Herat in 1506. In political terms Timurid rulers distinguished themselves by their fractiousness and perennial internecine warfare, but they and their subjects still bequeathed a legacy that influenced a broad region of the eastern Islamic world and could be felt even in the west in the twentieth century. It would be more accurate, though, to say that there were multiple, discrete Timurid bequests. Apart from the universal acclaim for the cultural florescence that occurred in Husayn Bayqara's Herat (1469–1506), different dynasties and populations selected only those elements of Timurid civilization that suited their own political traditions and cultural preferences. There were three principal groups of Timurid legatees. These were: the Mughul emperors of India, true Timurids who enthusiastically embraced Timurid legitimacy and consciously presided over a Timurid renaissance; the Uzbek and Ottoman States, whose Turkic rulers and subjects revered Timurid cultural achievements while sharing ambiguous feelings about the figure of Timur himself; and the non-Timurid, culturally non-Turkic Safavid and modern Afghan states in which the Timurid legacy was, respectively, the most ephemeral and the most diffuse. More recently a small number of Westerners have laid claim to part of the Timurid heritage by proclaiming the most anomalous product of its culture, Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur's autobiographical memoir, to be a work informed by modern literary sensibility and psychological insight. Their enthusiasm is only the most recent example of the diverse ways in which a civilization's legacy may be transmuted by its heirs' divergent interests.

In South India Cochin is well known for its Jewish settlement, but the rich Muslim heritage of the town has so far remained almost unknown. A reason for this anonymity lies perhaps in that the Muslim community of Cochin – unlike that of Calicut – while highly influential in the commerce of the region, kept a low profile with regard to political affairs, at least from the time of the appearance of the Portuguese. Cochin, situated at 9° 58′ N and 760° 14′ E, occupies the northern part of a long stretch of land, about half a kilometre south of the Island of Vypin (Baypin or Vypeen) and 1.5 km west of the shores of the mainland, now occupied by the modern town of Ernakulam. Between Cochin and Ernakulam is a long expanse of sheltered but navigable water, at the mouth of which is Willingdon Island, housing the modern sea port and the airport.

The “foreignness” of Islam in India is a familiar theme in the rhetoric of contemporary-Hindu fundamentalism. The numerical majority of Hindus in India is taken to mean that the nation-state ought to be founded on ideals and institutions defined as authentically “Hindu”, that India is the land of the Hindus, and that it must be ruled only by them. This ideology evidently leaves little room for non-Hindus, but especially so for Muslims, who ruled large parts of the Indian subcontinent for several centuries and who still constitute a sizeable minority in India. It is argued, for instance, that as the ruling elite in India, Muslims not only exploited the Hindus, they never even thought of themselves as “really” Indian and should not consequently be considered as such. For all the centrality of the Muslim Other to constructions of Hindu fundamentalism, the appeal and success of the latter is predicated on the systematic exclusion, if not the expulsion, of Muslims from the Hindu nation-state.

“The recognition as well as interpretation of archaeological evidence will always be biased and incomplete. There can be no archaeologically achieved final truths or wholly objective interpretations. But to recognize such limitation is not to reduce the subject to a set of mere perceptual constructs. Archaeology is a societal activity that embodies both the residues of its past and its changing attitudes towards the past. We call the residues evidence and the attitudes interpretation. The continuing dialogue between the two enables archaeology, always open to new questions, to reveal new knowledge.”

A number of Frenchman stayed behind in Siam in the wake of the Chaumont-Choisy embassy of 1685. The best known are the Chevalier de Forbin and the engineer La Mare: Forbin was appointed governor of Bangkok, admiral and general of the King of Siam's armies, and La Mare was to produce numerous plans, sometimes implemented, of Vaubanesque fortifications at various places including Bangkok, Mergui, Songkhla, and Phatthalung.

In the late thirteenth century the openness and religious toleration of the Mongol Empire created unique conditions which encouraged European missionaries to venture into Asia. The Franciscans and Dominicans who answered the call to evangelize in territories under Tartar dominion enjoyed such success by the early fourteenth century that the papacy created archbishoprics and suffragan sees in Central Asia and China, and entertained dreams of new Christian communities aligned with the Roman Church. This paper focuses on a special set of circumstances which briefly encouraged those expectations. Western missionaries to the Mongols found influential Christian women, the mothers and consorts of rulers, at the courts of several khans. Because these Mongol queens played powerful political roles, their prayers and example might encourage the conversion of their people and those subject to them. Faithful wives of pagan rulers, in times long gone, had played a dynamic part in the conversion of husbands or sons, and of their realms, thus contributing to the spread of Christianity in Europe. Once again, at the close of the thirteenth century, hopes were voiced that pious women might perform a similar task in Asia.

In the course of the last fifty years there have been on average twenty-four million animals registered annually in Mongolia. In 1996 29, 275,700 animals were counted. This is a quantity never before experienced in the country's history. In the coming years another rise in the number of animals is expected. Some specialists conjecture a continual increase. Others are attempting to prove that this cannot be realized on account of limitations of space and that, already, throughout the country, pasture land is being threatened by overuse due to the sheer quantity of livestock. The question of how much livestock the resources of the entire natural pasture can support is still not completely answered.

The publication of two volumes of collected papers by Nathan Sivin is an event that should be welcomed by every centre where Chinese studies are taken seriously. For all his considerable reputation in a difficult area of specialized research namely the history of Chinese science, he has never sought to capitalize on his status as a specialist to “blind us with science”, but rather has written with an eye to broader problems, problems of concern at least to anyone professionally interested in the Chinese element in human experience, and (one would hope) many more besides. The spread of his concerns has meant in the past that many smaller college libraries have not possessed the periodicals and conference volumes in which his work has appeared, so this set of republished papers serves a useful function in itself. But in the second of these volumes in particular we find a number of previously unpublished works, including one of over seventy pages on a topic of considerable importance. Rather than leave this unexpected bounty simply for college librarians to acquire in order to make good existing gaps (and to have on the record the full Sivin bibliography to 1995 which may be found in the second volume), there would seem to be every reason to draw the attention of a broader number of readers to the appearance of important work which has existed for a while in draft form, but which has not been made generally available until now.