In the summer of 1994 I received two communications from Mr Brad Sabin Hill, head of the Hebrew Section of the British Library. The first letter enclosed a copy of a Carmen Aethiopicum sive ‘әṭanä mogär whose most remarkable feature is that it is printed in Hebrew characters (“ob defectum Typorum, Literis Hebraicis expressum”). This composition of eleven lines forms part of a volume entitled Carmina Funebria & Triutnphalia Mis Serenissimam ac Desideratissimam Reginam Annam Deflet, Cantabrigiae MDCCXIV.

Scholars have known of Ibn al-Azraq and his Ta'rikh Mayyāfāriqin since at least 1882, with the publication of F. Wiistenfeld's Die Geschichtschreiber der Araber und ihre Werke, but it seems that the history received its first thorough reading in 1902, when Amedroz published a summary of the recently acquired British Museum (now British Library) manuscript. Amedroz concentrated only on the latter folios of the MS, particularly those that cover the Marwanid dynasty, and in his interest in the second half of the work he has been followed by B. A. L. Awad, who edited the section on the Marwaīnids, C. Hillenbrand, who edited and translated the 18-odd folios that concern the early Artuqids, and A. Savran, who made some brief comments on the two MSS of the history. It is of course natural that the later sections of Ibn al-Azraq's work have attracted historians' attention, since it is here that our author, who was born in 510/III6–7, and who probably died sometime during the last quarter of the sixth century, has important things to say about northern Mesopotamia in his day. For this reason his history was used by later authors;8 as Hillenbrand has noted,9 here he fills a gap in the historical record.

In Rajasthan, one of the north-western states of India, whoever has heard of the Kāmaḍ (or Kāmaḍiyā) would define them as wandering minstrels or jugglers, singing hymns in praise of Bābā Rāmdeo, a famous saint from Mārwāṛ, whose footprints they worship. Most people could not say much more about this community of religious singers who, since Independence, have been listed among the “scheduled castes”. In any case, everybody seems to be aware of their connection with Rāmdeo, a famous folk deity, also popular in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, now venerated by devotees of all castes and creeds, but mostly by Hindus, as an avatār of Vishnu-Krishna.

Dutch scholars honoured the centenary of one of their great Orientalists at a conference in Leiden in August 1994. Their aim was “to commemorate Hendrik Neubronner Van der Tuuk, the first linguistic fieldworker, and also the first Austronesian comparative linguist in the Netherlands, who died at the age of 70 on August 17, 1894”. In the United Kingdom too, we have inherited a share of his work and influence.

In the early thirteenth century Chinggis Khan used Central Asia and North China and then throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries his successors used China, Eastern Europe, the Near East, even Vietnam, Burma and Korea, as battlegrounds for their campaigns of conquest. Little, perhaps, did the Mongol Great Khans think that some six or seven centuries later their homeland would itself be a battleground, fought over politically if not actually militarily by the empires of Russia and China and by the Communist powers which succeeded those two empires.