Recent work among the Sippar Collections of the British Musuem has brought to light a number of interesting texts, among which is the fragment BM 63570. This text lists the qīpu's of numerous temples along with other officials, associating them all with bundles of reeds measured in hundreds. This is of unusual interest, however it is not the first time such a text has come to light as a similar fragment, BM 68777, was identified and published by the present author in 1993. Indeed, without a doubt the two pieces belong to the same tablet. BM 68777 is the beginning of the text, while BM 63570 carries on the obverse from this after a very small break and then gives some lines from the top of the reverse. The reverse of BM 68777 was uninscribed.

For most of the Islamic period central and southern Jordan has existed on the periphery of larger states. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the political and economic life of the Muslim and Frankish polities of Bilad al-Sham (Greater Syria) was dominated by cities like Damascus, Aleppo, Jerusalem and Acre. These urban centres contained the greatest concentrations of the military and civilian elite, and provided the largest markets for locally produced and imported commodities. Intellectual activity also prospered in such urban environments and, with few exceptions, it was the occupants of the cities of Bilad al-Sham who composed the histories of the Crusader states and the Ayyubid confederacy. These chronicles tend to reflect the interests of the ruling elites and generally pay rather less attention to rural areas. The lands between the Wadi Zarqa' and the Red Sea – populated as they were by villages and small market towns – excited little interest among historians, and only Karak and Shawbak merit relatively regular mentions in the chronicles of the period.

My purpose is twofold. We are to conjecture (a) how a preaching technique employed by St Paul comes to resonate with the Mahāyāna, and (b) that a conundrum in the solemn Mahānibbāna-sutta is Jewish, whence it reappears comically in Europe. Struck by these new oddities we ask at long last what can emerge from so many diverse parallels between Buddhist texts and their non-Buddhist counterparts. It is time those many threads were drawn together.

This, the second of our three articles on the role of the karguzar in the foreign relations of Iran, focuses on internal issues, and, in particular, the problems of security. Its main period of study is the years following the Constitutional Revolution during which Iran witnessed a gradual breakdown of social control resulting from severe government weakness. The Revolution, itself the product of financial fragility, led to the virtual bankruptcy of the country, despite the attempts of the Majlis at fiscal reform. Thus by 1910 the government did not have the means to enforce law and order. Problems of personal security placed considerable pressure on people at all levels of Iranian society. This article is, however, concerned with the experiences of the non-elite and the implications for them of financial crisis and weak government. These circumstances were also to have repercussions for Iran's relations with foreigners.

The reign of Sultan ‘Alā’ al-Dīn Kayqubād (1219-1237) is depicted by both mediaeval and modern sources as the apogee of the Saljūq Sultanate of Rūm (Anatolia) (c. 1081–1308). The later court historian, Ibn Bībī, reflected subsequent generations' perception of ‘Alā’ al-Dīn when he recorded that “the earth has never borne a king the like of him, nor have the high heavens looked down on such a one”. Above all, his reign was remembered for the great military conquests that unified much of Anatolia under Saljūq rule. To the north, south and east neighbouring principalities, both Muslim and Christian, were either annexed outright or reduced to tributary status in a series of memorable campaigns.

Bodily mutilations, such as nose-cutting, are recorded worldwide from different cultural settings. Hence the custom is not solely an example of “Oriental violence and cruelty” (at times quoted in Orientalist sources from the colonial period). I want to emphasise that I am not arguing from the vantage point of a colonial discourse with its criticism of “degenerate and barbaric” social customs. Instead, this paper deals with the human body as a symbol of society. It is particularly focused on the symbolic significance of nose-cutting and on understanding this violent impulse as a social practice. The underlying notion is that cultural categories, such as “honour” and “shame”, are encoded in body morphology and affect behaviour.

One of the most popular modern Korean folktales is Choi Tale Type 500, ‘The People Who Saw a Mirror for the First Time’. This tale however is neither a uniquely Korean nor East Asian tale, but an example of a general class of folktales found throughout the world. In the Aarne-Thompson Index it is classified as tale type 1336A, ‘Man does not Recognize his own Reflection in the Water (Mirror)’. The origins of the modern Korean tale may be traced back to the early years of the transmission and establishment of Buddhism in East Asia. The initial use of this tale in a Buddhist context, as a means to illustrate the illusionary nature of all things, had by the beginning of the twentieth century in Korea changed into providing a strong critique of certain features of contemporary society.

From the late nineteenth century until the hand-over of Macao to Chinese rule about one hundred years later, Russia and the Soviet Union demonstrated discernible, though far from overwhelming, interest in the tiny Portuguese territory of Macao. Their activities and involvement in the enclave served as an interesting contrast and coda to their more extensive dealings with the larger entities of British Hong Kong and even more problematic Taiwan. Both Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union had definite policies towards both Hong Kong and Taiwan; though policy emphasis altered dramatically over time, especially towards Hong Kong, both regimes sought to expand their trade with, and activities in, those territories. Soviet and Russian policies toward Macao were in some ways less consistent, circumscribed by the relative insignificance of the territory, and also for several decades from the 1920s onward by the implacable long-term hostility of the fascist Portuguese government toward Soviet Communism. Even so, the fact that first Russian and then Soviet foreign policymakers assigned some importance to Macao is amply demonstrated by the Foreign Ministry Archive, which contains nearly thirty files of varying size spanning the period from 1910 to 1987.

Continuing our theme of looking at foreign relations between Iran and Britain from the point of view of the popular level through the role of the karguzar (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Agent), this article will consider cases concerning foreign trade and disputes over property. It will examine the popular response to the growth of the foreign presence through expansion of foreign trade and the way Iranians handled their situation in a system that was dominated by Europeans. As trade grew in the late nineteenth century, so did the number and workload of karguzars.

Calcutta Botanic Garden occupies a prime riverside site three miles downstream from the centre of Calcutta. It is most famous as the home of the world's largest tree, a vast spreading banyan. Its grand avenues, named after its founders and the fathers of Indian botany, convey something of its former glory. In the nineteenth century it was the greatest of all the colonial botanic gardens and an important scientific institution; two of its superintendents were knighted and one went on to become Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the very centre of the imperial botanical network. The Garden is of considerable importance as it was one of the earliest institutions in India based on western science. This survey will look at the reasons for its foundation, and how it successfully established itself in its first twenty years.

“Fifty years ago, the name of Chin Peng was feared almost as much as Osama bin Laden is today”. So wrote the Hong Kong-based journalist, Philip Bowring, in 2003. Fifty years ago the British empire, in the view of Field Marshal Montgomery, was locked in a struggle “between the East and West, between Communism and Democracy, between evil and Christianity”. It was a time when Chin Peng was Britain's enemy number one in Southeast Asia. A measure of his importance is the size of the reward offered in May 1952 for his capture: M$250,000 was equivalent to first prize in the Social Welfare Lottery and a huge sum compared with the wage rates of Malayan workers. Chin Peng is Malaya's Ho Chi Minh, but a Ho Chih Minh manqué. Like Ho Chi Minh, Chin Peng was a communist who, having played a key part in local resistance to the Japanese occupation, led the struggle against the post-war restoration of European colonialism. Yet, whereas Ho Chi Minh established the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Chin Peng was thwarted in his attempt to create a socialist state in Malaya. Consequently, while the one became a national hero, the other has been cast out from the land of his birth and until recently has been without a voice in its history. The publication of his memoirs in 2003, however, enables us to reappraise Chin Peng's part in the achievement of Malayan independence.

The history of the regime of Democratic Kampuchea (DK) which ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 in the name of social revolution made on behalf of Cambodia's poor peasants has been researched and documented according to many sources. When the leaders of the counter-revolutionary Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation, spearheaded by a massive force of the People's Army of Vietnam, took back the capital, Phnom Penh, on 7 January 1979, they captured official documents, particularly the forced confessions of thousands of political prisoners, which threw light on the nature of the regime and its catastrophic course after victory in April 1975. Other contemporary sources included monitored radio broadcasts of the regime, the dossiers of Khmer Rouge defectors to Thailand compiled by the US State Department, and the rich vein of information provided to western scholars of Cambodian history by refugees in the Thai camps and in other countries which received them after 1979.

The Religious Life of Palmyra, By Ted Kaizer. (Oriens et Occidens 4), pp. 305, 7 pls. Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2002.

Palmyra (ancient Tadmor) is undoubtedly one of the most glamorous of Graeco-Roman cities in the Near East and probably the most visited of all historical sites in the modern Republic of Syria. It has long been recognised as a major centre of Semitic religious cults which flourished particularly when the city was politically within the orbis Romanus. Its semi-independent political status and its retention of Aramaic as a major day-to-day language of commerce and administration certainly helped to guarantee the continuation of its Semitic cultural traditions and religious life.

In his biography for the Avatamsaka master Fazang (643–712), Tang Tae Ch'ǒnboksa kosaju pǒn'gyǒng taedǒk Pǒpjang hwasang chǒn (Ch. Tang Da Jianfusi gu sizhu fanjing dade Fazang heshang zhuan) (Biography for Upādhyāya Fazang, the Late Bhadanta-translator and Abbot of Great Jianfusi of the Tang) composed ca. 904, the Korean author Ch'oe Ch'iwon (Ch. Cui Zhiyuan, 857–904) reports a ritual that Fazang performed to pray for snow in order to prevent an imminent drought. The ritual was executed in the winter of 711, barely one year before Fazang's death, beside a pond at the scenic mountain range fifty li west of Chang'an – Mount Zhongnan.

Research in Mahāyāna sūtras is a slow and painstaking process. Typically, it involves a careful study of multiple versions of individual texts, composed in different languages (Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan) as well as immersion in the voluminous but largely unchartered corpus of canonical literature preserved in the bKa' 'gyur and the Chinese ‘Tripiṭaka’. Years may easily go by without any noteworthy publication. Thus, when a new book appears, scholarly expectation tends to be high. Jan Nattier's study of the Ugrapariprcchā is no exception. Eagerly awaited among colleagues for its research on early Mahāyāna Buddhism – the Ugrapariprcchā is widely recognised to rank among the first Mahāyāna sūtras – Nattier's work promised to dispel at least some of the mist that continues to cloud this ill-understood period. Even though hers is not the first study and translation of the Ugrapariprcchā (Nancy Schuster wrote her PhD dissertation on this text, 1976), Nattier managed to produce a remarkable, original piece of scholarship that brims with thought-provoking ideas about the formation of the Mahāyāna, persuasive refutations of old-seated misconceptions, well-conceived approaches to textual interpretation and a competently crafted translation of the Chinese and Tibetan versions. In short, it is a book that needs to be taken seriously.