Religious worship is abundantly illustrated in many of its most important aspects by scenes engraved on Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian seal cylinders. Chronologically the seals of this region illustrate nearly every period of the long history of these peoples and the changing rituals and beliefs of their religion. A very large proportion of the seals represent the owner of the seal approaching a deity in the attitude of prayer. This is especially true of the glyptique of Sumer and Akkad, where the proportion of this type of seal to all others is much greater than in Assyria. In the northern empire the Assyrians are not so much attached to the scenes of worship, but even here this motif is well represented. The engravers of cylinders in all periods probably kept in stock seals engraved with the scene of the private prayer as the custom imposed in their periods. The human who is figured standing before a god, or in Assyria more frequently before a divine symbol, is not a portrait of the owner of the seal. The owner regards himself rather as represented and symbolized by the conventional figure. In those cases in which the engraver produced a seal cylinder at the command of a Sumerian or Babylonian, perhaps, we may regard the praying figure as an approximate portrait.

It is well known that the time of Zoroaster and the date of his birth or that of the announcement of his mission have not so far been indisputably established. In spite of very numerous writings published during more than two centuries, in which the question has been studied by many scholars, no unanimous conclusion has been reached. The opinions of famous scholars in the last eighty years have differed so widely that the date suggested has ranged between the eleventh or tenth centuries and the last part of the sixth century B.C. We are still hardly near to agreement on the matter.

Pre-modern historians of the Persianate world have primarily been used by modern historians as sources of factual information and rarely to gain insight into the means, methods and world-views of the historians themselves. The 15th C Persian historian Mīrkhwānd is a case in point despite the fact that his extensive discussion on the utility of history lends itself well to an historiographical assessment. While his understanding of the purpose of history may differ in some aspects for the modern discipline, his concerns and application were not as distinctive as we might like to think.

The dominating factor in the China trade for over two centuries was the problem of “laying down the dollar”. The dollar was not the currency of China; but during those two centuries—positively to 1834, and practically to 1857— it was the token by which the pound sterling and the woollen cloths of England were converted into the taels of silver and the silks and teas of China; and on the answer to the question whether the dollar delivered to the Company's treasury at Canton had cost to lay down four shillings, or five, or six, might depend the degree of profit on the round voyage.

While preparing a descriptive register of the manuscript fragments recovered by Sir Aurel Stein from the sand-buried ruins of Khadalik in the course of his second tour of exploration in Eastern Turkestan, I have recently discovered a portion of the Sanskrit version of the Sutta Nipāta. It is contained in fragments of five consecutive folios. According to Fausböll, in the reasoned statement in the Introduction to his Translation of the Sutta Nipāta (in SBE., vol. x), certain portions of that work, including the Aṭṭhavagga, are “very old”, containing as they do “some remnants of Primitive Buddhism” (loc. cit., p. xi). It is just the Aṭṭhavagga which happens to be preserved in the fragments, and it is this fact which imparts a particular interest to the discovery.

Upon the sudden death of Meḥemmed II in May, 1481, his two surviving sons, each hastily summoned from his provincial governorate by his own partisans among the Ottoman statesmen, set out with all speed to Istanbul. The race was won by the elder, Bāyezīd; but the younger son Jem had so strong and numerous a following that it was not until July, 1482, that he was finally obliged to admit defeat and take refuge at Rhodes with the Knights of St. John. The Grand Master, Pierre d'Aubusson, with a lively appreciation of the value of his guest as a hostage to insure Christendom against aggression by the new sultan—it was only two years since the Knights had beaten off a determined Ottoman siege—lost no time in removing him to France, where he would be less exposed to the danger of assassination by one of Bayezld's agents. For six years, well-treated but strictly guarded, Jem was confined in various houses of the Order in Savoy and France, his last prison, from whence he was handed into the custody of the Pope at the end of 1488, being the castle of Bourganeuf, in the present department of La Creuse, some 40 km. west of the Grand Master's native Aubusson. Jem's subsequent detention in Rome was brought to an end when he fell as a prize of war to Charles VIII of France in 1495, only to die at Naples a few weeks later.

Among the many manuscripts relating to Ch’an Buddhism included in the Tun-huang finds of the early years of this century, the Leng-chia shih-tzu chi has always been regarded by scholars as a discovery of unusual importance, since it presents an unrivalled picture of the early development of this type of Buddhism from the long-obscured viewpoint of the so-called Northern school of Ch’an. The text has been rendered into English lately by J. C. Cleary, but only in a translation intended for a non-scholarly audience. Fortunately, however, the new French-language translation and study by Bernard Faure is everything a scholar could wish for, a worthy product of many years of research, including several spent at the feet of Yanagida Seizan, Japan's outstanding authority on the early historiography of Ch’an. Faure's work, not surprisingly, shows a complete grasp of the complex issues of intellectual history raised by his text, and also provides copious commentary on its author, Ching-chüeh (683–c. 750), and his background.

This article consists of a short Introduction enumerating the oldest documents in Modern Persian, and of a decipherment of a deed from Khotan (501/1107) and of some private documents from Bāiyan (6077/1211).

After over a century and a half of increasingly superfluous translations of the Tao-te ching one might be pardoned for thinking that there was no further need for sinologists to devote attention to this text. Nothing could be further from the truth. The publication in 1974 of two manuscripts from the tomb at Ma-wang-tui dating to the early years of the 2nd century B.C., together with some previously unknown works of the same period, constituted as sensational an advance in our knowledge as could possibly be imagined, short of an autograph copy revealing the identity of Lao-tzu himself. Quite apart from answering (and raising) a host of textual questions, these finds have afforded us a startling glimpse of the significance assigned to the Tao-te ching during the early Han. This in turn has served to remind us that the continuous transmission of the text has involved marked discontinuities in the construction placed upon it, discontinuities which Western sinology has in the past been all too remiss in tracing.

It is common knowledge that religion and politics in Islam are closely related, and that in this relationship, the prevalent mode has been for the man of the sword to dominate the man of the pen. This is so both in theory and practice: passive obedience to the ruler has been erected into a religious duty, while religious dignitaries, muftis, qadls, and such have been usually content to play the rôle of

an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;…

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.

Eleven years ago I had the honour to read a paper before this Society, entitled “Five Hundred Questions on the Social Condition of the People of India.” That paper has been widely circulated, and has excited some interest on the subject. Since then, I have prosecuted one department of it—Oriental Proverbs in Relation to the Life and History of the People in India.

Luri is an Indo-Iranian language cluster with over four million speakers. The Luri ethnic area is found in southwestern Iran and southeastern Iraq, although smaller numbers of speakers have emigrated to elsewhere in Asia and a number of cities in the West.

The siwāk or miswāk (pi. masāwīk) is often mentioned as a symbol for the emphasis given in medieval Islam to dental health. Although not mentioned in the Qur'ān—the prime source of legitimacy in Islam—the siwāk gained popularity through being attributed to the daily practice of the Prophet Muhammad whose advanced understanding of preventive dentistry is lauded as being only part of his general concern with preventive medicine. Even on his death bed the Prophet is said not to have given up the use of the siwāk, since he always ordered Muslims to “purify your mouths for they are the channels through which utterances of praise to God (subḥāna Allāh) travel”. The word siwāk derives from the Arabic root swk, which indicates rubbing for the purpose of cleaning. Hence siwāk or miswāk are the names of the wooden instrument which has been used as a “tooth-stick” (Zahnstocher), or as an early form of the toothbrush, to clean the teeth and deodorize the mouth. The siwak is a wooden stick about 8 inches long and as wide as a finger. The edge is usually chewed so that the fibres separate to become like a brush. In contemporary Islamic ethics, of which the fatāwā literature (legal responsa) is only one example, the siwāk has regained recognition and is often praised as the preferred means for dental care.

The development of the Prester John legend and matters associated with it are complex, and no significant work of book length in English has appeared on the subject since V. Slessarev's Prester John. The Letter and the Legend (1959). The recent publication of a collection of texts and interpretive essays will therefore be warmly welcomed. The texts are among those published by Zarncke in the Abhandlungen der königlichen sāchsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, vii (1879), and include the famous “letter” of Prester John, together with a note by Hamilton on additional Latin manuscripts that have since come to light. The essays comprise both reprints of work that has appeared over the past five decades and six fresh studies that now see the light of day for the first time.

IN the year 1405 (a.d. 1098, a.h. 472), fifty-one years after the Turks had conquered these lands, when Alexius was emperor in Constantinople, the Turk Yághí-Siyán (Aksin) had been made governor of Antioch by Abu 'l Fatḥ, the Egyptian Afḍal was in Jerusalem, which he had taken from the Turks Suqmán and his brothers, the sons of Ortuk, two years before, and all the sea-coast was subject to the Egyptians, Theodore Kurbalát the son of Hátim was in Edessa, which he had saved from the Turks, expecting to hand it over to the emperor. At this time many kings and chiefs of the Franks with a big army and workmen of all sorts, thousands and tens of thousands without end, got ready. There were four kings, leaders of armies, Bohemund, Godfrey (Gufra, Gundafra), Saint Gilles, and Tancred (Tangri) with many bishops and monks. They set their faces to go by land through Greek territory, and to cross by the Hellespont, where is Constantinople, and the two seas are joined by a narrow strait. They sent ambassadors to Alexius to prepare and go out with them, to get ready what was needful, and to arrange throughout his land stores of food and fodder for the use of the army. Alexius promised to help them in all they needed.

Any complete biography of Qādī an-Nu'mān, the most illustrious of Ismā'īlī jurists, must necessarily be based on two kinds of sources, internal and external. He was a very prolific author, and although not all his works which were extant some 400 years ago have come down to us, a good many of his akhbār and fiqh works are still preserved. It would be necessary to go through all of these and collect all autobiographical information before the definitive biography of the Qāḍī can be attempted. Even purely fiqh works like the Mukhtaṣaru'l-Athār contain occasional references to contemporary events. The brief biography given below does not profess to be exhaustive; it is based in the main on three external sources, which seem to contain all that was definitely known of this great lawyer, the founder and the greatest exponent of Ismā'īlī jurisprudence. The difficulty of writing on Ismā'īlī subjects is well known; it is next to impossible to expect any co-operation from the sectarians themselves. I am trying, however, to obtain information from different sources, and if ever I am able to study all the works extant of the Qāḍī, a more comprehensive biography may be attempted.

Two sannyāsī problems have long troubled me, first, how it was that the early rule, Any educated twice-born man can become a sannyāsī, was supplanted by the rule, Only Brāhmans can enter the order, and secondly, how it came about that, in North India, seven of the ten sub-orders of sannyāsīs became flooded with non-Brāhmans and lost their purity.

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.

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 …”