The period of Mu'āwiya b. Sufyān, as governor over Syria and al-Jazīra under the caliph 'Uthmān from at least 25–6/646–7, and then as Umayyad caliph in Damascus 41–60/661–80, was crucial for the first impetus of Arab expansion in the eastern Mediterranean. Egypt had been conquered by 'Amr b. al-'Āṣ during 'Umar's caliphate, and the great port of Alexandria passed definitively into Arab hands by 21/642. Alexandria possessed famed dockyards, and had a Greco-Egyptian population which the Arabs were able to press into service for manning their warships operating out of the Egyptian ports and out of the harbours along the Syrian coast, such as Jaffa, Acre, Beirut and Tripoli.

This paper explores some different, interrelated versions of the history of the Pīshdādiyān, the earliest dynasty represented in the Shāhnāmeh, especially the recently edited text of Rashīd al-Dīn's Jāmi‘al-tawārīkh. This is compared with Bal‘amī’s Persian version of the History of al-Ṭabari and Qāḍī Baiḍāwī’s Niẓām al-tawārīkh, of which the latter is shown to provide much the closer basis for Rashīd al-Dīn's work — especially when confronted with the manuscripts of the Jāmi‘al-tawārīkh contemporary with the life of Rashīd al-Dīn. Comparison with both the early Arabic and Persian witnesses of the work suggests that the printed edition does not represent Rashīd al-Dīn's original text, but later reworkings of his chronicle — such as that by the fifteenth-century historian, Ḥāfiẓ-i Abrū — which draw more directly on the Shāhnāmeh. In so far as there is discernible subtext to Rashīd al-Dīn's coverage of these earliest periods of Iranian monarchical history, it is more to emphasise the didactic message of the Shāhnāmeh and the justice and constructive achievements of the first kings, than to follow Firdausī’s narrative. Despite the potency of idea of the Shāhnāmeh as expressing Persian kingly traditions, it is suggested that perhaps it was only after the time of Rashīd al-Dīn and the Islamisation of the Mongol rulers that historians appreciated and emulated the literary and narrative aspects of the text for their own sake.

1. Generally speaking, two conditions rule the development of Indo-Aryan consonants, when considered by themselves in contact only with vowels. If initial, they are maintained; if intervocalic, they are voiced, opened, and in many cases altogether disappear.

The campaign against thuggee in 1830s India produced a set of widely-circulated accounts of the origins and practices of thugs. In these works (both popular and scholarly), a very small amount of primary information was continually recycled throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The changes visible in the manner of deployment of this information are indicative of progressive re-formulations of the narrative of the history of thuggee, and the larger history of British India. This process is examined through a study of the incorporation of an extract from The Travels of M de Thévenot into the Levant into the historical archive, which concludes that any re-appraisal of history must incorporate a consideration of the narrative underlying the production of the records, as well as the records themselves.

The recognition that the setting of the story related in the Syriac Hymn of the Soul is Iranian is primarily based on the statement in the poem that its chief character, the Prince who “from the far Hyrcanian mountains” was sent down to Egypt to fetch the unique Pearl, was the son of the king of Parthia. Less obvious Iranian reminiscences are also to be found in the Hymn, some of which have lately been discussed by G. Widengren in Zeitschrift für Religions-und Geistesgeschichte, iv (1952), Heft 2,1 sqq., where, however, one misses a reference to the relationship of srbwg with the Sogdian word for “tower”, v. W. B. Henning, JRAS. 1944, 139 sq. It is proposed in the present note to explain the Iranian origin of a hitherto obscure title in the Hymn, which from the context appears to designate one of the highest officials of the Arsacid court. This is the title of the Prince's elder brother in verse 48, where the MS. has p'rybn “our p.”.

The great Semitic digest of laws made by Hammurabi and inscribed at his orders on the magnificent diorite stele of Susa was probably promulgated soon after the 34th year of the reign of that famous king, or about 2088. His reign extended to 2081. The period of its composition and promulgation is therefore limited to the brief space of eight years at the end of his reign. This date is at any rate certain for the great stele deciphered by Père Scheil (1902). Fragments of the same code written on clay tablets of the period of Hammurabi were found at Susa, at Ellasar or Warka, and at Nippur. From Nippur two large tablets have been recovered, one of which has the colophon, “Fourth tablet of ‘ When the far-famed Anu ’.” Since the Code as written on the Paris Stele begins “ When the far-famed Anu ”, it is evident that the editions written on tablets are based upon the monumental copy and that they are later than it. For it is highly improbable that the original tablet edition began with a long historical prologue. The Nippur tablet has a colophon which says that it is the al-gub-ba of the king Hammurabi.

From the close of the eighth century A.H. till the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in A.H. 922 the Mamlûk army underwent a slow but steady decline. There were three main causes:—

(a) Economic: the exhaustion of Egypt's rich resources due to the predatory economic system of the Mamlûks.

(b) Military: deterioration of discipline in the army; its excessive occupation with politics; the corrupt practice in one section of the army to obtain, for payment, exemption from participation in military expeditions; neglect of the traditional military training (based mainly on the furûsiyya games); the insufficient use of new methods of warfare arising from the introduction of firearms.

(c) Reduced manpower: the continuous decrease of the population in the native countries of the Mamlûks (especially the steppes of Southern Russia and the Caucasus); the outbreaks of plague in Egypt.

The following notes are perhaps somewhat miscellancous, but they may help to re-direct attention to an interesting subject, recalling the history of European studies of it with some of the results obtained. And since the scheme arranged by Mr. Whitley Stokes for cataloguing the Sanskrit works in Indian libraries, private and other, and for obtaining copies of the rarer ones has yielded such excellent results in all departments, it will perhaps be possible for Orientalists now to publish and translate some of the more important Siddhântas and Karaṇas hitherto inaccessible, and which would be most useful in tracing the origins and history of this Indian science.

During the fourteenth century on the Travancore coast of South India an independent Muslim sultanate was established which lasted for less than half a century, and was eventually terminated by the newly established neighbouring kingdom of Vijayanagar. The short, brutal and enigmatic period of this sultanate has attracted the attention of a number of modern scholars who have tried to put together its history through study of the coins, a few inscriptions, and the brief, often dismissive remarks found in the North Indian histories, as well as, most informative of all, the travel account of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, who visited the region when the power of the sultanate was at its peak. However, none of these studies agrees even in the number and chronology of the sultans, let alone the details of the events: a confusion which is a direct result of the lack of adequate information at the present time. Under the circumstances it may appear presumptuous to embark on a description of the architectural monuments of this sultanate.

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

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.)

In some verses from the Manichaean Middle Persian hymn-cycle, the Gōwišn īg grīw zīndag, the Light Self, or sum of the light elements in the world, speaks in the character both of the sacred fire of the Zoroastrians, and of the pure water reverenced by them. The editors of these verses pointed out that the use of certain technical terms shows that the Manichaean author had an intimate knowledge of Zoroastrian ritual. The publication since then of further Zoroastrian works has established this fact even more plainly; for it is now apparent that the term zōhr, which occurs twice in the text, is used in fact for two separate Zoroastrian offerings, the offering to fire, the ātaš-zōhr, as well as that to water, the āb-zōhr.

like Anaw-rahta's conquest of Thahton or the Mongol expeditions against Pagan, Tha-lun's transfer of capital from Pegu to Ava in 1634—5 is one of those prominent transitions in Burmese history which always attract comment in standard surveys. The pioneer historian of Burma G. E. Harvey claimed that the decision by Tha-lun (r. 1629–48) to forsake the coast in favour of the interior signified the abandonment of his predecessors' goal of a Burmese–Mon national kingship, and contributed to the subsequent isolation of the Burmese from international intercourse. D. G. E. Hall, expanding the latter theme, wrote that “(t)he removal of the Burmese capital from Pegu to Ava in 1635 was, without doubt, one of the cardinal events of Burmese history … it signalised the triumph of the more intransigent elements in Burmese character and governmental policy” and contributed ultimately to the political ruin of the country.

For the understanding of the period of history to which the name Indo-Greek (in perhaps more precise terminology Indo-Bactrian) is usually given, the reign of Menander has to be treated as central. For the Indo-Bactrian kingdom, this reign must have constituted the main period of stability and consolidation. Whatever we can hope to detect of Indo-Bactrian organizational structure must have assumed during those years its most coherent form. They had been preceded by several decades of expansion and improvization. The aftermath, as we shall attempt to show, was one of division, perhaps of dissension. At neither extreme could we expect a pattern of administrative continuity to stand out from so fragmentary an historical tradition. Since the evidence of texts and archaeology, despite noble efforts that have been devoted to them, is alike scanty for this episode of Macedonian government southward from the Hindu Kush to the eastern fringe of the Panjāb, it is from the copious coinage that inquiry must still be made. We may fittingly dedicate to Sir Mortimer Wheeler, excavator of Menander's capital at Chārsada, a new attempt to interpret the coinage of Menander. His own authority may be cited for the judgment that previous numismatic studies, notwithstanding great merits, have not yet revealed all that the archaeologist needs to know. In an age of technological progress, it may still be said that an excavator's finds of coins, once fully understood, could continue to provide his most accurate indication of dating. The present analysis derives from an inquiry conducted at Kabul during study leave from the School of Oriental and African Studies in the summer of 1969. The writer is indebted to H.E. Dr. Muhammad Anas, Minister of Culture and Information of the Royal Afghan Government, for permission to examine the copious material of the Mir Zakah hoard; to Dr. A. A. Motamedi, Director-General of the Kabul Museum, both for the initial invitation which made the visit possible, and for his generous allocation of the Museum's facilities while the work was in progress; and to Dr. Paul Bernard for his hospitable welcome at the Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan.

This article is part of a larger effort to broaden the source-base for understanding Mughal-period India by engaging with the Hindi literary archive. I analyze the vignettes of Aurangzeb and other Mughal figures that are available in Lāl Kavi's Chatraprakāś (Light of Chatrasal, c. 1710), a Brajbhasha (classical Hindi) historical poem commissioned by the Bundela ruler Chatrasal (1649–1731). Written shortly after Aurangzeb's death, the Chatraprakāś is in part a retrospective on Aurangzeb's reign. It is also a valuable source of regional history that gives voice to how the Mughal Empire was perceived from a local court that went in and out of political favour. In places, Lāl Kavi engages in trenchant political critique, expressing the court's strong disillusionment with the Mughal manṣabdārī system as well as more local grievances. While by no means the dominant tone of the work, there are occasional hints of the court's outrage at Mughal offenses against what Lal Kavi explicitly terms “Hindu dharma.” Parsing the Chatraprakāś as both poetry and history, I probe the text's complex perspectives on Mughal rule.

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.

Before the invention of printing, when copies of a book were few, it was common to find works falsely attributed to an author. The person of unorthodox opinions, like the PseudoDionysius, assigned his works to someone of unimpeachable reputation in order to avoid censorship or other obstacles to circulation. Or a man might insert heretical material into a rival's book to discredit him. Of al-Ghazali's Maḍnūn (? aṣ-Ṣaghīr), D. B. Macdonald wrote: —

“Of course it is quite possible and in accordance with the rules of Muslim polemic that there should also have been in circulation a false Maḍnūn teaching these heretical doctrines. Many such cases occur. A book against the belief in saints was ascribed to Abū Bakr ar-Rāzī (d. cir. 290–320) … and, it was suspected, falsely, in order to bring him into discredit. The same thing happened to ash-Sha'rānī. One of his enemies obtained a copy of his Al-Baḥr al-Mawrūd, left out parts and inserted others of a heretical nature, and then spread it as the original work. In defence ash-Sha'rānī was compelled to lay before the ‘Ulamā’ of Cairo his original copy signed by themselves, and so demonstrate the spuriousness of the other. Again, ash-Sha'rānī had to defend Ibn al-'Arabī against a similar injury. Some hostile theologians interpolated his Futūḥāt with heresy. Even Fakhrad-Din ar-Rāzī suffered from this; and there were enough suchcases for ‘Alī b. Muḥammad al-Miṣrī to make up a list of them. So we need not be at all surprised if this befell al-Ghazālī also …”

Considering the fact that the Mīmāṃsā, the Vedānta, the Sāṃkhya, and the Yoga schools owe their origin directly to the Vedas, the Brāhmaṇas, and the Upaniṣads, it may be expected that the doctrines of these would have been systematized and put together into the form of the Sūtras earlier than those of the Vaiśeṣika and the Nyāya schools, the essential tenets of which had their beginnings in a later and different kind of literature. This expectation, however, seems to be belied by the fact that the present Sāṃkhya-sūtras have been proved to belong to a very late period, as late as the fourteenth century a.d.; and the Yoga-sūtras are now believed by a number of scholars, following Professors Jacobi and Woods, to be as late as the fourth or fifth century a.d. Now, while the gap of an early systematic work on the Sāṃkhya is filled up by the Sāṃkhya-kārikā, or it may be explained by the surmise that there was an early Sūtra work, either a shorter form of the present one or altogether different from it, which is lost, the Yoga-sūtras are all that we have as a systematic exposition of the Yoga doctrines, and there is no reason to believe that they were preceded by another work of a similar nature. • The question, then, is whether the systematization of such an early school of thought as the Yoga would have been postponed until as late as the fourth or fifth century a.d., and until after the systematization of the doctrines of even the Vaiśeṣika and the Nyāya schools, which began later on, and the Sūtras of which definitely contain a reference to the Yoga doctrines of mystic intuition and concentration.

Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole is considered to fall within the group of Indo-Portuguese Creoles, which were Portuguese-based Creoles that once flourished around coastal India and Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole arose when the Portuguese established trading posts and fortresses in Sri Lanka from 1517 onwards. The purpose of this paper is to examine critically the influence of substratum (indigenous) languages on Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole.