It is a great honour for me to be asked to give theRichard Barnett memorial lecture. I knew RichardBarnett well, and had the privilege of working withhim at the British Museum for three years before hisretirement. He was a great source of inspiration,and I and many others owe him a considerable debt ofgratitude. I have chosen as my subject recentBritish Museum excavations in Assyria, partlybecause I believe this would have been of someslight interest to Dr Barnett. Both the BritishMuseum and Assyria were close to his heart. Heworked in the Museum for more than 40 years, andfrom 1955 to 1974 was Keeper of the Department ofWestern Asiatic Antiquities. Throughout this timeAssyria was a special interest, and Dr Barnett didsome of his most important work on Nimrud ivories,the Assyrian reliefs and the Balawat Gates.Inevitably, the role of the British Museum in makingthese pioneering discoveries in the nineteenthcentury held a particular fascination for him.

Early in the spring of 1990, Professor Josef van Ess ofTübingen University came to visit me at my home atOxford. In the course of conversation he asked meabout an Ethiopic memorial tablet he had seen inWestminster Abbey. To my chagrin I had to own thatthe existence of such an inscription was quiteunknown to me. In the hope of removing (or at leastof mitigating) this stain of inexcusable ignorance,I hastened to the Abbey the following week – only tofind it closed to visitors on account of a broadcastrecording performance. I then wrote to the AssistantLibrarian of Westminster Abbey (Mrs Enid Nixon) whoproved to be immensely helpful and knowledgeable andwas kind enough to answer my queries and to provideme with precious information. I have since been ableto inspect the monument insitu.

L'avènement de la vapeur amena les Britanniques, auXlXème siècle, à établir une ligne de navigationavec l'lnde, par la Mer Rouge, tout en conservantses grands voiliers de charge par la route du Cap. Apartir de 1833 les Packetsrelièrent Londres à Alexandrie, en Egypte. Ontraversait l'isthme à dos de mulets, pour retrouverà Suez le confort et la vitesse de vaisseauxpermettant d'atteindre 15 milles nautiques, soitprès de 30 kilomètres à l'heure.

At some time towards the middle of thetwelfth/eighteenth century, the young Najdī scholarMuḥammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb (1115–1206/1703f–92)experienced something like a conversion. From thatpoint on, his understanding of monotheism seems tohave been such that he considered most of theprofessed Muslims of his day to be polytheists whoshould be fought till they accepted Islam. The firstWahhābī state (1158–1233/1745f–1818) was the productof the fusion of this radical vision with thepolitical fortunes of the Āl Sa'ūd, until then thepetty chiefs of the Najdī oasis of Dir'iyya.

The Wakhi language, as represented in particular bythose of its dialects that are spoken in Afghanistanand the Soviet Pamirs, has been described in moredetail than any other Iranian language of the areathat has virtually no written tradition. As early asthe middle of the last century scholars beganstudying the language on the basis of mostly shortor fragmentary glossaries and collections of textsand additional material became available during thethirties and fifties of the present century. Duringthe sixties and seventies, two Leningrad Iranists,A. L. Grünberg and I. M. Steblin-Kamenskij, workedintensively on Pamirian Wakhi and the kind of Wakhispoken in Afghan Badakhshan. Their researchculminated in the publication of a rich collectionof orally transmitted songs, fairy tales, proverbs,and texts of ethnographic interest, accompanied by adetailed analysis of Wakhi grammar and acomprehensive glossary. The material collected byGrünberg and Steblin-Kamenskij like that publishedby G. Buddruss and in some older articles by Russianscholars, conforms on the whole to what one wouldexpect to find in an exclusively oral tradition.Apart from the usual kinds of fairy tales and songswe find also a kind of popular poetry unique toWakhi.

The Kathmandu valley in the seventeenth century wasvery prosperous, the bulk of its wealth derived fromthe trade which flowed through the valley betweenTibet and the Indian plains. The ancient urbancentres of the valley, Kathmandu, Patan andBhaktapur had emerged early in the century as threeseparate kingdoms. The tradition of jointrulership,whereby rule of each city-state was shared betweenbranches of the ruling Malla dynasty had collapsed.The three kingdoms were engaged in constant rivalrywhich intermittently spilt over into open hostilityand which consumed much of their energy and wealth.Yet it was also this rivalry which stimulated an eraof generous royal patronage of the priesthood andthe sponsoring of major pūjās andreligious festivals, together with the building ofnew palaces and temples dedicated to the rulers'favourite deities. Support was extended not only tothe artists commissioned to decorate the palaces andshrines, but also to poets, writers and musicianswho found their work being encouraged, particularlywhen Nepalese court life underwent something of arenaissance under Mithila influence. This activityreached a peak during the reign of the enlightenedand cultured King Pratapamalla of Kathmandu(1641–74), and under that of his contemporary andrival, King Jagatprakas'amalla of Bhaktapur(1643–72).

The Khalkha River (Khalkhin Gol),which forms part of the north-east frontier betweenthe Mongolian People–s Republic (MPR) and thePeople's Republic of China (PRC), is famous inMongolian history for the 1939 Battle ofKhalkhin Gol (Nomonhan), in whichjoint Mongolian-Soviet forces finally repulsed theattempted invasion of the MPR by the Japanese Armyof Manchukuo. Less well known, however, is theexistence on the left bank of that river of one ofMongolia's most interesting religious antiquities,the remains of a gigantic Buddhist statue, known asthe Great Buddha (Ikh Burkhan).

No one has done more over recent years to promote thestudy of the genre of Chinese literature known aspien-wen in the English-speakingworld than Victor Mair of the University ofPennsylvania. Since the discovery of this type ofT'ang popular tale among the Tun-huang manuscriptswhich were recovered at the start of this century, aconsiderable body of scholarship has been producedto explain its origins and affiliations. The resultsof all this academic effort are now surveyed inthree volumes by Mair: one a selection oftranslations, one a survey of comparable phenomenaoutside China, and one (dealt with here) addressedto the main problems raised by the Chinesematerials.