The term ‘Tibeto-Burman’ has latterly crept into use as a convenient designation of a very large family of languages which appear more or less to approximate to each other. They are those which Max Müller classes as Gangetic and Lohitic, names which, with all due reference to the learned Professor, really have little relevant meaning in this case.

Bien que l'emploi des bouches à feu soit attesté dans les pays de l'lnde antérieurement, la diffusion de l'artillerie, et de ce que l'on appelle du terme générique conventionnel d'arquebuse, a été, au début du XVIe siècle, le fait de transfuges recherchés pour leur habileté à fondre des canons et à manier l'arme à feu portative. Les plus fameux sont les deux Italiens qui, en 1503, passérent au service du Samorin de Calicut. On trouve ensuite parmi eux des “Turcs” ou “Roumes” – dont la plupart semblent, arrivés au Gujarat en 1507, avoir essaimé après le désastre de Diu de 1509, au service d'autres princes, jusqu'au Bengale et au Pégou – et des “Portugais”, ou réputé tels, dont la trace, une fois passés dans le monde d'en face, se perd le plus souvent. Si les activités de quelques-uns de ces aventuriers, revenant en terre chrétienne, étaient trop notoires pour qu'ils donnent le change, d'autres entouraient de fumée leur curriculum incontrôlable et rachetaient par une version édifiante un moment douteux de leur passé.

In a paper published in the Numismatic Chronicle (1873, Part I. page 60), I enumerated and described all the glass discs with Kufic inscriptions which had till then come under my notice; comprising those in my own cabinet, M. Sauvaire's collection, and others in the possession of the Rev. Greville Chester. I then advanced my reasons for believing that these discs were standard coin-weights. The theory that they were tokens, or equivalents of coins, had been supported by several learned writers; but all those students and collectors with whom I have since been in communication now recognize them as weights.

This article provides an historical review of the Arabic rendering of Swahili, while Appendix A (Parts I and II) contains proposals for the development of Arabic script to yield a phonologically adequate writing system for a variety of Swahili spoken on the East African coast – the variety known as kiMvita (central Swahili), and spoken from just north of T’akaungu to Mombasa, and thence as far south as Gasi. Parallel possibilities for the refinement of romanised script are not considered in any detail.

It should be stressed that kiMvita, the variety of Swahili here described, is not the standardised language. For a number of reasons, the Swahili speech of Zanzibar town, together with the Swahili spoken by Africans from the interior of the continent but resident in Zanzibar, were the varieties of Swahili with which the pioneering standardises of Swahili were familiar.

The ‘discovery’ of early Chinese, and its subsequent reconstruction, have allowed the modern linguist to reach a wide range of firm conclusions about the Chinese language and its position within the Tibeto-Burman family. Reverend Joseph Edkins (1823–1905) should be credited with initial work on early Chinese as the ancestor language of the various Sinitic languages, and with its first partial reconstruction. This article is an attempt to supply at least a first historical guide for those interested in obtaining a better understanding of the implicit discovery of Sinitic and the first reconstructions of early Chinese.

Under the title “Le Livre du Coq («Matzḥafa Dorho»)”, M. Chaîne published a short extract from MS. B.N. d'Abbadie 11, a MS. of the Ethiopian Holy Week Lectionary Gabrä ḥamamat (henceforth GḤ). Some citations of Chaîne's article give the impression that (i) the extract is complete in itself, (ii) it is properly entitled Mäṣḥafä dorho, and (iii) catalogue descriptions of MSS of GḤ can simply be cross-referenced to it; Chaîne's introduction does not encourage these assumptions.

Chaîne's extract appears in the printed edition of GḤ2 as part of the first of nine ‘homilies’, each headed dәrsan wätәmhәrt zä'abäwinä ḥawaryat qәddusan zämäharunä …, “homily and teaching of our fathers the holy apostles, which they taught us …”; the first of these “homilies” is additionally headed Mäṣḥafä doroho (sic).

Dear Sir, — You have requested, me to write some account of the work which I have in hand concerning the Libyan languages. I cannot satisfy myself without a rather lengthy introduction, which must begin with some account of my sources of knowledge. It may be best to open these historically.

Venture de Paradis, Professor of Turkish in the Paris School of Living Languages, initiated the study of the native language spoken on the highlands and slopes of Mount Atlas. He was well acquainted with Arabic and Persian, and was selected by Napoleon the First as “Secretary Interpreter” to the Chief of the Army in Egypt. The celebrated Amédée Jaubert, his successor in the Turkish Professorship, gives high testimony to his powers and activity.

Evidence about the ridda of Kinda is as mottled as it is for other events which Islamic historiography includes under the title of ridda. Tendentious writing and apologetics, contradictions and a complete lack of dates make the historian's task very hard indeed. Yet there is much that can be established (with varying degrees of probability) about those sanguinary events. Since no meaningful study of the short though eventful period of the ridda alone is possible, several related topics are also discussed below.

The following joint article is a departure from standard studies, in that historical research is put side-by-side with numismatic evidence. It reflects the growing awareness of the underlying concepts of steppe society that significantly shaped the formation and endurance of the Mongol Empire. With new analysis, it is apparent that the society was clear about these concepts and expressed them in very public pronouncements. They are most evident in the early period of the empire; during the formation of the state by Chinggis Khan and his first two successors, Ögödei (r. 1229–41) and Güyük (r.1246-48). However, the cataclysmic civil war in the middle of the thirteenth century between the Ögödeyids and Toluids removed direct acknowledgment of such a social ethos. Indeed, after 1250 khans strongly focused on pragmatic issues and relied less on philosophical theories of legitimacy, at least Mongolian ones. By contrast, the first three rulers were keenly aware of the theory of the state and the way society functioned within it. They developed this ethos into a fairly cohesive form that provided moral strength to a nascent regime. The evidence for this development emerges from the study of two particular words, tengri, “Heaven”, and especially töre, “grand principle”. Töre in this usage was the equivalent of the ‘binding and unbinding’ and the sunna of the messenger, Muḥammad, in medieval Islamic societies and of democracy in modern times. Tengri and töre are culturally defined theories closely related to the Aristotelian sense of positive law. In all cases, reality required various approaches to them at a given period of time. As a result, the concept of töre had existed before the empire and continues to this day, always implying the correct order of good governance.

A new copperplate inscription of Vainyagupta, to be presented in this article, is important as one of the rare sources that provide a glimpse of the later history of the Ājīvikas. It also tells us about their worship of Maṇibhadra, one of the eminent yakṣas, with interesting information on his iconography. Finally, it gives us some insights into the early history of Samataṭa, a subregion of Bengal on its eastern fringe, as it includes a copy of the grant of an earlier king named Nāthacandra. In this article, I will present an edition of the inscription and discuss some historical aspects revealed by it in connection with other sources.

In 305 B.C. Demetrius I Poliorcetes of Macedonia (r. 321–283), pursuing his ambition of reuniting the empire of Alexander, marched against the island city of Rhodes, which since the partition of 323 had been able to reassert its independence and pursue its own foreign policies. The ensuing siege, one of the most famous military campaigns of Hellenistic times, was a failure, and in 304 Demetrius was obliged to admit defeat and withdraw, leaving behind his siege train and large amounts of other military stores. The jubilant Rhodians gathered up this equipment and sold it for 300 talents, which, in gratitude for their deliverance, they used to commission a spectacular monument to the sun god Helios, the focus of a lively cult at Rhodes. The sculptor selected for the task was Chares, an artist from the town of Lindos (about 40 kilometres south of the capital) and a student of the renowned Lyssipus, who had recently erected a great bronze statue of Zeus at Tarentum in Italy.

Like other Britons in colonial India, Sir William Sleeman had a poor opinion of the traditional holy men who still formed an important part of Indian society in the nineteenth century. Reflecting his writings on the suppression of the Thugs that would make him famous, Sleeman declared that, “There is hardly any species of crime that is not throughout India perpetrated by men in the disguise of these religious mendicants; and almost all such mendicants are really men in disguise”.1 None of these holy men were considered more dubious – more superstitious and reactionary – than the dervishes and faqīrs. In popular Indian usage the terms darwīsh and faqīr referred to a class of Muslim holy men who were considered to possess a range of miraculous powers, powers which served to demonstrate their proximity to God; and so in turn to underwrite their considerable authority.2 For many British officials, it was this authority that stood at the heart of what they saw as the faqīr problem. As the rumours that surrounded the various ‘mutinies’ of the nineteenth century demonstrate, faqīr s were seen as the perpetual ringleaders of rebellion and sedition. Nowhere were these concerns more insistent than in the circles of India's colonial armies, which more than any other aspect of colonial society relied on loyalty to a formalised and rational chain of command. Yet in spite (and in some ways because) of these fears, the commanders of the various armies under British command in India were anxious to demonstrate their respect for the autonomy of the religious rights of the Indian soldier. Through the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Islam of ‘Jack Sepoy’ or the Indian soldier fell in between this tension of covert suspicion and official respect, and in different ways the careers of a series of Muslim holy men attached to the Muslim soldiers were shaped by this tension. Over the following pages, this essay examines the careers of three faqīr s connected to the Hyderabad Contingent, the army under British command in the nominally independent princely state of Hyderabad in South India, better known as the Nizam's State. Looking out from this princely corner of Britain's ‘informal empire’, the essay uses a number of forgotten small-town texts in Urdu to begin to reconstruct the religious history of the Indian soldier from the inside, as it were, and so to create an ethnohistory of Islam in the colonial armies of the British Empire.3

This article is an attempt, in the nature of things tentative only, to carry a stage further the identification and location of the principal Sino-European works printed in China during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as recorded by Henri Cordier in his L'Imprimerie Sino-Européene en Chine (Paris, 1901) and by Paul Pelliot in T'oung Pao (vol. xxiii, pp. 356–360) (Leiden, 1924). Considerations of space have obliged me to confine myself to a discussion of some ten of the most interesting of these, that is those which have the whole or the greatest part of the text printed in a European language. I therefore omit all those which have thetitle-page in Latin and the text in Chinese characters.

‘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?

Between 1922 and 1953, the German-Dutch Catholic Congregation Societas Verbi Divini, SVD, also known as the Divine Word Missionaries or Steyl Missionaries, sent approximately 90 missionaries to Northwest China. During these three decades, the Divine Word Missionaries established some 30 missionary stations (plus about 100 out-stations) in Gansu, Qinghai and Xinjiang.

1. The ancient Semitic poem here presented is inscribed in alphabetical cuneiform upon a clay tablet unearthed in 1933 at Ras esh-Shamrah (ancient Ugarit) on the north coast of Syria. The tablet dates approximately from the fifteenth-fourteenth century b.c. The text was first edited by M. Charles Virolleaud in the periodical Syria, xvii (1936), pp. 209–228, but the present interpretation differs toto cælo from that proposed in the editio princeps.

Man's moral responsibility for his actions is a tenet of Islamic revelation which no Muslim has ever tried to reject. Likewise, the notion of God's omnipotence, which the Qur'ān teaches, has never been challenged by Muslims. However, there is a great difficulty in explaining how true moral responsibility coincides with God's omnipotence; if God creates all things, He also creates man's actions, and this being the case, man cannot be responsible for them. As is well known, the Mu'tazilite solution to the antinomy of God's omnipotence and man's responsibility consists in affirming man's capability, granted to him by God, of creating his own works. Adhering to their principle of God's justice, the Mu'tazilites asserted that if God were to create a man's unbelief while commanding him to believe, He would be unjust in punishing him for unbelief, since the man could not, in this situation, help but disbelieve. According to them, ought implies can. In upholding man's responsibility for his own actions, the Mu'tazilites saved God's justice, but according to the Ash'arites, detracted from God's omnipotence. The Ash'arites taught that since God is the sole creator, He creates human actions. In order to safeguard both God's omnipotence and man's responsibility, al-Ash'arī, having been influenced by the teaching of al-Najjār, developed a theory of kasb (lit. acquisition) according to which God creates man's actions while man appropriates them and thus becomes responsible for them.