Through the generous benefaction of Professor Denis Sinor, sometime Honorary Secretary of the Society, a new Society medal has been inaugurated to honour major scholarship on an Inner Asian subject. The field of eligibility has been spiritedly defined as “from Tehran to Tun Huang”, and the award is to be made every three years, for the first time in 1993.

Not everyone will agree with the view that the Pilgrimage is Burton's “outstanding contribution to travel literature”. What is beyond dispute is the unique place it occupies among his writings. Conscious of the significant part it played in her husband's life and career, Lady Burton placed it at the head of the Memorial edition of his works. “Although he has been the author of some eighty books and pamphlets”, she wrote, “I think that this original edition of three volumes is the one that his name should live by…” Just over thirty years later, it provided the starting-point for the Royal Asiatic Society's first Burton Memorial Lecture.

The caliphate of Hisham ibn ‘Abd al-Malik (105–25/724–43) was undoubtedly one of the most important periods in early Islamic history, and as witness to the history of this era a source of paramount importance is certainly the Ta'rīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk of al-Ṭabarī. This in itself makes the publication of Volume xxv of the English translation of this work by Dr Khalid Yahya Blankinship, covering all but the last five years of Hishām's long reign, a matter of special interest to historians of the eastern lands of Islam. The reader will immediately notice that al-Ṭabarī devotes the bulk of his narrative for this period to events in Khurāsān and Transoxania, specifically, to the Umayyad campaigns there and hostilities with the Türgish khāqān Sü-lü Čur. In the course of this narrative one finds not only a wealth of information on military matters, but also much valuable data on the customs of the western Turks and life in Central Asia in general. The author's reasons for giving his work such a markedly eastern emphasis at this point are not unrelated to a desire, as Blankinship observes, to set forth the background for the 'Abbāsid revolution. But most of what al-Ṭabarī reports for this period is in fact not of immediate relevance to the advent of the 'Abbāsids, and indeed, the subject of 'Abbāsid propaganda activities hardly seems to be a prominent one in this volume.

To undergraduates of Western origin, one of the most alien aspects of Islamic history is the role played in it by tribes: why did they never disappear ? To seasoned Islamicists, on the other hand, it is the virtual disappearance of tribes from Europe after the age of invasions that is puzzling: why are there no Ḥāshid and Bakīl in Switzerland ? Who could imagine the Yemeni highlands or the Caucasus as places renowned for banks and cuckoo clocks ? Though tribes were prominent in many parts of Asia, they did not play the same role in Chinese and Indian civilisation either as they did in the Muslim Middle East; nor is it obvious that they played the same role in the Middle East before the rise of Islam as they did thereafter. It is hardly surprising, then, that Islamicists talk so much about tribes that non-Islamicists often suffer from the misconception that there is nothing but tribes in the Islamic world.

Ancient Arabic poetry in general is rightly regarded in Arab circles as one of the paramount monuments of Arabic literature, and it is of course also held in esteem among Western scholars. For the most part, however, this admiration does not, in effect, extend to the specifically historical poetry quoted – sometimes in vast quantities – in the works of such historians as Ibn A‘tham al-Kūfī, al-Balādhurī, and al-Ṭabarī. It is readily apparent that this verse is often of extraordinary difficulty, that some represents retrojections from later times, and that many poems (in particular the later forgeries) are of an inferior quality; but the often-heard views holding that the historical poetry is, as a whole, of no particular historical importance or literary merit are simply false.

Bien que l'emploi des bouches à feu soit attesté dans les pays de l'lnde antérieurement, la diffusion de l'artillerie, et de ce que l'on appelle du terme générique conventionnel d'arquebuse, a été, au début du XVIe siècle, le fait de transfuges recherchés pour leur habileté à fondre des canons et à manier l'arme à feu portative. Les plus fameux sont les deux Italiens qui, en 1503, passérent au service du Samorin de Calicut. On trouve ensuite parmi eux des “Turcs” ou “Roumes” – dont la plupart semblent, arrivés au Gujarat en 1507, avoir essaimé après le désastre de Diu de 1509, au service d'autres princes, jusqu'au Bengale et au Pégou – et des “Portugais”, ou réputé tels, dont la trace, une fois passés dans le monde d'en face, se perd le plus souvent. Si les activités de quelques-uns de ces aventuriers, revenant en terre chrétienne, étaient trop notoires pour qu'ils donnent le change, d'autres entouraient de fumée leur curriculum incontrôlable et rachetaient par une version édifiante un moment douteux de leur passé.

Attempts to show that similarities between the religious cults of different places are due to a transmission of ideas often have little basis in fact: the similarities may be more apparent than real, and may be more convincingly explained by other factors. Nevertheless, there is strong, albeit not conclusive, evidence for the following suggestion of an example of cultural transmission from the Graeco-Roman world to India.

Among the Arabic fragments within the Taylor–Schechter Genizah Collection in the Cambridge University Library, I came upon a piece from Ibn Buṭlān's The Physicians' Dinner Party (Da‘wat al-’aṭibbā’): one of the earliest examples of the Arabic maqāmah. Although the Jews of Arab lands were acquainted with Arabic literature mainly in the form of scientific and philosophical texts, the discovery of our fragment from the Cairo Genizah provides further evidence that they also had some familiarity with Arabic belleslettres.

It takes a determined sceptic to doubt the attribution of the Svapnavoāsavadatta (SV) to Bhāsa, a playwright Kālidāsa himself named as so favoured in his time that the younger generation of nāṭyakāras had a difficult time getting a hearing. After sifting through the evidence, the most likely conclusion is that the play we have of that name (or a variant), first discovered for Indology by T. Ganapati Sastri in 1909, is a somewhat shorter version of the play known to Śāradātanaya, Rāmacandra and Guṇacandra, Sāgaranandin, Abhinavagupta, Bhoja, and others. And one can scarcely admit the genuineness of SV without accepting the Pratijñayaugandharāyaṇa (PY): the two are perfectly complementary in plot, theme, treatment, and style. But even if we could not locate these two plays among the earliest extant of the whole Sanskrit corpus, we would be justified on aesthetic and thematic grounds in including them in any study of the key works of Sanskrit poetry. The plays are simple, yet charming and sophisticated, and more genuinely dramatic – giving us a more complicated sense of conflicting human interests (especially SV) – than any play except the Mudrārākṣasa (MR) of Viśākhadatta, who, however, completely lacks Bhāsa's lightness of touch. The two plays provide a thematic bridge between Kālidāsa and Viśākhadatta, combining the latter's resolute focus on sentiment-negating political demands (artha, utsāha) with the former's luxuriating treatment of the inner world of erotic emotion (kāma, śrṅgāra).

In my discussion of Khmer jā ‘amcās’, Thai pen cau2 “[who] is the Lord”, occurring in Buddhist texts as an epithet for the Buddha himself or his followers and in contexts referring to the Scriptures, the Doctrine, or relics, I cited two instances from the Wat Sri Chum inscription at Sukhothai, Sd.2/#2, dated to the late fourteenth century, and the inscription from Nakhorn Chum, Kamphaeng Phet, Kb.1/# 3, dated to 1357 in which the expressions cau kū and cau rau “my Lord”, “our Lord” occur.

A number of years ago, Dr D. K. Bassett pointed out that the English East India Company's objective in re-entering East Asian waters during the second half of the seventeenth century was the re-establishment of a direct trade with Japan from which the company had withdrawn in 1623. It was a futile pursuit. But, far from being an inconsequential historical footnote, the unintended consequence of this policy was the beginning of a direct trade with China, first mooted in the 1610s and which was to prove of greater consequence to the company's fortunes than the chimera of trade with Tokugawa Japan. It is within this context and that of the changing fortunes of the English company and its Dutch rival as well as the broader East Asian situation that the brief, and largely ignored, history of the company's factory on Taiwan is worth examining.

The coin described below is in the collection of the American Numismatic Society, New York, and, so far as is known, is a unique specimen. The photograph and technical details are by kind permission of the Society, and the authors are grateful to Dr Michael Bates, Curator of Islamic Coins, for his helpfulness here.

The alloying and distribution pattern of early Indian copper and copper-based artefacts and the occurrence of ingots in some archaeological contexts have been variously discussed in Indian archaeological literature. First, the presence of pure copper artefacts in early Indian archaeological contexts is considered to be symptomatic of the scarcity of alloying agents. For instance, D. P. Agrawal has argued that the presence of 70% of pure copper objects among the analysed Harappan artefacts in this metal is reflective of a problem in the procurement of tin; since this metallic ore was not easily available, evidence of copper alloying is scarce. Secondly, the variations in element composition of alloyed artefacts have generally been regarded as evidence of incomplete knowledge of mixing – E. J. H. Mackay's argument that “mixing of the two metals was performed in a most perfunctory manner ” to explain the variations in the average proportions of tin to copper in Mohenjodaro specimens is evocative of this general approach. Thirdly, not many sites which have yielded copper objects have yielded any positive evidence of manufacture – in some cases this may be due to the limited nature of the excavated data, but on the whole one would argue that the sites which can be described as centres of copper metallurgy are comparatively few and far between in the Indian context. Fourthly, the occurrence of copper ingots at different sites has been generally taken to be indicative of trade in this metal.

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.

The maps illustrating the archaeological surveys of Sir Aurel Stein's Central Asian expeditions remain to this day the most authoritative map series concerning the location of archaeological monuments in the Tarim Basin and Gansu Corridor of western China. The aim of this article is to evaluate the present-day value of Stein's maps for both relocating known ancient sites and attempting to locate additional sites on more recent maps. Figure i of this article shows the general area surveyed by Stein's expeditions. This study will be divided into three main parts: (i) a general description of Stein's cartographic surveys in terms of the regions of Xinjiang and Gansu surveyed and features depicted; (2) map series covering this region produced since Stein's surveys, and an outline of the history of the treatment of place names on both Stein's and subsequent maps; (3) an in-depth study of the Niya site area to illustrate both the extent to which Stein's original findings can be relocated on recent maps and the value of such maps for locating additional ancient sites.

The recent books by K. N. Chaudhuri and Janet Abu-Lughod are testimony to the rapidly rising interest in comparative world history in the last few years, and both make notable contributions to it. Both are heavily laden with theory, and both firmly repudiate the view that modern world history can be expounded in terms of what happened (or didn't happen) in western Europe around and after 1500.