In the present article I give a translation and description of the anatomical chart kept in the Temple Medicine on the lChags-po-ri (“Iron Hill”) at Lhasa which, together with its connected monastery, forms the medical college of Tibet. The chart demonstrates the Tibetan science of anatomy, and every Tibetan doctor taught his anatomy from it.

Is Viṣṇu Naṭarāja? yes, according to the (Vaiṣṇava saints of the Tamil country) Viṣṇu is Naṭaraja. The pan-Indian tradition associates two important forms of Viṣṇu with dance. They are Kāliyamardana and rāśaknḍa, merry making sports of Kṣīs. According to the Cilappatikāram (Kaṭalāṭukātai 11. 37–63) Viṣṇu presents mal while fighting with a demon, alliyam (a group dance) at the time rendition of KaṆsa, kuṭam as Trivikrama, pēṆi as the eunuch Kāmadeva, an aspect of Viṣṇu, and pāvai is performed by Tiru, Śrīdevī, consort of Viṣṇu. This seems to be an ancient tradition (c. 5th century A. D.), reiterated by the . The are Vaiṣṇava mystics of the Tamil bhakti age, in total twelve in number. They have contributed enormously to literature, grouped under the heading, Nālāyiratiwiyapirapantam “4000 Melodious Hymns” (cf. Hardy 1983: 247–50; Settar 1993: 223–40; Kalidos 1993: 181–88). The twelve are authors of 24 literary pieces, dated during the 5th–9th centuries A.D. The are grouped under three chronological heads as follows:

The subject of Oriental Music is one which offers a large field for research, in which very little work has, as yet, been done.

When publishing recently the painted pottery found at al 'Ubaid I had necessarily to refer to that found by the French excavators at Susa and other mounds in that part of Persia. I pointed out that while at al 'Ubaid there were two types of painted pottery, the thick and the thin wares, which were contemporary and were associated with various types of plain and incised ware, and while there was a very definite difference between these wares and those of Susa and Musyan, yet certain analogies and parallels did exist both with the thin wares of Susa I and with the thick wares of Susa II, which have always been regarded as differing from each other very widely in date and in style, and the former of which was not associated with any other type of pottery.

about the middle of the year 1887, having bought from Dr. R. N. Oust a lot of books and papers relating to the African languages, I found amongst them a Gebilee and Bornoo manuscript Vocabulary, very carefully written on three double sheets of rough paper: on examining it, the Gebilee proved at once to be a Berber dialect, spoken in the mountainous region lying about 50 miles S. of Tripoli, and extending 150 miles in a direction from W.SW. to E.NE. However, inasmuch as I was then engaged in another part of Africa, I had not at first attached much importance to this document; but, later on, having sent it for inspection to Prof. René Basset, of Algiers, this eminent scholar urged on me the necessity of publishing my manuscript, the peculiar dialect to which it refers having not yet been illustrated; at the same time, he sent me some valuable Notes, which have greatly helped me to extricate myself amongst many inaccuracies.

Chapter XVI.—Marco Polo travelled from Yazd to Kermán viâ. Báfk. His description of the road, seven days over great plains, harbour at three places only, is perfectly exact. The fine woods, producing dates, are at Báfk itself. (The place is generally called Báft.) Partridges and quails still abound; wild asses I saw several on the western road, and I was told that there were a great many on the Báfk road. Travellers and caravans now always go by the eastern road viâ Anár and Bahrámábád. Before the Sefavíehs (i.e. before A.D. 1500) the Anár road was hardly, if ever, used; travellers always took the Báfk road. The country from Yazd to Anár, 97 miles, seems to have been totally uninhabited before the Sefavíehs. Anár, as late as A.D. 1340, is mentioned as the frontier place of Kermán to the north, on the confines of the Yazd desert. When Sháh 'Abbás had caravanserais built at three places between Yazd and Anár (Zein ud-dín, Kermánsháhán, and Shamsh), the eastern road began to be neglected.

Various Near Eastern and European writers of the thirteenth century remarked on the outlandish appearance of the Mongol warriors then rampaging across Eurasia. One aspect of this was their distinctive headgear. From our sources it is clear that Mongol costume could be exploited by non-Mongols in the Near East for a variety of purposes; how these distinctive hats were described, and how contemporary artists depicted them, will also be discussed.

This article considers British agitation against East India Company rule in India via an examination of the Aborigines Protection Society and the British India Society. Founded by humanitarians and moral reformers in the 1830s, these organisations placed India within a wide transnational context, which stretched from Britain's settler and plantation colonies to Liberia and the United States. However, in the wake of slave emancipation, British campaigners struggled to reconcile their universal understanding of humanity with their equally strong confidence in the benefits of ‘British civilisation’. Their nebulous and changeable programmes for reform failed to convince Britain's politicians and public that the challenges of free trade could be met by the exclusive use of free labour, or that all imperial subjects possessed equal rights. A fuller appreciation of these campaigns reveals the contradictions and occlusions inherent in mid-nineteenth century humanitarianism, and underscores the importance of a more geographically integrated approach to the history of opposition to Britain's empire.

The only existing alphabetical list of Bast India directors for the period 1758–1858 was prepared and published in 1885 by Charles Prinsep in his book, The Services of Madras Civilians. Unfortunately it is an extremely inaccurate list, mistakes in the directors' years of service having been made in a great number of cases. Among other errors, Prinsep endowed two of the directors, John Smith Burgess and William Thornton Astell, with dual personalities; the two David Scotts, on the other hand, he treated as one; and although going so far as to invent one director, Joseph Bosanquet, he omitted at least five others—R. Atkinson, A. Campbell, G. Johnstone, R. Jones, L. Peel.

This paper discusses the theoretical basis of the Sufi term jadhb (the effortless attraction of man by God), and examines the different approaches towards the figure of majdhūb as developed and presented in Sufi compendia and both Sufi and non-Sufi biographies of the period between the fourth/tenth and the tenth/sixteenth centuries. It suggests that there are three major phases in the development of the theoretical basis of jadhb. The first stage covers the period between the fourth/tenth century and the first half of the sixth/twelfth century. Jadhb during this stage was not discussed as a separate technical term, and its early foundations were embedded particularly in the early discussions of tawba (repentance) beside other expressions such as ghayba and fanā’. The period that began with the late part of the sixth/twelfth century and reached the early part of the seventh/thirteenth century was distinguished by attempts of later Sufi authors to moderate the problematic aspects of jadhb and to integrate it with the detailed discussions of mashyakha (sheikh status). In light of the increasing antinomian appearances of the majdhūbs and the anarchistic qalandariyya in Muslim landscapes, the period following the early part of the seventh/thirteenth century up to the tenth/sixteenth century witnessed the popularity of majdhūb Sufis whose antinomian approach towards social codes and religious rituals came to be freely presented in the sources. Jadhb became separated from the institutionalised doctrinal system of mashyakha, although some attempts were made to integrate jadhb with sulūk and, thus, to maintain the majdhūb’s ability to act as a spiritual guide.

Comparative writing about the history of science and technology in different cultures tends to assume that differences in the ways in which these cultures write their histories are not important. But this is unlikely to be the case. The comparative lack of historical writing about printing in China by European standards should not in itself lead us to conclude that print only played a minor role there, any more than the tendency to downplay the importance of paper among historians of the European book means that its use in Europe was less significant than in other cultures. That in China the relative balance of the historical record is the opposite of the one that we tend to assume on the basis of the European experience is demonstrated here by contrasting the dearth of information about early printing with the commemoration even of relatively marginal cultural figures through the traditional Chinese historiography of paper making. But only tentative suggestions can be made as to why these differences in historical writing may have occurred.

The University of London was the first institution in the United Kingdom to establish a professorship in Chinese. Within a decade of the first half of the nineteenth century, two professorships in Chinese were created at its two colleges: the first at University College in 1837 and the second at King's College in 1847. Previous studies of British sinology have devoted sufficient attention to the establishment of the programme and the first Chinese professorship. However, despite the latter professorship being established by the same patron (Sir George Thomas Staunton; 1781–1859) during the same era as the former, the institutionalisation of the Chinese programme at King's College London seems to have been completely overlooked. If we consider British colonial policy and the mission of the Empire in the early nineteenth century, we are able to understand the strategic purpose served by the Chinese studies programme at King's and the special reason for its establishment at a crucial moment in the history of Sino-British relations. Examining it from this perspective, we reveal unresolved doubts concerning the selection and appointment of King's first Chinese professor. Unlike other inaugural Chinese professors appointed during the nineteenth century at other universities in the United Kingdom, the first Chinese professor at King’s, Samuel Turner Fearon (1819–1854), was not a sinophile. He did not translate any Chinese classics or other works. His inaugural lecture has not even survived. This is why sinologists have failed to conduct an in-depth study on Fearon and the genealogy of the Chinese programme at King’s. Nevertheless, Samuel Fearon did indeed play a very significant role in Sino-British relations due to his ability as an interpreter and his knowledge of China. He was not only an interpreter in the first Opium War (1839–1842) but was also a colonial civil servant and senior government official in British Hong Kong when the colonial government started to take shape after the war. This paper both re-examines his contribution during this “period of conflict and difficulty” in Sino-British relations and demonstrates the very nature of British sinology.

Taking the example of the Ismaʻilis in colonial South Asia and East Africa, this article examines some aspects of the complexities involved in the identity formation of communities seeking gradual redefinitions in a deterritorialised global context, reformulating notions of community membership in the process. The Ismaʻili case illustrates an intertwined history of the development of community identity, and a language of social service that became the hallmark of the community under a religious leadership that virtually redefined its position through a vigorous and increasing emphasis on the idiom of social commitment. At one level, this thrust marks a passage from the translocal to the global context, intelligible in terms of the conceptual rubric of global assemblages. At another level, the article also seeks to evaluate the nature of the community's diasporic experience in Africa. It suggests that the ideational framework and praxis of social service — and in more recent times grander developmental endeavours addressing the needs of both Ismaʻilis and non-Ismaʻilis across the world — both reflect, and are mutually constitutive of, more fundamental experiments with identity and repositioning of religious authority that the Ismaʻilis first witnessed in colonial South Asia and East Africa. This article is thus an effort to retrieve some of the continuities and ruptures in the historical process.

The British territories of greater Southeast Asia were administratively connected to London and Calcutta, and while local censuses show that these centres could exert some influence at the furthest peripheries of the Empire, a close analysis of the ways in which race and religion were approached in the classification of colonial subjects in Southeast Asia shows peculiarities specific to the region.

In this article I argue that the demographic and socio-political contexts of British Burma and Malaya (with references to Hong Kong) led to a framing of ‘race’ that challenged European ‘scientific’ definitions and embraced instead the interweaving of multiple aspects of an individual's identity, most prominently religion. This shift, potentially empowering as reflective of local understandings of belonging, and an improvement from the period's anthropometric framework, was to backfire, however. With the emergence of nationalism, majoritarian identities came to be homogenised in these ethno-religious intersectional communities, marginalising and excluding those who did not fit.

The Shi‘i communities of South Asia, roughly 60 million people, represent, after those of Iran, the second largest grouping of Shi‘as in the Muslim world. Until recently our knowledge of them has not matched their numbers. Indeed, they, and here I refer to the Twelver Shi‘as rather than the Isma‘ilis, have suffered from the paradox of being both highly visible but in scholarly terms largely invisible. Where the Shi‘a live in South Asian towns and cities, arguably, no community has been more visible or more audible: visible because of their great processions at Muharram; and audible, certainly at Muharram, but also throughout the year in their majalis, as they recount the events of Karbala, often transmitting them by loudspeaker to the muhalla.

The number of Arabic papyri from the first two Islamic centuries that have been preserved is relatively small. Papyri from the third century A.H. are far more numerous and constitute the bulk of most collections. In this paper I publish an Arabic legal document from A.H. 77 (A.D. 707), which is in the Michaelides collection of papyri at Cambridge University Library. It is one of the earliest extant Arabic legal papyri. The document is a quittance (barā’a) drawn up by a certain Sa‘īd ibn Qays al-Dallālī to certify that Jamīla, the freedwoman of ’Umm Hunayda, is cleared of obligation to him after the payment of a sum of seven dīnārs. This sum was delivered as payment for a portion of a house.

This paper revisits the intersection of the 19th and 20th century to bring into focus hitherto unused archival and diplomatic correspondence from the attempts to define and delimit a boundary between India and China. The theoretical point of departure for the paper is to discern how perception (knowledge, beliefs, and norms) relating to the boundary evolved over time to alter the meaning and construction of the material reality i.e. the boundary itself. In doing so it establishes how what each country deems today, as its ‘traditional customary boundary’ was not an unambiguous fixed one, but was mutable across different time periods. The political importance of the selection of these boundary lines did not lie in their being ‘true’, or in the claim being ‘real’ but in their being shared by a process of political selection, and then being reified in the respective countries.

This article examines the linked sets of paintings commonly known as the “small Guler” Rāmāyaṇa by Paṇḍit Seu, the “Mankot” Rāmāyaṇa and the “Siege of Laṅkā” by Mānaku in the light of the text from the Vālmīki Rāmayaṇa on the versos of the paintings. This allows significant conclusions about the intentions behind their production and the original extent of each set.

Among the uncertain Arabic coins in the British Museum are two dirhams of the years 361 and 363 a.h., which are described by Professor Stanley Lane-Poole (J.R.A.S., 1876, p. 295) as bearing the name of the Caliph al-Muṭī'lillah and of the sovereign (?) The mint place on one of the coins is illegible; that on the coin of 361 a.h. was identified by Dr. O. Codrington as “Rūbār,” and his collection contains a similar but more perfect specimen ; there is also one at Paris, in the Cabinet des Médailles, struck at Rūbār ; and one was published by Tornberg in the Rev. Num. Belge, 5th series, ii, 243. He read the mint Rūbār, and the name of usru āh's ancestor as adding that there was a dinar of the same type and mint in the collection of Baron Chaudoir, and that Millies possessed a dirham which he surmised to belong to the Dailamite dynasty of Wahsūdān.