For more than three and a half centuries the Bodleian Library at Oxford has possessed three palm-leaf MSS originating from Java, probably the earliest of their kind to be included in a Western public collection. They bear the shelfmarks MS.Jav.b.l (R), MS.Jav.b.2 (R), and MS.Jav.b.3 (R), for which I shall use the numbers 1, 2, and 3 here for convenience sake.

In the relevant published literature, to be referred to below, there exists some uncertainty, not about the identity of the two persons who donated these MSS, but about the question of which of them gave which one. This is true explicitly for MS. no. 3, and by implication for the others. When first examining this MS, I was informed by the then Keeper of Oriental Books that it “was a 17th century gift, either by Andrew James in 1627, or by the Earl of Pembroke in 1629, more probably the latter”. This dual possibility was subsequently adopted in publications about this MS. Only a recent examination of the pertinent data, both published and unpublished, has shown that they do allow of a definite conclusion being reached, as will be demonstrated below.2

Whilst engaged as a Research Student on “Mediaeval Arabian Musical Theory ” at Glasgow University, I had the good fortune to have access to several libraries, and among them the Bodleian, where I compiled for my needs a short but detailed catalogue of the Arabic musical MSS. in this famous library. As this catalogue may be of use to orientalists and musical antiquaries, I take this opportunity of giving it publicity.

Tirāhī is a Dardic language of which, till now, hardly anything has been known. Our only materials have been the contents of a short vocabulary compiled by Leech in the year 1838. According to him, its speakers once inhabited the Tirāh country, now the home of the Afrīdi Pathāns, and, in consequence of a feud breaking out between the Ōrakzāīs and the Afrīdīs, they left that tract and settled in the Ningrahār country in independent Afghānistān, where they are now found.

There are more views and opinions about the nature and character of the vidátha than the number of scholars who have worked on the subject. That the sources are open to different interpretations is obvious from the divergent views held about the origin, development and functions of the sabh (council) and sámiti (assembly), the chief political institutions of Vedic India. The Vedic literature provides numerous vague references to the vidátha. In the Ṛg Veda alone at least 97 verses refer to it, while the Atharva Veda mentions it in about 20 hymns. The Vājasaneyī Saṁhitā, the Brāhmaṇas and the Ṯaittirīya Āraṇyaka also contain references to the vidátha. Most of the evidence, however, is provided by the Ṛg Vedic hymns, and references to this institution are fewer in the later compositions of Vedic literature.

The recent discovery of a comparatively large collection of inscribed wooden and bamboo strips in north-west China has aroused considerable interest on the part of Chinese scholars, as the material concerns both the extension of the Han government and the early methods of textual compilation in China. As the material finds are not available for inspection, the following notes can be no more than a summary of the information given in the few Chinese articles that have been published on the subject.

The original home of the founders of the royal dynasties of the Hittites was the country of Kussar. It was of Kussar and Kussar only that Khattusilis, the ancestor of Subbi-luliuwas, the founder of the second dynasty, was king (KB. iii, p. 30); so, too, was “the lord” Labarnas or Tabarnas, the founder of the first dynasty (c. 1900 b.c.). From his death-bed in the city of Kussar Khattusilis I issued his last testament to his son and successor Mursilis I, and the only territorial title of the unnamed “great king” in whom Dr. Forrer is probably right in seeing Mursilis I is “king of Kussari”. The state records carefully preserved the annals of a still earlier monarch, Anittas “king of Kussara”, who describes in them his conquest of the Hittite-land.

[The following fragments were found among the papers of the late R. C. Childers. When his last illness overtook him, he was known to have been engaged for some time on a comprehensive handbook of the Pali language. Before, however, he had far proceeded with the elaboration of the greater work, he proposed to bring out an elementary grammar first, to meet the pressing want of intending students of that language. After his death, it was hoped that some other Pali scholar would be found willing to complete the work in either form from the materials collected by Mr. Childers: and with this view these were submitted to Prof. Pischel at Kiel. But as this gentleman has since expressed his intention of publishing a grammar on a plan of his own, it is thought that the following two fragments may, even as such, be of interest to Pali students. Each of them treats of the Sandhi rules, and is complete in itself. But while the former, intended for the shorter work, was left ready for the press, the latter, intended for the larger, had not yet received the benefit of the gifted author's revision.—R. R.]

It is at a relatively late date that the writing of history begins in the Arabic literature. The Arabs of the earliest period of Islām seem to lack all historical sense, and their theologians proved entirely hostile to historical studies. The impetus towards such investigations was not given until the second half of the second century A.H., when, under the ‘Abbāsides, the Arabs came into close touch with the Sāsānides, whose political ideas and civilization were accepted by the caliphs of Baghdād. Persian customs, Persian knowledge pervaded the empire and brought forth one of the most remarkable phenomena of history: the subjugation of the conqueror by the conquered, possessed of higher intellectual gifts.

This article focuses on the relationship between property developers and architects in colonial Hong Kong in the 1920s to 1930s, identifying a successful collaboration within the architectural development company, the Crédit Foncier d'Extrême-Orient (CFEO). Benefiting from new plots of land made available on the Kowloon Peninsula and the opportunity to plan new neighbourhoods for both Western and Chinese clientele, the directors of CFEO negotiated with their in-house architects regarding land speculation and residential typology preferences while targeting the middle-class market. The company's demolished buildings left a crucial gap in the urban history of Hong Kong and China's treaty ports only recently uncovered through archival research by the author. Drawing upon in-depth primary data research and interviews with the architects’ descendants, this article probes into early twentieth-century residential development in Hong Kong, revealing how certain Western entrepreneurs and architects experimented with unique adaptations of architectural typologies suited to the local environment in the Chinese urban landscape.

Ancient tombs and hoards across the Eurasian steppe call for a thorough revision of art-historical categories associated with pastoral societies from Mongolia to Crimea. This study focuses on one such category. “Animal style” is an umbrella term traditionally used to categorise portable precious metalwork ornamented with dynamic scenes of vigorous animal fights and entwined zoomorphic designs. With its emphasis on irregular animal anatomies and deeply rooted in a “pars-pro-toto” mode of expression, steppe imagery of fantastic fauna presents a useful case study in broader investigations of composites in the ancient world and their diffusion across cultural spheres. This study views beasts through a binary lens, the structured monsters of Greco-Roman thinkers and the organic composites of nomadic steppe artisans. In the Western canon, “composites” existed within a politically-manufactured framework of governable “otherness”, in which fantastic fauna conveys a certain tension with the exotic, unknown and uncontrollable East. Meanwhile, in the visual rhetoric of steppe artisans, monsters represented a tension with the (cyclical) shifts occurring in one's biota rather than the tumultuous events in one's constructed environment. This paper explores how the contrasting steppe pastoralist and sedentary imperial world-views came to define the various functions and meanings of “composites” in Eurasian Antiquity.

This article examines the different mechanisms of the circulation of Chinese ceramics in the Middle East during the Abbasid-Chinese ceramic exchange during the eighth–tenth centuries ce. Although trade has been used conveniently to denote the circulation of Chinese wares in the Abbasid Caliphate, it is not the only mechanism that existed. There were also other possible processes of circulation, such as ceramics sent as tributes, diplomatic gifts, and samples, and secondary distribution through looting and pilgrimage. Not all Chinese wares shipped to the Middle East were luxury goods. Different types of Chinese wares had different functions and commercial and aesthetic values in the Middle East. It is an oversimplification to describe the circulation of Chinese wares in the Middle East as merely the result of the luxury goods trade.

The Geography of Mesopotamia during the epoch, of the Baghdād Caliphate has not, I think, received the attention which the subject deserves. With the exception of the small maps found in the Spruner-Menke Atlas, I believe no detailed description or delineation of the country at this date has been attempted. Yet it must be admitted that the history of the Abbasids is almost incomprehensible without such an aid; for the physical and political condition of the country was not then what it is now, as a glance at the accompanying map will show.

The main scheme of creation in Zoroastrian Pahlavi literature is adopted from the Young Avesta. In this scheme Ohrmazd creates the world in the manner of a skillful craftsman who conceives of the form of his product and then fashions it in matter. The number of the constituents of the world and the sequence in which they are created are already fixed in the Avesta. Pahlavi authors draw on Greek philosophical tradition to rationalise their account of the creation of the world. The article also explores some of the complications that their philosophical elaboration of the Avestan scheme occasions.

The Islamic laws pertaining to mustḥāḍa—women who have dysfunctional uterine bleeding (istiḥāḍa)—have been overlooked in the research literature. This article reopens the research discourse on this topic by discussing two related questions: may a mustḥāḍa perform religious obligations and may she have sexual intercourse? The questions are shown to be somewhat related. It is found that jurists conceded the right of a mustḥāḍa to pray but disagreed about why—implying, contrary to previous scholarship, that Islam accommodates different levels of ritual impurity—and that they held divergent views on her having intercourse. By probing and investigating Islamic legal sources, it is shown that research assertions about istiḥāḍa thus far require circumscription and re-examination.