The Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya sūtra is a religious document of the first importance. It carried Hiuen-tsiang through the Gobi desert, was reproduced, in writing, on stones, in recitation throughout Asia from Kabul to Nara, and formed one of the main inspirations of the Zen school, occupying in Buddhist mysticism about the same place the “Mystical Theology” of Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita occupied in Christian. Unlike other very short Prajñāpāramitā-sūtras, the Hṛdaya is of great philosophical interest. The Svalpākṣara, and other abbreviations, were designed to bring the benefits of Prajñāpāramitā within the reach of those unable either to study or understand it. The Hṛdaya alone can be said to have gone really to the heart of the doctrine. The historical analysis of its sources can contribute to the understanding of this sūtra, by restoring its component parts to their context in the larger Prajñāpāramitā sūtras.

The story of Imam Husain's martyrdom at Karbala has been told with variant emphases and interpretations in different historical contexts. This article examines one of the most famous modern tellings of this narrative: that of ‘Ali Naqi Naqvi, arguably South Asia's most influential Shi‘i mujtahid of the twentieth century. It argues that, from the 1930s–1940s, ‘Ali Naqi pioneered a novel perspective on Imam Husain, establishing him as a model for human comportment and a figure to be actively emulated, both by Shi‘as and by humanity at large. As well as having implications for transformation within Shi‘ism, this reorientation of Husain's significance pre-empted its politicisation: ‘Ali Naqi's message informed the incorporation of Shi‘i symbology within the 1942 Quit India agitation, and in some senses exhibited parallels with the later revolutionary rendering of the Karbala message in 1960s–1970s Iran. It is the range of the religious and political implications to be drawn from Ali Naqi's interpretation that have ensured both the durability, and ongoing controversy, of his Husainology.

The existence of poets in Arabia before the rise of Islam is certified by the Qur'an, which contains one Surah named after them, and occasionally alludes to them elsewhere. Among the descriptions of the Prophet given by his opponents there was “ a Jinn-ridden poet” (xxxvii, 35), to which he replies that he has brought the truth. In another passage (lii, 29) the suggestions that he was a kāhin, a jinn-ridden man, and a poet are offered as alternatives. Since those who described him as a poet said they would wait to see what would happen to him (lii, 30) it might be inferred that poets were in the habit of foretelling the future. Elsewhere he asserts that his language is not that of a poet, but rather of an honourable messenger (lxix, 41), and that God had not taught him poetry, which would have been of no use to him (xxxvi, 69); his utterances were “ statement and clear lesson ”, whence we should infer that poetry was obscure. These hints about the poets are summarized in the Surah that bears their name (xxvi, 224, foll.), where we are told that they are followed by the misguided, rave in every valley, and say what they do not do. The sequel might seem to except certain pious bards from this condemnation, but the style of the Qur'an renders it uncertain whether this exception really applies to bards.

The Mughal Empire is paradigmatic in many of its formulations, and it is epitomised in the persons of its first six padshahs or emperors. The Great Mughals, Grao Mogor, Grand Mogul, Großmogul or Groote Mogul, as the padshahs were known in Europe, have been considered as paragons of rulership. In critical appraisals, which were the prevailing view in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they were the quintessential Oriental despots, held up as a warning to those rulers in Europe with similar aspirations. One thinks here especially of Francois Bernier's letters of the Mughal court to his French contacts which included Colbert, the minister of Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715). In more sympathetic (and more recent) eyes, such as those of the world-traveller, philosopher and enthusiastic inter-culturalist Count Hermann Keyserling, who was in India in 1911, they were “the grandest rulers brought forth by mankind”. Keyserling came to this conclusion because the Mughals “combined in their personalities so many divers talents: they were men of action, refined diplomats, experienced judges of the human psyche, and at the same time aesthetes and dreamers”. He felt that such a “superior human synthesis” (grossartige Menscheitsynthese) had not shown itself in any European king. Here I discuss to what extent the emperor Jahangir fulfilled Francis Bacon's ideal of the perfect ruler.

[The Royal Asiatic Society having- determined to reprint occasionally papers which may be considered of interest, or may contain useful information, and which, although in print, are not generally procurable in this country, have been pleased to select in the present instance a translation made by me many years ago, and published anonymously in one of the periodical publications of the Calcutta press. At the time of its publication, the subject was entirely new. It has lost something of the gloss of novelty by the more comprehensive journals which have since appeared; but it still contains information regarding parts of Turkestan and Central Asia, which is not derivable from any better source, as the countries have not been visited in modern times by European travellers. In what has also ceased to be novel, the observations of the traveller are not without interest, as they relate to a political state of the countries traversed, which had undergone a change for the worse even when Izzet Ullah's steps were; followed by Moorcroft and Trebeck, and which has become still further deteriorated by the anarchy that has so long distracted Afghanistan. The journal of Izzet Ullah is in most places little more than a mere itinerary, and it is so far more serviceable to geography than to history; but he occasionally extends his notes so as to furnish materials for the latter.

India during the period of the Mughal dynasty (sixteenth-eighteenth centuries) is exceptionally well illuminated by a large body of historical literature, mainly in Persian. This literature followed the traditions of classical Persian historiography, the models of which like Yazdi's Zafarnama (a history of Timur) and Mir Khwand's Rauzatu's Safa (a history of the world), both written in the fifteenth century, were widely read in India. By its very volume, if nothing else, Mughal historiography has, however, to be studied and assessed separately. It may be recalled that when C. A. Storey made his great survey of Persian historical literature, works written on Indian history accounted for a major part of it providing 475 items, by authors (nos. 612–1087), as against 299 (nos. –611) concerned with Persia, and Central Asia and countries other than India. And among the works written in India those written in Mughal times again account for the overwhelming part.

In the late thirteenth century the openness and religious toleration of the Mongol Empire created unique conditions which encouraged European missionaries to venture into Asia. The Franciscans and Dominicans who answered the call to evangelize in territories under Tartar dominion enjoyed such success by the early fourteenth century that the papacy created archbishoprics and suffragan sees in Central Asia and China, and entertained dreams of new Christian communities aligned with the Roman Church. This paper focuses on a special set of circumstances which briefly encouraged those expectations. Western missionaries to the Mongols found influential Christian women, the mothers and consorts of rulers, at the courts of several khans. Because these Mongol queens played powerful political roles, their prayers and example might encourage the conversion of their people and those subject to them. Faithful wives of pagan rulers, in times long gone, had played a dynamic part in the conversion of husbands or sons, and of their realms, thus contributing to the spread of Christianity in Europe. Once again, at the close of the thirteenth century, hopes were voiced that pious women might perform a similar task in Asia.

At the beginning of the eighth century A.D. a new town was built in Palestine, called al- Ramla (Ramlah of today). It was founded by the then provincial governor, Sulaymān b. ‘Abd al-Malik (d. 717) in order to serve as the capital of Jund Filasṭīn, the southern province of Palestine. The building of a new town, and especially of a capital city, constituted a significant departure in the Palestine environment, for two main reasons. First, it was the first city to be founded after a period of 350 years, i.e., for most of the Byzantine epoch. Second, though the Muslims ruled the country for 1100 years, al-Ramla remained the sole example of a new town in the whole of Palestine.

The abstract concept of “the Silk Road” linking east and west shapes many popular narrative histories, encouraging readers to think dreamily of dazzling silks carried as luxury trade items on the backs of camels over sun-scorched sand dunes, and conveniently skirting more complex issues such as political, military, religious and cultural barriers. The actual mechanics of how any trading and other financial or economic transactions took place are seldom addressed, and references to money are few and far between.

There are many stories connected with the decipherment of ancient writings and the recovery of forgotten languages, but these stories need not be retold here. Furthermore, they usually deal only with the discovery of the key, that brief moment of insight when some datum is arrived at, which when inserted causes the rest of the puzzle to fall into place. But what we are interested in here is the tremendous amount of work, routine but necessary, which precedes that moment and makes the decipherment possible, and the even more tremendous amount of work which follows that moment and results in the recovery of the language.

1. In India, perhaps as much as in any linguistic area, we are faced with an extensive mixture of dialects from the earliest times. The conditions have seldom been such as make for the evolution of a number of sharply differentiated languages. Constant invasions, the movements of great armies, the attraction of vast crowds of pilgrims from distant parts to centres of religious worship, the far wanderings of innumerable ascetics, the influence on illiterate peoples of travelling bards, the absence in the great plains of the north at least of pronounced natural boundaries, the continual interplay of kingdom with kingdom, a district being now in this political area now in that—these conditions have all made for widespread borrowings in language, the extension of common linguistic changes over large areas and the formation of common mixed languages, of which modern Hindōstānī, spoken and understood in varying degree over the whole of northern and central India, is an excellent example.

In my article on “The Persian Manuscripts of the late Sir Albert Houtum-Schindler, K.C.I.E.”, published in the JRAS. of October, 1917, pp. 657–94, brief mention was made (on p. 672) of a book entitled Silsilatu'n-Nasdb-i-Ṣafawiyya, on the genealogy and history of the Ṣafawís. I can find no notice of another copy, and as the work is of considerable interest and importance, I think that a somewhat fuller account of its scope and contents may be acceptable to students of Persian history.

The language of the Kharosthi documents recovered from Chinese Turkestan by Sir Aurel Stein is in the main Prakrit, but contains a considerable amount of non-Indian material. Of this there are a number of Iranian words (under a score). The rest consists of about 1,000 proper names and about 150 words. The latter consist of titles, names of agricultural products, articles of dress, etc., for which no doubt there was no Indian term that exactly corresponded. We may take this as representing the native language of the Shan-Shan kingdom, as opposed to the Indian Prakrit which was used as the official language. Most of the documents come from the Niya site, which was an outpost of the kingdom bordering on Khotan. For the rest there are a few from Endere (= Sāca) and about forty from the Lou Lan area (666–707). Since the names in these latter are of the same type and often the same names, we may conclude that the population and their language was uniform throughout the whole kingdom.

The publication of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles's The History of Java in 1817 marked a new sophistication in the recording of British experiences of the island. Providing a depth of analysis and breadth of subject matter, Raffles's publication was not the fairly simplistic diaristic account of adventure and opinion that had characterised many earlier British publications on Southeast Asia, but a highly detailed, minutely observed and handsomely illustrated study.

Professor Turner, in his valuable articles on Gujarātī Phonology, refers to what he terms “ Spontaneous Nasalization ”. In regard to Gujarātī he says (JRAS., 1921, p. 344) “ there seems from the earliest times to have been a tendency to pronounce vowels with the velum incompletely raised, which results in the vowel becoming nasalized ”. Similarly, Professor Bloch (La Formation de la Langue Marathe, § 70) says “ Toute voyelle longue tend à développer une résonance nasale ” and he discusses this question at greater length in his article on “ La Nasalité en Indo-Aryan ” on pp. 61 ff. of the Cinquantenaire de l'École Pratique des Hautes Études.

There has been much debate about the origin of the Chakma tribe of the Chittagong Hill Tracts and the Muslim names of the Chakma chiefs of the 18th century have added to it. According to the Chakmas their ancestors were kshatriyas of north Indian origin, who invaded Arakan towards the end of the 14th century, settled there and intermarried with the local people. But there is no credible evidence to corroborate this story and all the modern writers on the subject consider it to be a myth. Hutchinson points out that the Indian kshatriya link was forged during Kalindi Rani's time in the 19th century when Hindu influence was at its highest in her court and the worship of Śiva and Kali crept into their ritual. The Chakmas are not the only Arakanese tribe to claim descent from the ancient warrior class of north India. The accepted idea amongst the Maghs is that their ancestors were kshatriya princes of Magadha. The Burmese are undoubtedly a Mongolian race; yet their traditions hark back to India and not to China. “Their chronicles read as if they were descended from Buddha's clansmen and lived in Upper India”.

This paper describes the results of a brief archaeological survey of Jazī;rat al-Hulayla, an island in the Emirate of Ra's al-Khayma, United Arab Emirates. The island was found to contain extensive evidence of occupation dating from the first three centuries A.D. until recent times.

The following Paper having been referred by the Council of the Royal Asiatic Society to Sir John Malcolm, for his opinion as to its eligibility for insertion in the Printed Transactions of the Society, was returned by that distinguished and lamented individual, with a Letter of which a copy is subjoined, and which will be found to point out, in a very satisfactory manner, the practical value of Mr. Edye's communication.

When the decisive battle of the Yarmuk in 636 AD gave the Muslim Arabs control of Syria, they gained a land that had been Roman for 700 years. Yet in the memory of most of its inhabitants, their recent subjection to the Sassanian Persians would have been fresh and even dominant. The forces of Chosroes II, which had controlled Syria for a generation, had only been withdrawn in 630. Anyone who had reached adulthood by the time the Arabs arrived had already experienced the Persian occupation; many were born or raised during it. This period of Persian rule, which lasted twenty years or more in Syria, Mesopotamia and Armenia, fifteen in Palestine and ten in Egypt, may have played a major role in accustoming the locals to non-Roman rule, or may have had violently disruptive effects that facilitated the subsequent Arab conquest. So far, the period has been poorly known and never studied as a whole, allowing many theories to be projected upon it. For the most part, historians and especially archaeologists have assigned to the Persians a highly negative and destructive role.

The paper discusses the questions of the alleged conversion of Arghun Aqa, the powerful Mongol governor of great parts of Western Asia in the mid-13th century, to Islam, claimed by the famous Armenian historian Kirakos. While in the end dismissing the historicity of this claim, the paper uses a variety of archaeological, numismatic, epigraphic and literary sources in order to highlight the great role the Islamic beliefs and identity of the surrounding Persianised society played in the continuous Islamic acculturation of Arghun Aqa and his family since the earliest phases of their presence in Iran.