A'ryab'hatta, who flourished in the beginning of the thirty-seventh century of the Cáli Yuga, of which four thousand nine hundred and twenty years have passed, has in his work, the Aryab'hatiyam, in which he mentions the period of his birth, exhibited the proportion of the diameter to the circumference of the circle as 20000 to 62832, in the following verse:

Chaturadhicam ṣatamashṭaguṇandwáshashṭistathá sahasráṇám Ayutadwaya vishcambhasyásannó vritta pariṇáhah.

The term Timurid is generally understood to comprise all Timur's descendants who reigned or competed for power in western Turkistan, Iran and Afghanistan in the century demarcated by the deaths of Timur in 1405 and Sultan Husayn Bayqara of Herat in 1506. In political terms Timurid rulers distinguished themselves by their fractiousness and perennial internecine warfare, but they and their subjects still bequeathed a legacy that influenced a broad region of the eastern Islamic world and could be felt even in the west in the twentieth century. It would be more accurate, though, to say that there were multiple, discrete Timurid bequests. Apart from the universal acclaim for the cultural florescence that occurred in Husayn Bayqara's Herat (1469–1506), different dynasties and populations selected only those elements of Timurid civilization that suited their own political traditions and cultural preferences. There were three principal groups of Timurid legatees. These were: the Mughul emperors of India, true Timurids who enthusiastically embraced Timurid legitimacy and consciously presided over a Timurid renaissance; the Uzbek and Ottoman States, whose Turkic rulers and subjects revered Timurid cultural achievements while sharing ambiguous feelings about the figure of Timur himself; and the non-Timurid, culturally non-Turkic Safavid and modern Afghan states in which the Timurid legacy was, respectively, the most ephemeral and the most diffuse. More recently a small number of Westerners have laid claim to part of the Timurid heritage by proclaiming the most anomalous product of its culture, Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur's autobiographical memoir, to be a work informed by modern literary sensibility and psychological insight. Their enthusiasm is only the most recent example of the diverse ways in which a civilization's legacy may be transmuted by its heirs' divergent interests.

When historians explain the end of empires, they often follow a ‘decline and fall’ paradigm which owes its fame to Edward Gibbon's great book on the Roman Empire. Recent historians of Late Antiquity, however, have tended to doubt its validity. This article considers the reasons for the end of the Mongol Empire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It examines the division of the empire into four khanates, the eventual collapse of each of which is then studied. It suggests that the khanates which retained more of their original nomadic ethos – the Golden Horde in the Pontic steppes and the Chaghatai Khanate in Central Asia – were able to survive longer than those – in the Ilkhanate in Persia and the Great Khanate in China and Mongolia – which had their centres in sedentary lands. It concludes that in all cases, ‘fall’ was the result of internal factors, about which there was nothing that was inevitable, and that there is little evidence of a long ‘decline’. Hence the ‘decline and fall’ paradigm does not seem to provide an adequate explanatory framework.

The sovereignty of God and related ideas have had a prominent place in Islamist discourses. Key figures like Mawdudi of Pakistan and Qutb of Egypt have argued that anything less than exclusive submission to God's law, and all that it necessitates in religious and political terms, is idolatry. Yet the idea of the sovereignty of God has been invoked by many more people than the Islamists, and it has meant quite different things in different quarters. Focusing on South Asia, this paper seeks to shed some new light on the provenance of this idea, on how and to what purpose it has been deployed in religious and political argument, and what the debates on it might tell us about rival conceptions of Islam.

Historical analyses of slavery in India generally emphasize the escalation of this social institution during the era of Muslim domination in north India. The present study is not an exception to this rule. However, while historical records make it clear that the Delhi Sultans and Mughal emperors retained slavery in order to suit their political and economic needs, it should be emphasized that Muslim rulers did not introduce slavery to the subcontinent. Sources such as the Arthaśāstra, the Manu-smrti and the Mahābhārata demonstrate that institutionalized slavery was well established in India by the beginning of the common era. Earlier sources suggest that it was likely to have been equally widespread by the lifetime of the Buddha (sixth century BC), and perhaps even as far back as the Vedic period. Furthermore, just as slavery was common in India long before the eighth-century Islamic conquests in Sind, recent work demonstrates that the institution continued, in various manifestations, well after the decentralization of the Mughal Empire in the early eighteenth century. Still, it is argued here that the expansion of slavery in Muslim India is an important component of the medieval and early modern history of the region and, at least in terms of its role in the commercial and cultural relations of India and Central Asia, it is a subject that would benefit from further historical analysis.

A Translation and full explanation of the complete recension of the Bundahishn have been wanted ever since Anklesaria in 1908 published his facsimile edition, the few Iranian scholars having been occupied with the endless stream of fresh material that has descended upon them since the beginning of this century. This article contains a translation of the second chapter; the first and third chapters were made available by Nyberg, JA., 1929, i, 206–237.

Was there a Xia Dynasty? By the mid-nineteen thirties, the works of Henri Maspero and other scholars in the West and of Gu Jiegang and his compatriots in China had clearly established the originally mythological character of the founder of the Xia Dynasty (traditionally ca. 2200–1760 B.C.) and of the rulers who preceded him in traditional Chinese historiography. The excavations near Anyang of late Shang palaces, tombs and inscribed oracle bones had also established the authenticity of the Shang Dynasty which followed the Xia, or at least of the latter part of it. In 1936, Chen Mengjia published an article in which he related the Xia king list to the Shang and argued that the two periods were the same. For the next forty years, the question of the authenticity of the Xia was left largely in abeyance although most scholars did continue to assume that the Xia Dynasty, which was hereditary like the Shang, would some day be authenticated by archaeological excavation.

I should like to present some ideas on what, I think, is necessary revaluation of Islamic traditions in the light of our present knowledge; but am at a loss whether to call my conclusions something new and unprecedented, or something old and well known. No one could have been more surprised than I was by the results which the evidence of the texts has forced upon me during the last ten years or so; but looking back I cannot see what other result could possibly be consistent with the very foundations of our historical and critical study of the first two or three centuries of Islam. One of these foundations, I may take it for granted, Goldziher's discovery that the traditions from the Prophet and from his Companions do not contain more or less authentic information on the earliest period of Islam to which they claim to belong, but reflect opinions held during the first two and a half centuries after the hijra.

In his Islam in Modern History, published in 1957, yet still a work remarkable for its insights, Wilfred Cantwell Smith refers to the extraordinary energy which had surged through the Muslim world with increasing force in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He talks of:

dynamism, the appreciation of activity for its own sake, and at the level of feeling a stirring of intense, even violent, emotionalism…The transmutation of Muslim society from its early nineteenth-century stolidity to its twentieth-century ebullience is no mean achievement. The change has been everywhere in evidence.

This surge of energy is closely associated with a shift in the balance of Muslim piety from an other-worldly towards a this-worldly focus. By this I mean a devaluing of a faith of contemplation of God's mysteries and of belief in His will to shape human life, and a valuing instead of a faith in which Muslims were increasingly aware that it was they, and only they, who could act to fashion an Islamic society on earth. This shift of emphasis has been closely associated with a new idea of great power, the caliphate of man. In the absence of Muslim power, in the absence, for the Sunnis at least, of a caliph, however symbolic, to guide, shape and protect the community, this awesome task now fell to each individual Muslim. I hazard to suggest that this shift towards a this-worldly piety, and the new responsibilities for Muslims that came with it, is the most important change that Muslims have wrought in the practice of their faith over the past one thousand years. It is a change full of possibilities for the future.

Scholars of Indo-European historical linguistics have long found it convenient to refer to well known sound changes by the name of the researcher who first noticed the correspondences the sound change accounts for. Because of the proven utility of such named sound laws in Indo-European linguistics, the explicit listing and naming of sound laws in the Tibeto-Burman family could be expected to bring similar benefits.

This article is a historical study of maritime trade between Tang China and early Islamic Iraq, in the seventh to tenth centuries. While the existence, in this period, of merchant communities from the Arab-Persian Gulf in Chinese ports has been known for a long time, the present study seeks to contextualise their emergence, to articulate the socio-economic conditions of their trade, and to consider the extent to which these were conducive to transmissions of ideas. Building upon scholarly findings accumulated in different disciplines, it outlines patterns of exchange that, while limited in scope, were more systemic than has hitherto been assumed.

In the north-western extremity of our Indian possessions, and under the tropic, is situated the small and sterile territory of Cutch, of importance to the government from its advanced position, but of more attraction to the student of history from its western shore being washed by the waters of the classic Indus and from its proximity to the scene of Alexander's glories. Divested, however, of these alluring enticements to enter on its history, Cutch is a country peculiarly situated. To the west it has the inconstant and ever varying Indus. To the north and east the tract called Runn, which is alternately a dry sandy desert and a muddy inland lake. To the south it has the Gulf of Cutch and the Indian Ocean, with waters receding yearly from its shores.

This study examines in detail the biographical entry of an Ilkhanid (the Mongol state centred in Iran) princess, El Qutlugh Khatun daughter of Abagha Ilkhan (r. 1265–82), in the biographical dictionaries of the Mamluk author Khalīl ibn Aybeg al-Ṣafadī (d. 1363). Al-Ṣafadī‘s biography of the lady provides a rare glance into the life of women of the Mongol royal household during the transitional period which followed the Ilkhanid conversion to Islam. It sheds light on issues such as the relations between the Mamluks and the Ilkhans in light of the latter's conversion to Islam and the influence of the process of Islamization on traditional Mongolian gender related practices. This paper also discusses the motivation of the Mamluk author in including El Qutlugh's unusual story in his biographical dictionaries showing how his choices might have been influenced not only by his own interests but also by what appealed to his readers.

In the epigraphic and literary records of medieval Hindu India the term sāmanta is used to mean vassals and nobles. Thus the sāmantas were vitally connected with the structure of Indian society. But, in spite of its importance, the term has not received a full-length study.

According to its derivation the term sāmanta is an adjective and means ‘being on all sides’, ‘neighbouring’ or ‘bordering’. In earlier works we find it used in this sense.

The important rôle which the Kārimī merchants played in Oriental trade at the end of the Middle Ages has been touched upon by some outstanding orientalists. The last to treat the subject exhaustively was W. J. Fischel in his paper “Über die Gruppe der Kārimī-Kaufleute”, published in 1937 in the series Analecta Orientalia (of the Pontifical Bible Institute) no. 14. The Arabic historical works of the later Middle Ages contain, however, additional material, which partly corroborates and partly modifies Fischel's conclusions. A good many of the notices on the Kārimīs to be quoted in this paper are taken from the hitherto unpublished chronicle Inbā' al-ghumr bi-abnā al-'umr of Ibn Ḥajar al-'Asqalānī (d. 1449), MS. Constantinople, Yeni Cami 814 and the Who's Who of the fifteenth century composed by al-Sakhāwī (d. 1497) and called ad-Ḍau' al-lāmi' fī a'yān al-qarn al-tāsi' (Cairo, 1353–55).

This article explores the historical writings of Rashid al-Din Tabib (d. 1318) as part of a programme of political legitimisation for the Mongol Ilkhans of Iran. By considering both volumes of the Jami` al-tawārikh alongside one another and in their political context, it reveals aspects of the text that get lost when the dynastic and world history are treated in isolation. Rashid al-Din's presentation of legendary figures of communal identity from Perso-Islamic and Turko-Mongol traditions responds to immediate political conflicts between his patrons and their neighbours, the Jochid Mongols of the Volga region and the Mamluks of Egypt. In the relative absence of documentary evidence, court-sponsored narrative chronicles can in this way inform our understanding of ruling ideology during the period.

The adoption of western notation (which is an example of graphic notation) as the “official system” in Turkey dates from after 1828. Sultan Mahmud II (reigned 1808–1839) abolished the Janissary force in 1826 and with it the musical unit of that army, it was a band for wind and percussion instruments (Mehterhâne-i Hümâyûn). He then organised his new army on western lines and thus introduced an institution of western origin, the military band, as the musical unit of his modern army. This new institution, which was European in its music system, instruments, repertoire and first and foremost its methods of education, was formed under the name Muzika-i Hümâyûn (the royal military band). Professional musicians were invited from Europe to participate and, with the foundation of Muzika-i Hümâyûn in 1827, the most far-reaching change in Turkish musical history took place. It was an outstanding manifestation of westernisation which necessarily made a deep impact on both the Turkish makam (modal) music system and the existence and the behaviour of the musicians who produced and performed it. The domination of makam music and its masters in court circles and their claim to be the sole and absolute system of taste was undermined, although the appreciation and respect of certain sultans and bureaucrats continued on a personal level. From that date on, a duality, an East-West dichotomy (the effects of which can still be seen), overtook the cultural sphere of which music was a part. Within this dichotomy, tonal polyphonic music of the West began to make its influence felt at least as much as, if not more than, makam based Turkish music both within the state framework and in the society at large. These dual concepts were referred to as Alla Turca and Alla Franga. While Alla Franga (alafranga in common parlance) came to symbolise modernity, change and the new life style, Alla Turca (alaturka in common parlance) became a manifestation of being archaic and conservative and of having a blind commitment to tradition and an under-developed taste (even no taste at all). Within this series of dichotomies, which took hold of every area of life (from literature to fashion also, eating habits, systems of beliefs, and education as well as government) makam based Turkish music received a large share of “cultural negation” with the judgement that it did not even have a decent notation system. It became marginalised and restricted to a narrow social group deeply and passionately devoted to it. Even during this process, makam music developed a dynamic of self-protection against “cultural negation” with its composers, theorists, publishers, performers and listening public. Makam music composers and performers learnt western notation, they wrote pieces down and deciphered music from that notation; a system of education based on modern methods developed while still preserving meşk (the traditional oral teaching method of Turkish music). These efforts were driven by the ‘ideal’ of transforming makam music, which was claimed to be archaic due to its monodic structure, into a polyphonic music. The musicians who knew western notation (such as Melekzet Efendi, Leon [Hancıyan] Efendi, etc.) were paid great amounts of money in order to record the works of the old masters in western notation and compile them, along with new compositions, into extensive note-collections (such as Muzika-i Hümâyûn Kumandanı [the commander of the royal military band] Necîp Paşa Collection and the Pertev Paşa Collection, etc.). Works were also published in note editions (such as Mâlûmat [literally meaning knowledge], Müntehâbât [literally meaning selections], Ûdî [lute-player] Arşak editions, etc.). Moreover, educational guides devoted to teaching makam theory and solmisation (such as Tanbûrî Cemîl Bey's Rehber-i Mûsikî [The Music Guide], Muallim [teacher] İsmail Hakkı Bey's Mahzen-i Esrâr-ı Mûsikî [The Cellar of the Secrets of Music], Muallim Kâzım Bey's Mûsikî Nazariyâtı [Music Theory], etc.) and the first methods for learning the instruments of makam music (such as Ûdî Salâhî Bey's Ud metodu [Lute Method], Seyyid Abdülkaadir Bey's Usûl-i Ta'lîm-i Keman [Method for Practising Violin, etc.], modelled on their European counterparts, were beginning to be published.

In the colonial anthropology of India developed in connection with the decennial censuses in the late nineteenth century, caste and religion were major topics of enquiry, although caste was particularly important. Official anthropologists, mostly members of the Indian Civil Service, reified castes and religious communities as separate ‘things’ to be counted and classified. In the 1911 and later censuses, less attention was paid to caste, but three officials – E. A. Gait, E. A. H. Blunt and L. S. S. O'Malley – made significant progress in understanding the caste system by recognising and partly overcoming the problems of reification. In this period, however, there was less progress in understanding popular religion. The Morley-Minto reforms established separate Muslim electorates in 1909; communal representation was extended in 1921 by the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms and again by the 1935 Government of India Act, which also introduced reservations for the Untouchable Scheduled Castes. Gait and Blunt were involved in the Montagu-Chelmsford debates, and Blunt in those preceding the 1935 Act. In the twentieth century, the imperial government's most serious problems were the nationalist movement, mainly supported by the middle class, and religious communalism. But there were no ethnographic data on the middle class, while the data on popular religion showed that Hindus and Muslims generally did not belong to separate communities; anthropological enquiry also failed to identify the Untouchable castes satisfactorily. Thus, official anthropology became increasingly irrelevant to policy making and could no longer strengthen the colonial state.

The “foreignness” of Islam in India is a familiar theme in the rhetoric of contemporary-Hindu fundamentalism. The numerical majority of Hindus in India is taken to mean that the nation-state ought to be founded on ideals and institutions defined as authentically “Hindu”, that India is the land of the Hindus, and that it must be ruled only by them. This ideology evidently leaves little room for non-Hindus, but especially so for Muslims, who ruled large parts of the Indian subcontinent for several centuries and who still constitute a sizeable minority in India. It is argued, for instance, that as the ruling elite in India, Muslims not only exploited the Hindus, they never even thought of themselves as “really” Indian and should not consequently be considered as such. For all the centrality of the Muslim Other to constructions of Hindu fundamentalism, the appeal and success of the latter is predicated on the systematic exclusion, if not the expulsion, of Muslims from the Hindu nation-state.

Tràng An is a Vietnamese government supported cultural and ecological park development covering 2,500 hectares that is centred on an isolated massif on the southern edge of the Song Hong delta in Ninh Bình Province, north Vietnam (Fig. 1). The archaeological investigation of Tràng An is being led jointly by the Xuan Truong Construction Corporation and the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, under the direction of the lead author. The Corporation is creating an ecologically sensitive development – the ‘Tràng An Tourism Resort’ – within this karstic landscape, which is also the subject of a planned application to UNESCO for World Heritage Site status. International involvement in this work has been at the behest of Nguyêń Van Truong, the General Director of Xuan Truong and at the invitation of the Ninh Bình People's Committee. The research itself is carried out under the guidance of Nguyêń Van Son, the Tràng An Tourism Resort Project Manager. The main focus of the May 2007 season was to undertake excavations at the site of Hang Boi (the ‘Fortune-Teller's Cave’).