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.

In 1405 Sino–Iranian relations hit a nadir. Tīmūr (1336?–1405), never one to bother with the niceties of diplomacy, had detained and executed Chinese ambassadors sent to his court by the Ming emperors Hung-wu (r. 1368–98) and Yung-lo (r. 1403–24) in 1395, 1402 and 1403, had amused himself by regularly insulting Emperor Hung-wu, publicly calling him the “Pig Emperor”, and had finally decided to invade China to claim it for himself and Islam. Fortunately, for all concerned, Tīmūr drank himself into a stupor on the night of 18 February 1405 and expired at his base camp at Utrār where his troops were assembling for their march to China. The Chinese campaign was immediately abandoned as succession suddenly became a more pressing matter. It would continue to occupy Timurid energies until 1411 when Tīmūr's fourth son, Shāhrukh (1377–1447) gained control of the empire.

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.

If I, first of all, may express my gratitude to the Royal Asiatic Society for its decision to institute this lecture in memory of Paul Demiéville, please believe that this is more than a ritual gesture. He, indeed, was a person to be remembered both as a man and as a scholar. I shall not speak about his human qualities, for it is impossible to do justice to them in a few words. As a scholar, he was a man of astonishing breadth of vision, as is shown by the many different fields which he covered: Chinese philosophy, Chinese literature; historiography; Sino-Indian studies; the history of Chinese Buddhism, to mention only his main fields of interest, all of which were based on a truly stupendous erudition. For in his case breadth was always combined with depth, accuracy, and utter reliability; with the patient and painstaking labour of philology. Needless to say that, faced with the task of giving a lecture that bears his name, I feel both honoured and embarrassed, for I know that I, at best, can only do justice to one of the fields he covered, the study of Chinese Buddhism – an area in which he made bis most outstanding contributions. It is true that in doing so he worked in line with a great tradition in French sinology, alive ever since the heroic times of Stanislas Julien, that had also been carried on by his teacher Édouard Chavannes and his elder colleagues Paul Pelliot and Henri Maspero. However, it remains true that, also in this field, no other scholar has equalled Paul Demiéville in scope and depth, for his studies cover almost the whole field, from the earliest treatises on dhyāna to late Chinese Buddhist iconography; from the most sophisticated products of Buddhist philosophy to popular Buddhist literature, and from the most rational type of scholasticism to the utter irrationality of those early Ch‘an masters that were so dear to him. His works constitute a vantage-point from which we can overlook the field, and plan future inroads; and if to-day we see some new perspectives, we can only do so by standing on his shoulders.

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 article applies a synthetic approach of philological, religious, philosophical, and cultural studies to explore the original meaning of the terms dao 道 and de 德, two primary concepts in traditional Chinese intellectual history. Through an etymological analysis of the characters dao and de, and supported by both received and discovered texts and materials, this article demonstrates that dao originally represented the spirit of the Pole Star/High God and the movement of Heaven, and de, in relation to dao, originally represented the impartial virtue and power of Heaven. In terms of this new interpretation, the article further discusses the signification of dao and de in the Laozi to uncover the mystic aspects of the text.

This essay is concerned with the career of a somewhat obscure figure in the early history of Orientalism, Colonel Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier, who is however known both to aficionados of the early European manuscript collections in the West, as well as to historians of the more obscure aspects of the Enlightenment on the Continent. The occasion for the research on which this essay is based is, in large measure, a project intended to translate the extensive Persian letter-book that Polier (together with his amanuensis, or munshī, Kishan Sahay) produced during his long stay in India; this translation, of a text entitled I jāz-i-Arsalānī (which is preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris), has recently been brought to partial fruition by Muzaffar Alam and Seema Alavi, through the auspices of Oxford University Press (Delhi). In this context, it may be useful to reflect somewhat on the rather extraordinary career, and fascinating milieu, of Colonel Polier.

To facilitate & promote all enquiries which may be calculated to enlarge the boundaries of General Science is a Duty imposed on the British Government in India by its present exalted situation & the discharge of that Duty is in a more especial manner required from us when any material addition can be made to the Public Stock of useful knowledge without involving considerable expence.… [T]his desirable object will never be attained unless it shall be made the Duty of some Public Officer properly qualified for this Service to collect information & to digest & publish the results of his researches.

In many parts of the world there exist social relations between a man and his mother's brother which are in many ways closer than those between the man and his own father. Often these are associated with the condition of society best known as mother-right, in which the child belongs to the social division of his mother and her brother, to whom may fall the chief or sole direction of the life of the child. In other cases a similar close relation is found between maternal uncle and nephew when descent is no longer counted in the female line, and there is definite evidence1 that in some cases this relation is a survival of a previously existing condition of matrilineal descent.

The treatise of Jāḥiẓ, of which a translation is given in the following pages, was published at Leyden in 1903 by Brill. The editor was Van Vloten. But he died before completing the work; it was continued and sent to the press by de Goeje. Since then another edition has appeared at Cairo from the “Maẓba'a al-Taqaddum” by Muḥammad Effendi al-Sāsy al-Maghriby. I have used the Cairene edition for my translation. In the Leyden edition there are two other opuscula (rasā'il) besides the one translated here, namely those entitled “The Boast of Black People over White” and “The forming of Squares and Circles”. In the Cairene edition there are eleven rasā'il in all, including the three of the Leyden edition, the titles of the remainder being as follows:—

The Envious Man and the Object of his Envy.

The Superiority of Speech to Silence.

The Praise of Merchants and the Blame of the Work of Government. Love and Women. Keeping One's Promise.

Exposition of the Practices of the “Faction”. Gradations of the Competent.

“If all you have to tell us is that one barbarian succeeded another barbarian on the banks of the Oxus or Jaxartes, what benefit have you conferred on the public?” Voltaire's question is an awkward one for anyone investigating the transmission and distribution of power in the XVth century Circassian Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria. Even so the question of factionalism and its role in succession crises and other crises in the history of the Islamic lands has to be tackled, for surely the prevalence of factions in the Near East and our lack of understanding of them does add a certain patina of dullness to much of Islamic history. Faction succeeds to faction as “Amurath to Amurath”, and though Macaulay could find the history of England and its latter part, the struggle of Whig and Tory, to be “emphatically the history of progress”, few people have felt similarly confident about the struggle of Ẓāhirī and Manṣūrī factions in medieval Egypt. It is hard to understand past events without imposing a pattern, and at the political level the gyrations of Egyptian factions do not lend themselves easily to the imposition of pattern.

Sidkeong Namgyal Tulku was a colourful figure in the history of Sikkim. This crown prince was an incarnated lama as well as a student at Oxford, and a member of the Royal Asiatic Society. This article considers the various roles of Sidkeong Tulku in the light of a Tibetan work by his hand, which has been previously not connected to his person. Written in 1909, it consists of ‘monastic guidelines’ (bCa’ yig) which are a clear witness to the time and circumstances they were written in. This traditionally framed work, authored by a supposed Buddhist modernist, addresses the education of monks, monastic economy, sex, and preaching to the laity. These guidelines shed light on the changing status of the monastery in Sikkim, in the midst of reforms and threats to Sikkimese sovereignty. In this article I examine the contents of these guidelines in the context of its author's eventful but short life, against the political, religious and social backdrop of a Buddhist kingdom in turmoil.

As is well known, Hülegü, Chinggis Khan's grandson and the founder of the Ilkhanate (r. 658–664/1260-65), never converted to Islam. Moreover, as the man who annihilated the Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258), that had led the Islamic umma for more than half a millennium, Hülegü was often portrayed—albeit mainly outside his realm—as one of the great destroyers of Islam. Yet around the mid-seventh/fourteenth century we find at least two different conversion stories relating to Hülegü in both Ilkhanid and Mamluk sources, both allegedly originating in Baghdad. This paper aims to present these narratives and analyse their origin and use in the context of the later or post-Ilkhanate period. I may say already at this stage that I have more questions than answers, and that my explanations as to why such stories were invented are rather speculative.

Professor Langdon has pointed out to me that the Assyrian text published in Ebeling, KAR., No. 360, bears a close resemblance, alike in diction and in subject-matter, to Lehmann, Šamaššumukin, Taff. xxxvii f., edited in Streck, Assurbanipal, ii, 264–8, and it is almost certain that we have here two different but relạted accounts of the return of the god Marduk to Babylon with Shamashshumukin, in 668 B.C. In the following interpretation of KAR. 360, I am again very greatly indebted to Professor Langdon.

Patronage by the royal court of religious institutions and foundations is one of the hallmarks of the development of India under the rule of the Gupta and Vākāṭaka kings (4th–5th centuries). This patronage was extended also to religious movements other than the king's own persuasion. The evolving culture of religious tolerance and enthusiasm is apparent in the temple monuments of the time. In this article we focus on four archeological sites where these developments become best visible: Udayagiri, Māṇḍhaḷ, Rāmagiri (Ramtek), and Mansar. The close relationship of the Gupta and Vākāṭaka realms is investigated in its local settings. Renewed attention is given to the ‘Mandhal Inscription, Year 5’ of the Vākāṭaka king Rudrasena II and the deity on whose authority the charter was issued: Muṇḍasvāmin. It is argued that the name Muṇḍa refers to no one else than the Gupta queen of Rudrasena II, Prabhāvatī Guptā. During the last decade, excavations in Mansar (5 km west of Ramtek) have brought to light the state sanctuary of the youngest son of Prabhāvatī, Pravarasena II. The findings there are placed within the tradition that can be traced back, through Rāmagiri and Māṇḍhaḷ, to the religious foundations in Udayagiri.

It is a great honour for me to be asked to give the Richard Barnett memorial lecture. I knew Richard Barnett well, and had the privilege of working with him at the British Museum for three years before his retirement. He was a great source of inspiration, and I and many others owe him a considerable debt of gratitude. I have chosen as my subject recent British Museum excavations in Assyria, partly because I believe this would have been of some slight interest to Dr Barnett. Both the British Museum and Assyria were close to his heart. He worked in the Museum for more than 40 years, and from 1955 to 1974 was Keeper of the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities. Throughout this time Assyria was a special interest, and Dr Barnett did some of his most important work on Nimrud ivories, the Assyrian reliefs and the Balawat Gates. Inevitably, the role of the British Museum in making these pioneering discoveries in the nineteenth century held a particular fascination for him.

The history of early settlement of the East African coast is currently interpreted in widely differing ways. One view takes as its premise the idea that the coast was first colonized from Asia. This hypothesis, which has its roots in the work of XlXth century historians suggests that there was substantial settlement by non-Africans who established trading and religious communities. These colonies formed the basis of what has come to be known as the Swahili Culture. At first defensible peninsulas and offshore islands were chosen as safe refuges from the African tribes of the interior. Eventually contact was established between these new communities and the African coastal peoples, to the benefit of both parties. Raw materials were obtained from the hinterland of these trading outposts, which were traded and taken across the Western Indian Ocean on the seasonal monsoons. The foreign merchants married local African women and an Afro-Arab culture developed, building stone towns, mosques, and tombs, that still remain today along the coastline from Somalia to Mozambique.

Robert Orme is probably now chiefly remembered as the author of the History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan. First published in 1763 and 1778, the History was widely admired in its time. Since then, however, Orme has been steadily displaced by later historians from James Mill onwards. The result is that today he is hardly read at all. The purpose of this article is to rescue Robert Orme from the anonymity to which he has been relegated.