The subject of the Sanskrit poem called the Mahábhárata is well known to be the struggle for supremacy between two kindred and rival families, those of Pándu and Kuru. The event is in all probability historically true, and the circumstances related in the poem, however blended with fiction and coloured by mythology, are in many instances likely to be substantially authentic. It is, however, Jn the episodical portions with which the poem abounds, that information of a curious and no doubt, in the main, correct description, relating to the social and political state of India, at periods considerably anterior to the Christian æra, is to be found. The information, it is true, is of a mixed character, as might be expected in a professedly poetical composition, and in a work which has very possibly been from time to time corrupted by comparatively modern interpolation. Still there is much that wears the semblance of accuracy and antiquity, as in the instances which I propose to bring to the observation of the Society.

As late as 1920 it was believed that civilization on the Indian subcontinent dated back only to the time of Alexander's invasion in the 4th century b.c. and that everything before that was “dark”. This assumption was made in spite of the fact that literary evidence pointed to the contrary. However, in 1921 the “belief” received its first blow when Daya Ram Sahni discovered the site of Harappa; the second one came just a year later when R. D. Banerji discovered Mohenjo-daro. Subsequent excavations at these two sites and at another site called Chanhu-daro, respectively by M. S. Vats, John Marshall, and E. J. H. Mackay, brought to light fuller details of the civilization which encompassed the Indus valley in the 3rd millennium b.c. The more recent work at Amri, Damb Sadaat, Gumla, Jalilpur, Kalibangan, Kot Diji, Lothal, Sarai Khola, and Surkotda has added new dimensions to our knowledge of this civilization.

The recent recovery of the Revelation of St. Peter has again attracted attention to this branch of apocalyptic literature. Speculation has been rife as to the sources of that Revelation.

I intend publishing now, for the first time in English garb, the oldest extant Revelations which must have served as source to that of Peter, then to that of Paul, Ezra, Abraham, Isaiah, Virgin Mary, St. Macarius, and the host of others down to Dante and St. Patrick.

Durgā is a mighty Paurāṇic goddess; and of all the forms of Śiva's wife or Śakti she is the most popular and greatly honoured in the province of Bengal. It is in the province of Bengal only that her Pūjā (worship) is celebrated with great pomp and idol-exhibition. By ‘Pūjā’ the Anglo-Indian means now the Durgā-Pūjā festival of Bengal, during which all Government offices remain closed for one month. A new clay image of the goddess is made for the occasion, and it is enthroned on the sixth day of the light fortnight of the month Āśvina. She is worshipped during the three days next following, and is then immersed in water on the Daśamī day. These are all very widely known facts, but I mention them with a distinct purpose in view, as will be shown later on.

Among the Khotanese manuscripts from Tun-huang now in the Pelliot Collection at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, a fragment of a legend of Kaniṣka has been found. I transliterated these manuscripts during December, 1938, and January, 1939. In the roll numbered P 2787 there are 194 lines of Khotanese text. Lines 1–153 treat eloquently of the character and activities of the king of Khotan, called in line 50 śī kū śrrī vījītta sagrrāma and in line 82 śai-kū miḍā jasta śrrī vīśa' <sa> grrāma 'the noble lord, gracious god, Śrī Viśa' Sangrāma'. A second text in lines 154–194 contains the fragmentary legend of Kaṇaiska. and Aśagauṣa his kalyāṇamitra. The first three lines are written in the now familiar Gostanian Sanskrit, the Sanskrit of Khotan. These lines are then translated, with some variants, into Khotanese in which language the text continues.

When the Umayyad Caliphate in Spain succumbed to internal faction and weakness, the country was split up into independent kingdoms, ruled by the men who for one reason or another were able to take control. In the confused history of these “Party Kings” the Abbadids of Seville played a spectacular role. Their history is known from the admirable writings of Dozy, as is also the history of other families of this period. But the Banū dhī'n-Nūn or Dhunnunids are comparatively unknown. The article by Seybold in the Encyclopædia of Islam is very short, and the references are confined to Maqqarī. There is enough, however, in various writers to give here some account of the family through a dozen generations on the scale which their importance merits. More precise information is likely to be contained in unedited manuscripts, notably the Dhakhīrah of Ibn Bassām, and also in printed books which were not to hand. It is hoped that what may be found elsewhere will add to the present sketch, rather than correct it.

The personages described by the term Shahbandar, with such variations in orthography as Savendar, Sabinder, Xabendar, and the like, appear so frequently in the literature of the Eastern seas that it is desirable to arrive at a definite idea of the position which they occupied, and the functions which they discharged. The task is not, however, easy, for the ordinary Persian and Portuguese dictionaries are not very enlightening on this particular topic, while the discussion of the term in Hobson-Jobson is by no means exhaustive.

The present study aims to contribute to the quest for the origins of belief in the eschatological figure of the Sufyānī, a matter of hot debate since the late nineteenth century. To this end, three different bodies of evidence are produced and analysed: reports indicating that the Sufyānī was, indeed, thought of as a redemptive personality in some Syrian quarters, traditions on him in the Muslim endtimes literature that contain an ex eventu pronouncement, and reports concerning the propaganda activities of the first Sufyānī claimant, Abū Muḥammad Ziyād ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Yazīd “al-Sufyānī”, in the historical record. Making use of hitherto unavailable sources and looking afresh at the previously studied sources, it is argued that the myth of the Sufyānī emerged during the counterrevolutionary revolt of Abū Muḥammad al-Sufyānī in 132 ah, with vague residues of it traceable to his earlier military activities, against the Umayyad caliph Yazīd III, in 126 ah.

This article studies the political and symbolic importance of elephants for medieval Muslim kingship in South Asia. Specifically, the incorporation of the elephant by the Ghaznavid dynasty led to a crisis of sovereignty for early Muslim kings of South Asia. This was because while the elephant stood for divinity and sovereignty among Hindus, it represented satanic pride among Muslims. The famous Koranic chapter of “the elephant”, tells the story of a king Abraha who had tried to destroy the House of God in Arabia (the Ka‘ba) with elephants, but it was said that God pelted his army to death by small pebbles thrown by birds. This meant that any Indo-Muslim ruler that posed as an elephant-master could appear as the destroyer of the house of God in the eyes of his Muslim subjects. In order to compensate for this crisis, early Indo-Muslim rulers employed a number of tactics, which included trying to present themselves as the opposite, i.e. destroyer of pagan temples for which they are infamous today. But perhaps more significantly, the continued symbolic (and not just practical) use of the elephant, in spite of its problematic association, shows that what is often today understood as an alien institution imposed upon a majority non-Muslim population, was actually the opposite: that is, it was mainly a project equally pitched to non-Muslim South Asians with a compensatory nudge toward Muslims.

Robert Morrison (1782–1834; Chinese name: Maˇ Liˇxùn) was the London Missionary Society's first representative in China and is generally viewed as the father of Protestant missionary work there. Modern scholarly interest in him has in the main focused on his role as a Bible translator (see, for example, Zetzsche 1999, especially Chapter 2). As part of his missionary activities, Morrison studied both written and spoken Chinese; and these researches yielded grammars of both Mandarin (i.e. Guānhuà “the language of the mandarins or officials”; Morrison, 1815) and Cantonese (1815: appendix, pp. 259–280), plus a major dictionary of written Chinese (1815–1823) and a smaller lexicon of Cantonese (1828). In order to transcribe spoken Chinese, Morrison developed romanisations for both Mandarin and Cantonese. These orthographic systems shed light on the pronunciation of the underlying languages as they were spoken two hundred years ago. The purpose of the present paper is to examine Morrison's romanisation of Mandarin for clues about the pronunciation of early nineteenth-century standard Chinese.

In recent years some admirable attempts have been made to offer a connected story of the development of the science of archaeology in various parts of the world in the last hundred years or so. No comparable account is available of its development in India. Archaeology developed in Denmark, in the Aegean, in Egypt and in Cranborne Chase — as it were, so many laboratories in which the methods and techniques of the new discipline were perfected. The question naturally arises in the mind as to why these methods did not grow in India, where literally hundreds of sites were at the archaeologists' disposal. What circumstances prevailed in the Indian archaeological scene to account for the remarkable delay in introducing developed concepts and techniques? To answer this question we must examine the phase when archaeology in India was dominated by Cunningham and Burgess.

Over forty years ago a number of bricks, inscribed with Buddhist sūtras, were discovered in an underground chamber at Gopālpur in the Gorakhpur district of the United Provinces by men ransacking the site for building materials. Four of these came into the possession of Dr. Hoey and Mr. Vincent Smith, who published an account of the find with a transcription of one of the bricks in Proc. ASB., 1896, July, pp. 99–103, but there is reason to believe that a number more remained in the hands of the villagers or were built into an indigo vat by the local zamindar. No further steps were taken for publication of the texts, though references to them have been made occasionally since; and the bricks themselves were lost sight of. On taking over recently at the Indian Institute in Oxford, I noticed in one of the cases of the small Museum attached to it several inscribed bricks, which on examination were found to be the missing ones, Mrs. Hoernle having presented them some fifteen years ago. They were still largely encrusted with mortar, which made the reading of many characters difficult, but Mr. Rickard of the Ashmolean Museum proved equal to removing these deposits and to rendering them as legible as on the day they were inscribed, except for certain fractures. As the contents are of considerable interest to Buddhist scholars, I publish a transcription of the unpublished portion here, and for the benefit of those interested in palæography I adjoin photographs of IIa, IIIb, and IVa; it is not necessary to reproduce them in their entirety, as the writing on all the bricks is of the same kind and the repetitions in the matter are such that the portions not illustrated contain hardly any characters of which typical specimens are not available on the plates.

This study adopts an osmotic ethnography in order to decolonise the museum as an intellectual institution that was born in the West and informed by a logic of command (arkheion). As in the biological process of osmosis, characterised by an equilibrium between the inner and the outer that shapes its own distinctiveness through its symbiosis, the museum constitutes itself as a space intertwined with external reality. This is particularly true in the case of South Asian museum artefacts: because of the concept of darśan (the sensuous relationship between the worshipper and the deity's material embodiment) curators have faced the challenge of coming to terms with visitors’ responses, from colonial to post-colonial times. A direct consequence of this challenge is represented by the reconstructions of religious spaces—shrines, altars, temples—that should evoke the so-called “original context” and be in consonance with local forms of material engagement.

By adopting eco-phenomenology as its methodological framework, this article examines colonial sources, in particular the works of Thomas Hendley (1847–1917) and Fanny Parks (1794–1875), and compares them to the ethnographic fieldwork undertaken by the author at the Oriental Museum of the University of Durham in November 2014, as part of doctoral research.

Coinciding with the May Fourth new cultural and literary movement, the publication of the Mandarin Union Version, the vernacular Chinese translation of the Bible, in 1919 had a profound impact on the formation of modern Chinese literature. This paper examines the ways in which the Union Version provided a novel source of imageries, poetic genres and worldviews for the experimentation of modern Chinese poetry during the Republican period, particularly between the 1920s and 1940s. Revering the Bible as the Holy Scripture, young Christian poetess Bing Xin (1900–99) spontaneously expressed her religious sentiments and commitment by composing a series of “sacred poems” as her own poetic response to the striking beauty of biblical images. Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), a renowned May Fourth Chinese writer and intellectual, regarded the Bible as a treasured anthology of Jewish literature and appreciated the humanistic values embodied in the teachings of Jesus. Placing the biblical references of the wilderness, Jesus's universal love and Moses's legalistic position in the forefront, Zhou Zuoren's poem “Qilu,” or “Crossroads,” captured the perplexity of his contemporary intellectuals, Zhou himself included, in their sabbathless search for cultural rejuvenation and national salvation during the transitional and tumultuous Republican era. An ardent admirer of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, Chinese modernist poet Mu Dan (1918–77) studied their poetry at the Southwest United University in Kunming during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45). Imbued with biblical allusions, for instance, the fall of humankind and the loss of paradise, Mu Dan's poems, like “She de youhuo,” or “The Temptation of the Serpent,” articulate his penetrating critique of modernity. These works of poetry represent the multiple voices and diverse reactions of the early twentieth-century Chinese poets towards the Union Version which had not only firmly established its canonical status as the predominant Chinese translation of the Bible used by the Protestant Church, but also emerged as a literary tour-de-force to propel the evolution of modern Chinese poetry.

The association of Alexander the Great with the Mongols begins with the identification of the latter with the peoples of Gog and Magog. The evolution of this legend, which has its origin in the Book of Genesis, is curious in the extreme. In Genesis Magog is mentioned as one of the sons of Japhet, his name occurring between those of Gomer and Madai. Since Madai is clearly intended as the eponym of the Medes and Gomer has been located in Cappadocia and Phrygia it has been plausibly suggested that Magog at this stage corresponded to the territory in between, i.e. the region immediately south of the Caucasus in Eastern and Northern Armenia. In Ezekiel we hear for the first time of Gog “of the land of Magog”, who will come from his place out of the uttermost parts of the north, he and many peoples with him, “all of them riding on horses, a great company and a mighty army.” It will be seen that the “land of Magog” can no longer be located south of the Caucasus, and indeed Ezekiel's prophecy of the invasion of Gog has been interpreted as an echo of the invasions of the Cimmerians, who came southwards from the steppes through the Darial pass towards the end of the eighth century B.C.; or more probably of the invasion of the Scythians which took place in the following century by way of Darband. Finally we are told in Revelation that “when the thousand years are finished, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall come forth to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to the war; the number of whom is as the sand of the sea”.

It is only to be expected, while the ancient literature of Buddhist philosophy is inaccessible to the general critic, and still to some extent also to the Indianist, that many hasty generalizations and one-sided conclusions concerning the nature of Buddhist ideals and discipline should continue to prevail. Enough, however, has already been accomplished in the editing of texts to render some revision of what may be called common errors not altogether premature. There is, for instance, much that is misleading, or downright false, in labelling Gotama's doctrine as Pessimism, Pantheism, Atheism, Nihilism, Quietism, or Apatheia. Nor is that recent criticism altogether discriminating which finds in it the closest coincidences with that of Schopenhauer, or characterizes it bluntly as an ethic rooted in egoism, or as “the crassest eudaemonism,” and aspiring to moral stultification.

This article establishes that the tümens which took part in Jebe and Sübedei's Raid to Europe were not merely conducting a reconnaissance mission, as it is usually described. The campaign was part of Chinggis Khan's conquering strategy aimed at the complete subjugation of the Kipchak and the conquest of the steppe territories not only in Asia but also in Europe. The task of implementing this strategic plan was given to Prince Jochi as the ruler of the western ulus of the Mongol Empire. Jochi was to bring his main military force to Europe while Sübedei, together with Jebe, advanced with their corps to defeat the Kipchak. The Grand Prince of Kiev and other princes of Southern Rus’, being allies and relatives of the Kipchak rulers, gave them military support. Therefore, the Mongols retaliated against the Rus’. After defeating the allied Rus’ and Kipchak forces at the Kalka River, the Mongols succeeded in crossing the Dnieper and went as far as Kiev. However, the refusal of Jochi to bring his main forces to assist the Mongol vanguard forces nullified the achievements and victories of Jebe and Sübedei. Jochi's reluctance to participate in the Western Campaign of 1221–23 was related to his conflicts with his younger brothers and Chinggis Khan himself, which, in its turn, brought about Jochi's loss of his former status in the empire, a severe illness and untimely death. As a result, Chinggis Khan had to reconsider his general conquest strategy; the conquest of Kipchak and Rus’ was postponed for one and a half decades.