In the summer of 1994 I received two communicationsfrom Mr Brad Sabin Hill, head of the Hebrew Sectionof the British Library. The first letter enclosed acopy of a Carmen Aethiopicum sive ‘әṭanämogär whose most remarkable feature isthat it is printed in Hebrew characters (“obdefectum Typorum, Literis Hebraicis expressum”).This composition of eleven lines forms part of avolume entitled Carmina Funebria &Triutnphalia Mis Serenissimam ac DesideratissimamReginam Annam Deflet, CantabrigiaeMDCCXIV.

Scholars have known of Ibn al-Azraq and hisTa'rikh Mayyāfāriqin since atleast 1882, with the publication of F. Wiistenfeld'sDie Geschichtschreiber der Araber und ihreWerke, but it seems that the historyreceived its first thorough reading in 1902, whenAmedroz published a summary of the recently acquiredBritish Museum (now British Library) manuscript.Amedroz concentrated only on the latter folios ofthe MS, particularly those that cover the Marwaniddynasty, and in his interest in the second half ofthe work he has been followed by B. A. L. Awad, whoedited the section on the Marwaīnids, C.Hillenbrand, who edited and translated the 18-oddfolios that concern the early Artuqids, and A.Savran, who made some brief comments on the two MSSof the history. It is of course natural that thelater sections of Ibn al-Azraq's work have attractedhistorians' attention, since it is here that ourauthor, who was born in 510/III6–7, and who probablydied sometime during the last quarter of the sixthcentury, has important things to say about northernMesopotamia in his day. For this reason his historywas used by later authors;8 as Hillenbrand hasnoted,9 here he fills a gap in the historicalrecord.

In Rajasthan, one of the north-western states of India,whoever has heard of the Kāmaḍ (or Kāmaḍiyā) woulddefine them as wandering minstrels or jugglers,singing hymns in praise of Bābā Rāmdeo, a famoussaint from Mārwāṛ, whose footprints they worship.Most people could not say much more about thiscommunity of religious singers who, sinceIndependence, have been listed among the “scheduledcastes”. In any case, everybody seems to be aware oftheir connection with Rāmdeo, a famous folk deity,also popular in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, nowvenerated by devotees of all castes and creeds, butmostly by Hindus, as an avatār ofVishnu-Krishna.

Dutch scholars honoured the centenary of one of theirgreat Orientalists at a conference in Leiden inAugust 1994. Their aim was “to commemorate HendrikNeubronner Van der Tuuk, the first linguisticfieldworker, and also the first Austronesiancomparative linguist in the Netherlands, who died atthe age of 70 on August 17, 1894”. In the UnitedKingdom too, we have inherited a share of his workand influence.

In the early thirteenth century Chinggis Khan usedCentral Asia and North China and then throughout thethirteenth and fourteenth centuries his successorsused China, Eastern Europe, the Near East, evenVietnam, Burma and Korea, as battlegrounds for theircampaigns of conquest. Little, perhaps, did theMongol Great Khans think that some six or sevencenturies later their homeland would itself be abattleground, fought over politically if notactually militarily by the empires of Russia andChina and by the Communist powers which succeededthose two empires.