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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Duncan Haldane, a member of the Council of the Royal Asiatic Society, who died in August after a long battle with cancer, was an Arabist, a broadcaster, an arts administrator and a teacher, who made his mark in many different fields.