Though best known for his formative and decisive contributions to the field of Arab-Islamic studies, the Hungarian orientalist Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921) also had a considerable impact on the field of Jewish studies. His first publication, at the age of twelve, already reveals his interests in the history of Judaism and its prospects in the modern world,1 and his doctoral dissertation, prepared as a teenager working under the supervision of the great H. L. Fleischer (1801–1888) in Leipzig on the thirteenth-century Jewish philologist and exegete Tanḥūm ben Joseph Yerūshalmī,2 already displays its author as “a very distinguished scholarly mind”.3 His first extended monograph dealt with issues concerning the function and importance of mythology among the ancient Israelites,4 and further, with the anti-Semitic and racist theories of European scholars and intellectuals like Ernest Renan (1823–1892).5

Sa‘d b. Mansūr Ibn Kammūna, a Jewish polymath whose writings are now receiving a good deal of scholarly attention, worked in Baghdad under the aegis of the Mongol rulers and their courtiers. Born early in the thirteenth century, so it seems, he was forced to flee the capital after rioters protested against his book which compared the three revealed monotheistic faiths; he died in the 1280s. His oeuvre includes a treatise on ophthalmology, no longer extant; quotations from it are however available in the writing of another ophthalmologist, Sadaqa ibn Ibrāhīm al-Shādhilī. From these we learn that Ibn Kammūna practiced medicine in Aleppo (Halab).

From the earliest days of Christianity in Armenia, Jerusalem was an important centre of pilgrimage, culture, and faith. An Armenian hierarchy free from the authority of the Imperial Greek church had existed in Jerusalem possibly from the time of Justinian and an Armenian episcopacy from the time of the Arab conquests. According to Armenian tradition, first recorded in M. Č‘amč‘ian's History of the Armenians, in 1311 Bishop Sargis of Jerusalem (sed. 1281–1313) dramatically changed the nature of that office, when he declared himself and his entire charge independent of both the spiritual overlordship of the Catholicossate of Sis and the political protection of the Armenian kingdom founded in Cilicia. The catalyst for the rupture was the Cilician Church's decision in favour of union with Rome taken with the encouragement of the Armenian monarchy at the Council of Sis in 1307. According to Č‘amč‘ian, Bishop Sargis, rejecting the Armenian kingdom's demands of obedience, turned to the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt and received from him an edict declaring that henceforth the Armenian bishop of Jerusalem would be able to exercise full Patriarchal rights, namely, the ability to appoint bishops and to use the red patriarchal seal to ratify documents.

Since the creation of its first disciplinary histories in the late nineteenth century, Near Eastern archaeology has perceived its origins largely in terms of individual breakthroughs, following the common precepts of a pre-Annales historiography. The founding figures mentioned in the works of Rogers, Hilprecht, Budge or Parrot were either great explorers, great scholars or, most importantly, great excavators. From Della Valle's first tentative explorations at Babylon in 1616 to the major excavations at Nineveh and Babylon three centuries later, Near Eastern archaeology saw itself as the fruit of individual discovery. ‘Real’ archaeology was furthermore perceived as a natural rather than a human science and subsequently taken to have originated in nineteenth-century positivism; earlier accounts were hinted at in only the briefest fashion.

If with all these openings there had been no exchange whatever between East and West in their literary productions, it would have been strange, to say no more; and though, as I repeat, we have no tangible evidence of anything like translations, whether oriental or occidental, at that time …

Those words come from one of Max Müller's last essays ‘Coincidences’, in which he listed the many points of contact between East and West in the period after Alexander the Great's invasion of Bactria and the Indus valley. Müller thought a translation of a literary work from Greek or Latin to Sanskrit or Pāli or vice versa might be the key to resolving the numerous similarities he had found in the myths of East and West, particularly in the sacred texts of Buddhism and Christianity. In fact, according to his son, the collection of these parallels was the project on which Müller was working at his death. Had the father of the Sacred Books of the East lived another half century, he would have had his translation, but, I believe, he would have been disappointed with the profit accrued so far from the discovery.

Seyf-el-Mulook answered him, May God (whose name be exalted!) make it [thy country] ever to be honoured by thy rule, O King! And the King Faghfoor Shah said, Nought hath brought thee hither save some affair that hath occurred to thee; and whatever thing thou desirest to obtain from my country, I will accomplish it for thee.

Most English readers may not remember the story these lines from Edward Lane's translation relate to, but the sub-Biblical language in which the exotically named characters converse should be enough to site the story of Sayf al-Mulūk in the magically Oriental world of the Thousand and One Nights as it was conceived in the Victorian imagination.

The verbal form known as the active participle (= AP) is an integral part of the Mehri verbal system, functioning mainly – but not exclusively – as a future tense.1 Yet despite its frequency, recent synopses of the language have given this form very little attention. For example, in the very important sketch of the Modern South Arabian languages by Johnstone (1975), discussion of the AP is limited to less than one sentence (p. 119). In the very useful set of observations by Lonnet (1994a), the AP receives only a little more consideration, about ten lines. In the more recent outline by Simeone-Senelle (1997), the AP also gets about ten lines. All of this is in contrast to the grammar of Jahn (1905), in which the AP (or future, as Jahn calls it) is treated as a basic verbal tense and is included in all paradigm sets.2

Travellers to the fabled city of Samarqand will not miss the opportunity to visit the tomb of Tīmūr (Tamerlane), the famous conqueror of much of Central Eurasia in the fourteenth century. In the courtyard of the Gur-i Amir, Tīmūr's mausoleum, stands a stone of greyish marble, approximately ten feet long, four feet wide and two and a half feet high, decorated with arabesques. A relic of a glorious past, this stone, known as the Kök Tash, is reputed to have served as the great coronation stone for Central Asian rulers ever since it was used as Tīmūr's throne.

Among all the inequalities of traditional Chinese society, education was one of the most obvious. In most cases, girls and women were not expected to receive education at the highest level and in late Qing China, most Chinese women did not have access to a university education. Cai Yuanpei (1868–1940), an educator of the late Qing era and of Republican China, was renowned for his progressivism towards women. His broad-mindedness can be perceived in the way he advocated and implemented for girls and women educational opportunities on a par with those available to boys and men. Although many of his well-known contemporaries shared similarly progressive ideas on women, none of them are regarded as the initiator of the admittance of women to China's national universities. Actually during the May Fourth Period Cai was Chancellor of an important academic institution in China and thus strategically placed at a decisive moment in modern Chinese history.

This analysis of certain rock carvings at Jabal Jusasiyah Qatar is in the form of an Archaeological Report, but is not a full Archaeological Survey. This has been carried out by others – (Hans Kapel Arryan, Qatar National Museum Journal, 1983, pp. 1–126) for Jabal Jusasiyah Qatar. A systematic procedure is adopted for the analysis of a number of these petroglyphs at the sites in Qatar.

Inscribed lamps are rarely found in the region of ancient Gandhāra: just one each from Malakand, Taxila; Jamal Garhi and Chatpat site, two from Swat. To this list can be added another lamp, also found at Swat, which is presently in a private collection in England. To this we can add three more such lamps presently in private collections and the author is thankful to the owners for allowing him to publish these objects. Moreover, this paper also includes an inscribed slab and a unique seal bearing Kharoṣṭhī inscriptions; both come from the same region.

Yi, a term denoting one of the primary concepts of Confucian ethics, has proven to be one of the most difficult terms to interpret and translate. It has been rendered as ‘righteousness’, ‘rightness’, ‘right conduct’, ‘propriety’, ‘justice’, ‘morality’, ‘duty’, ‘sense of duty’, ‘obligation’, and so forth. The aim of this article is to open new avenues to discuss the original and extended meanings of yi by the means of paleographic, archaeological, and socio-cultural studies.

The following remarks were originally drafted to serve as the thirty-seventh Evans-Wentz Lecture in Asian Philosophy, Religion and Ethics at Stanford University in May 2006, and take therefore as their tacit point of departure the work of Walter Y Evans-Wentz (1878–1965). His Tibetan Book of the Dead, first published by Oxford University Press in 1927, long remained the most influential account of the way in which Buddhists confronted their future as mortal beings, though in this lecture the scope of my own inquiry is widened from the individual to encompass fears concerning the transience of human society as a whole. This broader approach, moreover, allows for a degree of innovation. Ever since the era of Evans-Wentz, if not earlier, the problem of presenting the impulses behind traditions as unfamiliar as those of South and East Asia without simply confirming their apparent ‘exoticism’ has been difficult to solve, but over recent years our greatly increased knowledge of the history of the planetary environment that we all inhabit has offered an unprecedented perspective on the widely shared hopes and fears of the past. This is because we now know that at times different regions of the planet were subjected to events caused by the same catastrophic upheavals in climate. By taking one of the best known of these in the sixth century CE – and the information given below by no means exhausts what has been discovered about this phenomenon – and looking at its impact in terms of the sense of foreboding it engendered, it is therefore possible to trace the extent to which Europe and East Asia reacted in similar ways.

Al-Manār was an Arabic and reformist journal founded by Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā in Cairo in 1898, and its primary objectives were to examine the decadence of Muslim political institutions, underline the danger of European colonialism in the Muslim world, and promote the idea that Islam was compatible with modernity and reason. The present article attempts to examine the intellectual influence of al-Manār among the Ḥadhramī elite in the Malay-Indonesian world, and critically assess its role as the mouthpiece for the propagation of ‘Abduh's doctrines and accomplishment of his reforms. It first addresses the mission of al-Manār as a reformist journal that worked towards the promotion of social, religious and economic reforms in the Muslim world. It secondly examines the religio-cultural background of the Ḥadhramī elite who were influenced by the reformist mission of al-Manār and subscribed to its ultimate goal. The study finally highlights the impact of al-Manār on the religio-political and social structure of the Ḥadhramī diaspora in the Malay-Indonesian world, and discusses how this impact resulted in the establishment of a revivalist movement that rejected the conservative attitude of blind imitation (taqlīd ) of the four schools of Islamic law, and denounced the Sufi practices that were not in harmony with the fundamentals of Islam. Special attention will also be paid to the role of the Ḥadhramī organisations, schools and press that contributed to the propagation of al-Manār's reformist mission and its dissemination at the grass roots level of the Ḥadhramī community.

‘Krishna and Rukmini’ is the title of Amar Citra Kathā comic vol. 516, with artwork by Pratap Mulick. The front page has a muscular Kṛ⋅ṇa gallantly helping an entranced lady mount his chariot. Or is he that gallant? A closer look reveals that Kṛ⋅ṇa is actually grabbing her by the wrist; yet the lady seems more than willing, she is coquettishly lifting her skirt as she mounts the vehicle, and her eyes look adoringly, somewhat naively, at her hero as she smiles coyly. The only hint of opposition is in the background where we see angry mustached warriors coming after them. Is this a case of abduction, or is it better called an elopement?

In standard accounts of medieval Japanese society, enormous stress is put on the conflicts between local landholders (zaichi ryōshu) and absentee proprietors. Fuelled by the debate on feudalism that divided scholars up until the early 1990s, these conflicts have widely been recognised as proof of the diminishing powers of the central elite in, or near, Kyoto and of the increasing absorption of power by warriors in both the countryside and in the administration of the military government, the bakufu. The conflicts were, in other words, seen in the structural context of a system of huge landed estates (shōen) owned by court nobles or large religious institutions, which were gradually replaced by much smaller proprietary units controlled personally by individual warrior families.

Maps are graphic interpretations of real or imagined space. Although utilitarian by nature, they are of intrinsic aesthetic and artistic value. In addition to their material qualities, they are constructs of the human mind at a specific time and in a specific culture. Traditionally judged on the basis of their Cartesian rather than artistic qualities, maps are categorised by their spatial accuracy according to a positivist construct. This criterion has recently been re-examined to address mapmaking across cultures and through time. A new definition developed by the History of Cartography Project not only treats maps as material culture, but further broadens the concept of the map to include all artifacts that depict space.1 In this theoretical framework, maps discovered in archaeological contexts are rare artifacts that provide a window into the minds of their makers and users, the way in which space was perceived, as well as the relevance and function of maps in ancient societies. By definition, this is an attempt to address an emic perspective.2

Poems about women from the Riben zashi shi (Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects from Japan) by Huang Zunxian constitute about ten per cent of the collection as a whole; most are translated and annotated here. These poems and Huang's own attached commentaries create a fascinating mixture of fact, sensibility, and interest that attempts both to describe Japanese women in terms of variations on the traditional cultural roles and characteristics of Chinese women and to account for who they then were and how they behaved in terms of the general process of modernisation/westernisation, which then, during the early Meiji era, was transforming practically all aspects of Japanese life. As with other subjects, a strong sense of the tension between tradition and modernity underlies such poems, leaving the reader at times with a suspension of resolution between them and at others with the hope that the present could lead to a more hopeful future. In either case, the relationship between the sexes is examined with wit and insight, and the changes that this relationship were then undergoing are treated as an integral and inevitable dimension of the modernisation process.