The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries tempted several European nations to exploit the opportunities for overseas trade by expanding their influence in distant seas and lands. When Vasco de Gama discovered a new route between Europe and South-East Asia during the last decade of the fifteenth century, Europeans increased their search for new colonies and for new trade routes. Like many other nations of the region the people of Balochistan also felt the impact of this new phenomenon. The Portuguese were the first European Colonisers to reach their shores.

Since the time when the human race first began to speculate about the origin of the universe there have been two cosmological models that have seemed particularly attractive to its imagination. One has been to derive everything in the world from a single primal origin, out of which the cosmos, in all its apparent complexity, evolves. The other has been to view the history of the universe as a battle between two opposing forces which contradict and undermine each other. The two views can be called monism and dualism. They are not the only possibilities. There have been systems that posit three, four or an indefinite number of principles, but most of these have also tended to assume one basic pair of opposites with one or more neutral or intermediate principles beside them; this too can be seen as a form of dualism.

As regards the Mongols, our knowledge of their history, of their customs, of their way of life, our relations with them, England presents an interesting case. We do not know the extent of the material lost on the Continent, but, in this (for the Mongols) remote corner of Europe, (in places safe from their devastation) documentation is to be found. A monk of Saint Albans, the chronicler Matthew Paris who died in 1259, is an important source. He was the only person to preserve Ivo of Narbonne's confession (which reveals that an Englishman was one of the first envoys of the Mongols to King Bela of Hungary), the report of Bishop Peter of Russia given at the council of Lyons in 1245 and information about André of Longjumeau's mission after the council. Incidently, twice at the end of his Chronica Majora, in an entry for the year 1257, Matthew Paris refers to a manuscript concerning ‘Tartarorum immunditias, vitam (spurcissimam) et mores (…) necnon et Assessinorum furorem et superstitionem’. It is the same work which is mentioned by John of Oxnead, in his Chronka under the year 1258, as a written command (mandatum scriptum) sent to Simon de Montfort, containing letters the length of a Psalter, and entitled De vita et moribus Tartarorum (…) et de eorum fortitudine etguerra, et de adquisitionibus which was to be found in the book of Additions. Unfortunately this work has not survived. (Nevertheless it is tempting to see here a mention of William of Rubruck's report of his journey, which has the form of a letter and which was written in 1257, but which has little information about the Assassins. Later another Englishman, the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon († 1294) met William of Rubruck and became interested in the Mongols.)

The two recent discussions of the chronology of Aśoka's early missionary activities, as described in his first Minor Rock Edict, came to different conclusions. For the idea of a 256-day pilgrimage, which stems ultimately from mistranslation, Falk had sought to substitute a calculation involving 256 non-consecutive Uposatha nights. Without detailed refutation of Falk's arguments, Norman rejected this result and retained the assumption of a date counted in days from the beginning of a regnal year. Falk's Vedic and Arthaśāstra material points, however, in the right direction. A description of Aśoka as 256-rātra-vyuṣṭo “having spent a 256-day season” would date his proclamation to the close of an eight-month campaigning season, corresponding closely with varṣā-rātra-uṣita Rāma (R 4.19.1), literally ‘having spent the rains season’, but dating the activity in question to the first day of autumn. Late Vedic and epic use of vyuṣṭa and instances of calculation by binary, apparently solar, weeks of 8 days and months of 32 days (of which eight would yield 256), suggest that Aśoka was seeking to give his proselytizing campaign the status of a religious observance defined in Kṣatriya terms. Arthaśāstra includes the proposition that a 32-day military month was used for administrative purposes in the field.

Just as in rock edicts the phrase [devānaṃpiyena] … abhisitena lekhite dates events to a regnal year, so [devānaṃpiyena] … vivuṭhena sāvane dates Aśoka's MRE proclamation, but with reference to his years of religious seniority. The additive chronology, more than two years plus more than one year, suggested by Norman and upheld by Falk, is supported by the syntax of the passage. It would tend to associate the MRE with Aśoka's 13th regnal year. Aśoka's epigraphs imply that, inspired perhaps by early residence in Ujjain, he was at first drawing on late Vedic and epic calendrical motifs, before starting to display a knowledge of Vinaya calendrical material in the pillar edicts.

In 1917, Kasai Zenzō (1887–1928) wrote With the Children in Tow (Ko o tsurete), a short story of approximately eleven pages in its original Shinchōsha edition. Kasai's work, paralleling the actual events that took place in his household from August 9th to 11th of the year of its publication, is exemplary of the shi-shōsetsu genre, I-novel or autobiographical narrative where the author recounts details of his personal life through a thin guise of fiction.

The Mongol conquests produced the last in a series of realignments of the Turkic peoples, creating, more or less, the configurations in which we find them today. The earliest of these realignments was associated with the rise and fall of the Hsiung-nu polity (second century BC to mid-second century AD). This was the first of the attempts at a pannomadic state. Mao-tun, the “Great Shanyü whom heaven has set up”, the founder of the Hsiung-nu union, boasted in a letter to the Han Court that because of his efforts “all the people who live by drawing the bow are now united into one family.”2 Činggis Qan expressed similar thoughts regarding the “people having skirts of felt” i.e. living in feltcovered tents.3 Although it cannot be demonstrated that all the Eurasian nomads were, indeed, incorporated into the Hsiung-nu polity, substantial numbers of the Turkic nomads undoubtedly were. In its formative, “heroic” years of conquest and in the course of its collapse, a number of Turkic (and other) pastoral, nomadic peoples were brought into motion along China's northern frontiers and adjoining regions. Others were pushed westward, some making their way to what is today Kazakhstan and into the Caspian-Pontic steppelands. This marked the first large-scale movement westward of Turkic peoples from Inner Asia to Central Asia and thence to the Western Eurasian steppelands. The final stages of these migrations ultimately brought some of the nomads to Danubian Europe and the Hungarian Plain.

This essay is concerned with the career of a somewhat obscure figure in the early history of Orientalism, Colonel Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier, who is however known both to aficionados of the early European manuscript collections in the West, as well as to historians of the more obscure aspects of the Enlightenment on the Continent. The occasion for the research on which this essay is based is, in large measure, a project intended to translate the extensive Persian letter-book that Polier (together with his amanuensis, or munshī, Kishan Sahay) produced during his long stay in India; this translation, of a text entitled I jāz-i-Arsalānī (which is preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris), has recently been brought to partial fruition by Muzaffar Alam and Seema Alavi, through the auspices of Oxford University Press (Delhi). In this context, it may be useful to reflect somewhat on the rather extraordinary career, and fascinating milieu, of Colonel Polier.

Javanese literature can boast a distinct genre of works about the adventures of wandering students/scholars, who travel about the countryside in pursuit of esoteric knowledge. Journeying and undergoing various trials and tribulations on the way is regarded in Javanese culture as an ascetic practice, preparatory to ultimate enlightenment. An early, pre-Islamic representative of this genre is the Kidung Subrata, dated 1541. The best-know examples, at least by name, i.e. the Cĕnṭini and Jatiswara, probably originate from the beginning of the seventeenth century. In the course of time these two stories were constantly reworked until by the beginning of the nineteenth century they reached massive proportions and were made into storehouses of encyclopaedic knowledge of all kinds of things Javanese. The so-called Major Cěntini, compiled in 1814 at the Surakarta Crown Prince's court, has hitherto received most attention. Quite a few scholars, guided by Pigeaud's table of contents, have tapped this source for information on many topics.

Much has been written about the extraordinary artistic, religious and historic importance of the Thousand Buddha Cave Temples at Dunhuang, in Gansu province, western China. One hundred and twenty years ago, on 2 May, 1879, a Hungarian expedition reached Dunhuang. It is a little known fact that its members were to be the first western travellers to visit the cave temples there. Still less known is the influence of this expedition on Sir Aurel Stein, the Hungarian-born British archaeologist. This article examines a hitherto unstudied aspect of why Stein was in the position to become the first to arrive in Dunhuang after the important discovery was made. It is argued that the little known Hungarian expedition was a determining factor in prompting Stein to undertake the hazardous journey to Dunhuang. Furthermore the travel notes of these earlier Hungarian travellers throw light at the very unstable situation at the Dunhuang caves thirty years before Stein's visit. This information is likely to have influenced Stein's decision to take much of the material away for safe keeping as at the time of his visit the situation continued to deteriorate.

With this fourth volume Mme. Brunner-Lachaux completes her richly annotated translation of the influential eleventh-century book of rituals of the old pan-Indian Śaiva Siddhanta by Somaśambhu. The first of these volumes appeared in 1963, among the first fruits of the study of the Sanskrit texts of the Śaiva Siddhānta pursued by the French Institute of Pondicherry (hereafter IFP). Since then much has been discovered about the history of the development of the Śaiva Siddhānta (a great deal through the efforts of Brunner-Lachaux herself) and a number of its texts have seen publication, so that it is only to be expected that there should be a gulf between the first and fourth volumes (hereafter SP1, SP4, etc.). It is therefore excellent news that Brunner-Lachaux intends to produce an entirely revised SP1 (announced on p. lxv).

In 1824 the governor of the important southern Siamese city of Nakhon Sri Thammarat, and of the large region which fell under Nakhon's jurisdiction, was chao phraya Nakhon (Noi). He ruled the city from 1811–39 and was a man of extraordinary character, a vigorous and determined ruler who was reputed to be the son of a former king of Siam, Taksin. This attribution of royal birth was current in his own lifetime, and was recorded by Henry Burney in 1826, and by Lieutenant James Low a little later (Munro-Hay, in press). At that time the British, at war with Burma, Siam's western neighbour, were concerned by developments relating to the Rangoon expedition, and it was determined to send an envoy from the Government of India on a mission to the Siamese governor to discuss outstanding problems and possible co-operation.