The occasion which brings us together this afternoon is a truly memorable one: to present to you, Sir Harold, the newly founded Denis Sinor Medal for Inner Asian Studies. Here at Cambridge, indeed, and everywhere among Iranists in Britain, your epic contributionsto the knowledge of Inner Asia and its cultures are indeed better known than the new award with which we today seek to acknowledge them. I should, I think, preface my remarks with a few words about the new medal and its origins.

This work is a truly splendid and remarkable achievement. It greatly enlarges and brings up to date the Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, 4 vols, 1975–8, edited by the late Michael Avi-Jonah and by Ephraim Stern, on whom the prophet's mantle has now fallen. It provides a detailed catalogue raisonne of all the archaeological excavations in the Holy Land. This is defined in a pragmatic way, that is to say, the ancient Palestine, and so modern Israel and Jordan, some parts of Lebanon and Syria under Israeli control, and a number of sites in the Sinai peninsula. Given that in Israel archaeology is a national hobby, and that numerous foreign agencies are likewise at work, British, French, German, Italian and United States as well as others, such an encyclopaedia can only mark a stage in Holy Land archaeology, for it is of its nature an on-going process.

This paper describes the results of a brief archaeological survey of Jazī;rat al-Hulayla, an island in the Emirate of Ra's al-Khayma, United Arab Emirates. The island was found to contain extensive evidence of occupation dating from the first three centuries A.D. until recent times.

H. J. Polotsky was my teacher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for four years in the 1930s and my friend and mentor and scholarly critic for 53 years. It is difficult for me to speak or write about him without a measure of personal involvement and indeed emotion. In the humanities he was a polymath, as a student of languages he was, I believe, without parallel in this generation. He could appear austere to those not well acquainted with him; he was a man of few words but many thoughts and great profundities. His style in all languages was exquisite and witty; his letters were invariably full of humour and his aphorisms pithy, widely admired, and never forced. He did not suffer fools gladly, but he mellowed with age and developed much tolerance even towards the majority of mankind who could contemplate his mastery with awe – yet never emulate it. While he and I lived in the same city, Jerusalem, for five years only, we were in wellnigh constant communication by letter (more about that correspondence, in part now published, anon), by meetings (often extending over many weeks), and in more recent years by telephone. When I was in error, even in senectute, he could be as sharply reproving as he had been towards the immature undergraduate – and such frankness was not only welcomed, but it had always been of the very essence of our relationship. In a book of reminiscences of Jerusalem in the 1930s I had written of the difficulty of envisaging a future deprived of his guidance and counsel and had expressed the hope that such a contingency would not arise until senility had numbed the blow for me. Alas, this was not to be: he died shortly before his 86th birthday. When his son telephoned me with the sad news on 10 August 1991, I found some consolation in the task of editing his letters in the manner prescribed by him earlier; and that book was published just six months after his death.

It is well-known that Maimonides (1135–1204), one of the greatest philosophers and experts in Jewish law (Halakhah), was an eminent physician as well. He probably studied medicine during his sojourn in Fez (Morocco) between 1158 and 1165, after he and his family had fled from his native city Cordoba, because of the persecutions by the fanatical Muslim regime of the Almohades.

Evidence about the ridda of Kinda is as mottled as it is for other events which Islamic historiography includes under the title of ridda. Tendentious writing and apologetics, contradictions and a complete lack of dates make the historian's task very hard indeed. Yet there is much that can be established (with varying degrees of probability) about those sanguinary events. Since no meaningful study of the short though eventful period of the ridda alone is possible, several related topics are also discussed below.

The number of Arabic papyri from the first two Islamic centuries that have been preserved is relatively small. Papyri from the third century A.H. are far more numerous and constitute the bulk of most collections. In this paper I publish an Arabic legal document from A.H. 77 (A.D. 707), which is in the Michaelides collection of papyri at Cambridge University Library. It is one of the earliest extant Arabic legal papyri. The document is a quittance (barā’a) drawn up by a certain Sa‘īd ibn Qays al-Dallālī to certify that Jamīla, the freedwoman of ’Umm Hunayda, is cleared of obligation to him after the payment of a sum of seven dīnārs. This sum was delivered as payment for a portion of a house.

In 1893, the Government of India revised the handbook for the officials who conducted its relations with the Indian States. The new edition included a chapter on titles and ceremonial because of “the great importance of these matters in Indian Political business”. Modern scholars agree that what we now call “honours” and “civic ritual” are worthy of study; and Stern's monograph on Jaipur State, and Dirks's on Pudukkottai, are only two of the many recent works that have noted the central role that titles and ceremonial played in the relationship between the British Paramount Power and the princes and chiefs of India.

The town of Mecca, in the Hijaz of western Arabia, in addition to its importance as the goal of the ḥajj, or annual Muslim pilgrimage, was a commercial emporium of great importance during the Mamlūk era (A.H. 648/1250–A.H. 923/1517). Approximately eighty kilometres to the west of the Holy City lies the port ofjedda, which had been under the direct control of the Ḥasanid sharīfs of Mecca since at least the fifth/eleventh century. During Mamlūk times, Jedda was a way station of gradually increasing importance on the maritime trade route connecting the ports of the western coast of India with the Arabian Peninsula and Egypt. The merchandise around which this trade revolved consisted almost exclusively of luxury goods and small-sized but high-priced commodities, destined for the markets of Egypt, the Levant and western Europe, and included – among other goods – both cotton and silken cloth, all manners of spices, but primarily pepper from the Malabar coast of southwestern India, camphor, musk, amber, sandalwood, Indian Ocean pearls, precious and semi-precious stones, such as agates, and materia medica from the Indian subcontinent, as well as goods trans-shipped from East Asia.

These words of the thirteenth-century Hungarian chronicler, Bishop Thomas of Spalato, are not untypical of many descriptions of the consequences of the creation of the Mongol nation (ulus) by Chinggis Khan in 1206 and the subsequent expansion of the Chinggisid Empire. They accord with the popular concept of the Mongol hordes, known by Europeans of the thirteenth century as the Tartars, and believed to be the descendants of Gog and Magog who had broken forth from behind the Alexandrian Iron Gates at Derbend to destroy European culture and Christianity.

dKor and sPu are twin villages, separated by a rivulet, situated on the right bank of the river Sutlej in Kinnaur. A stēle inscription in question was first noticed from dKor by A. H. Francke in 1909, and subsequently by Giuseppe Tucci, in 1933 (Fig. i). Unfortunately neither Francke nor Tucci translated it in extenso. Francke, however, has published its main contents and Tucci relied on Francke's translation. Fragmentary it may be, but it contains invaluable information about the activities of Ye-shes-'od, a well-known monk-king of Western Tibet (formerly of the Gu-ge kingdom). To our knowledge, this seems to be the only Tibetan inscription which can definitely be dated to Ye-shes-'od's times. Fortunately, it mentions a specific date, i.e. the dragon's year (‘brug gi lo). In the year A.D. 1042 his grand-nephew Byang-chub-'od indirectly recalls Ye-shes-'od's deeds in the very first line of an inscription at rTa-pho. Thus it runs: spre'u'i lo la sngon mes byang chub sons dpas/gtsug lag khang ‘di bzhengs … [before, in the monkey year this temple (vihāra) was constructed by the grandfather the bodhisattva]. It is quite clear that the grandfather referred to in the line is none other than Ye-shes-'od. Another inscription also at rTa-pho, belonging to a somewhat later period, again records his name along with Byang-chub-'od and Zhi-ba-'od.

In recent years several important books have discussed aspects of labour in India. Some have been significant in their fields more generally, and the subject as a whole can be seen to be changing. This essay reflects on four works, a three-volume collection of documents published by the Indian Council for Historical Research, and Gyan Prakash's monograph on Bihar, which together might be taken as representing the transition in Indian labour studies.

Yamaga Sokō (1622–85), Itō Jinsai (1627–1705), and Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728) are generally recognized as the three luminaries of the kogaku, or “Ancient Learning”, philosophical movement of Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868). One of the most conspicuous features of their masterworks is their lexicographical methodology. The origins of that methodology are found, this paper suggests, in (I) Chen Beixi's (Jpn: Chin Hokukei; 1159–1223) Xingli ziyi (Jpn: Seiri jigi; The Meanings of Philosophical Terms, c. 1226); and (2) Hayashi Razan's (1583–1657) work propagating the Ziyi, the Seiri jigi genkai (Vernacular Explication of Beixi's Ziyi, 1659).

The Huainanzi is a corporate work which was compiled at the court of the king of Huainan, being first presented to the imperial throne in 139 B.C., and possibly receiving certain additions between then and 122 B.C. For various reasons, however, the book did not meet with the same type of acclaim that had accompanied other texts. By the eleventh century at least, the comments of Xu Shen (c. 55–149) and Gao You (c. 168–212) had been fused together into a single set of notes. The book attracted the critical attention of Su Song (1020–1101), and then that of some of the most notable scholars of the Qing period, such as Wang Niansun (1744–1832), Huang Peilie (1763–1825) and Gu Guangqi (1776–1835). In the early days of western sinology the work evaded the attention of scholars such as Legge and Couvreur who necessarily followed the lead of their Chinese masters and fastened on what they regarded as the basic texts of traditional learning, i.e. mainly the classical texts and the Confucian teachers, and the Daode jing. It is only in the latter part of the twentieth century that western scholars have felt ready to examine, appraise and translate parts of the Huainanzi, and the results may be seen in the writings of Eva Kraft (1957–58), Benjamin Wallacker (1962), Roger Ames (1983), Charles Le Blanc (1985), Hal Roth (1992), Claude Larre (1993) and now John Major. Further research in the future will be immeasurably improved and brought to new standards thanks to the publication of the concordance to the text by D. C. Lau (1992).