Some twenty years ago, Professor J. N. Banerjea identified a statue on the north gopura of the Naṭarāja temple at Cidambaram (Fig. I), hitherto considered to represent Agni, as Yajñapuruṣa, a minor manifestation of Viṣṇu. No other image of Yajñapuruṣa being known at the time, this was an important identification. It served, moreover, to call attention to the iconography of an extremely unusual figure as it possessed two heads (with their necks, rather than simply a pair of faces) and was directly derived, so Banerjea claimed, from a verse in the Ṛgveda.

At the beginning of June, 1803, a new phase opened in the relations of the British Company and the Marathas. It was symbolized by two events; the march northwards from Poona on 4th June of the detachment of East India Company troops commanded by Arthur Wellesley and the assembly near Malkapur on the 5th or 6th June of the armies of Daulat Eao Sindhia and the Raja of Berar. Since what was at stake, in diplomatic terms, was the contest of the British Company and Sindhia for overlordship of the Peshwa, it was appropriate that in military terms this should be expressed by the confrontation, not far from the capital city of the Maratha people, of the Company's army and what could be formed of an army of the Maratha Confederacy.

I am much indebted to the Royal Asiatic Society for having given me the opportunity to study three bronze plaques owned by it and also for having sent me excellent photographs of them.

RAS a = RÉS 3125; forgery after CIH 516/3–9.

Plaque:

11·35 cm. × 16·8; thickness: 0·35 cm. (top) and 0·45 (bottom).

Remarks on RÉS 3125: add a word divider before b in 1. 1 and at the end of 1. 8 omit the word divider at the end of the line.

The purpose of this article is two-fold: firstly, to illustrate by means, particularly, of two examples how far Thomas More based the Second Book of his masterpiece, Utopia, upon Indian, or more strictly, indological sources; and secondly to reintroduce to historians of India Iosephus Indus, “Joseph the Indian.”

Cambodia was a kingdom in which the English East India Company took only a limited and spasmodic interest in the seventeenth century so that little attention has been devoted to its activities there. References to the Company's Cambodian settlement in the 1650s have usually been erroneous or misleading. Dr. John Anderson made the first serious mistake when he wrote of an English factory in Cambodia between 1654 and 1659, and later English writers, particularly E. W. Hutchinson, have followed him. Dutch historians also have been affected: H. P. N. Muller, in his preface to De Oost-Indische Compagnie in Cambodja en Laos, cites Anderson as his authority for stating that in 1656 the Dutch Company bought the English factory established two years previously. As we shall see, servants of the English Company were sent to Cambodia from the presidency at Bantam in 1651 and withdrawn by order of the directors in 1656; the Englishmen in Cambodia after that date were private traders using the Company's name for their own ends. The episode now to be recounted was therefore an isolated incident with no long-term consequences, but with some intrinsic interest.

Antioch, under the government of the Crusades, for 200 years was ruled judicially by a series of assizes the original text of which remains lost.

In 1870 an Armenian scholar-priest, Father Hovhaness M'krian of Constantinople, published a letter in an Armenian periodical to which he added a few notes, stating that he had discovered an Armenian manuscript belonging to a Mr. Manoug Aslanian that contained various codices. This collection of religious and civil laws was copied in a.d. 1331 for the king of Armenians, Levon, son of Oshin. The scribe of this manuscript was the well-known Sarkis, surnamed Bidzag, who illuminated it and decorated it with a fullpage miniature in gold and colour, showing King Levon seated in court to pass judgment. In this law book was incorporated an Armenian translation of the Assizes of Antioch with seventeen articles about liege lords and serfs, and their rights as well as their obligations towards each other, and twenty-one assizes dealing with civilians. This manuscript was secured for the library of the Mekhitarists in Venice and is kept there now.

The establishment and consolidation of the British Empire in India occurred at a time of expanding interest and achievement in science in Europe. In India there was certainly an appreciation of the importance of this European science, for the growth of science education there in the early nineteenth century compares not unfavourably with that in England. But what kind of scientific interests and activities were to be found in India up to about 1850, and who were the men who pursued them ?