A few years ago Professor Balog, in the introduction to his book Coinage of the Mamlūk sultans of Egypt and Syria, suggested, on the basis of the numismatic evidence, a number of modifications to the principles of Mamlūk heraldry proposed earlier by Mayer in his book Saracenic heraldry, particularly with regard to the use of composite blazons by the sultans, and their design. Balog's main conclusions may be briefly summarized as follows:

(a) The Mamlūk sultans engraved their coats-of-arms on many of their coins. (b) Besides simple charges true composite blazons occur on fulūs, showing that not only the nobility but the sultans also had composite blazons. (c) All simple charges occurring on issues of one and the same sultan are parts of his composite blazon. (d) Coins sometimes confirm the evidence for a sultan's blazon provided by other objects, and sometimes contradict it; in the latter case, the coin evidence should prevail, (e) Coins, in that they can be definitely attributed and the ownership of the blazons they carry can be proved without question, confirm Mayer's theory that the Mamlūk blazon was hereditary.

Among the many notable finds of the first season of the ill-starred collaboration of Cambridge and Peshawar Universities in excavations at Shaikhān Dherī, Chārsada, in the autumn of 1963, those in the house or shrine D were outstanding. Here in one of the symmetrical and well oriented insulae of the city was discovered a small building constructed of brick and diaper masonry, probably in early Kushān times, and destroyed around the time of Vāsudeva. The destruction was a result of fire and there was every sign that the building had been hastily stripped of its more valuable contents, if not actually looted, before the final collapse of the roof. In the main and largest room, of some 22 by 18 feet, beneath the fallen ceiling, were a remarkable collection of objects, scattered in disarray and including two seated Buddha figures, a standing Bodhisattva, a seated Hariiti, and a small figure of a four-armed city goddess, all being typical examples of the Gandhāran style and in Gandhāran schist; carved stone relic caskets and stūpas, one inscribed in Kharoṣṭhī; a remarkable relic casket of a fine schist, carved in the form of a cruciform building with four vaulted arms and a central circular opening rabbeted to take a now missing lid which was almost certainly in the form of a dome, the ends of the vaults being carved with miniature reliefs of scenes from the life of the Buddha; and a small broken sculpture in Mathurā sandstone of a seated Buddha in the style of the celebrated Mathurā Katrā Keśava Deva figure. It is a matter of great concern and regret that the proper publication of all this important material has been so long delayed, and that it has not been possible for this extremely productive and important excavation to proceed.

In the Učenye Zapiski, XVI (1958), 280–308, the late V. S. Vorobiev-Desiatovsky published facsimiles of some Central Asian fragments preserved in Leningrad. One fragment contained a bilingual text, a traveller's guide, a type familiar elsewhere in Saka of Khotan, in Buddhist Sanskrit and Saka; and also in Chinese and Saka. The two languages in the new fragment were Buddhist Sanskrit and Kuchean, the language of ancient Kuci, modern Kucha, the so-called Tokharian B.

For the understanding of the period of history to which the name Indo-Greek (in perhaps more precise terminology Indo-Bactrian) is usually given, the reign of Menander has to be treated as central. For the Indo-Bactrian kingdom, this reign must have constituted the main period of stability and consolidation. Whatever we can hope to detect of Indo-Bactrian organizational structure must have assumed during those years its most coherent form. They had been preceded by several decades of expansion and improvization. The aftermath, as we shall attempt to show, was one of division, perhaps of dissension. At neither extreme could we expect a pattern of administrative continuity to stand out from so fragmentary an historical tradition. Since the evidence of texts and archaeology, despite noble efforts that have been devoted to them, is alike scanty for this episode of Macedonian government southward from the Hindu Kush to the eastern fringe of the Panjāb, it is from the copious coinage that inquiry must still be made. We may fittingly dedicate to Sir Mortimer Wheeler, excavator of Menander's capital at Chārsada, a new attempt to interpret the coinage of Menander. His own authority may be cited for the judgment that previous numismatic studies, notwithstanding great merits, have not yet revealed all that the archaeologist needs to know. In an age of technological progress, it may still be said that an excavator's finds of coins, once fully understood, could continue to provide his most accurate indication of dating. The present analysis derives from an inquiry conducted at Kabul during study leave from the School of Oriental and African Studies in the summer of 1969. The writer is indebted to H.E. Dr. Muhammad Anas, Minister of Culture and Information of the Royal Afghan Government, for permission to examine the copious material of the Mir Zakah hoard; to Dr. A. A. Motamedi, Director-General of the Kabul Museum, both for the initial invitation which made the visit possible, and for his generous allocation of the Museum's facilities while the work was in progress; and to Dr. Paul Bernard for his hospitable welcome at the Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan.

It has now generally been accepted that blue and white originated in the Near and Middle East, and that it was these Near Eastern wares that gave the impetus to the development of such wares in porcelain in China. Yet our knowledge of the underglaze-painted blue and white wares of the Near East that may have influenced the Chinese potters is almost non-existent. One could perhaps consider as prototypes the black, blue, and green underglaze-painted vessels of Kāshān and Sulṭānābād of the 13th and 14th centuries, which may have found their way to China after the Mongol invasion of Persia.

In offering to Sir Mortimer Wheeler some of the firstfruits of our recent excavations at Shahr-i Qūmis, 32 kilometres west of Damghan, it may not be inappropriate if we enlarge on certain of the details that have been recovered from the only major building with both Parthian and Sasanian associations.

The coin is a drachma of the Sasanian king Hormizd IV (a.d. 579–590), and is dated the tenth regnal year, equivalent to a.d. 587/8. Its formal description may be given as follows:

Obverse. Bust of Hormizd IV to right. To left, from 11 o'clock, Pahlavī inscription: ’pzwr “increase”. To right, from 1 o'clock (reading from the outside): ’wḥlmzdy “Hormizd”.

In the Archaeological Museum, Gwalior, stands a square stone pillar (No. 1/48; 1/21 ?) (Pl. I(a)) surmounted by the remains of the head and bust of a male figure supported by a throne-back. The stone is a light ochre sandstone, very worn and badly flaked; and the whole front portion of the pillar and bust has, in fact, split off and been replaced, with the exception of the bust and head portion which has been lost. The front and both sides of the pillar are divided into panels with bas-relief scenes while at the back there is an inscription. The museum label reads simply “Hasalpur Inscription of Nagvarman (c.a.d. 550) records the death of a warrior”. Hasalpur, in the district Sheopur (Shivapuri) is a village about 70 miles west of Gwalior. It is four miles from the Chambal River which forms the boundary with Rājasthān.

Many scholars in the last 150 years have applied themselves to problems posed in dating the rock reliefs of the Sasanian kings. Steady progress has been made and we have now reached a stage when most, but not all, sculptures can be assigned, with reasonable certainty, to the various kings. However, the closer dating and the identification of the context of the reliefs are still hotly disputed. This paper, written in honour of Sir Mortimer Wheeler, who has long been interested in Iranian studies, attempts to examine the stylistic development of the sculptures of Bahrām II (a.d. 276–93) in the hope that this will at least establish the order in which he commissioned the reliefs during his reign of seventeen years. It has been a surprising feature of earlier studies of the sculpture of specific Sasanian kings that little or no attempt has been made to ascertain developments in style during the course of a reign. The author has already attempted this for the sculpture of Ardashīr and Shāhpūr; the same methods are here applied to the reliefs of Bahrām II. Only after such an examination can there be any hope of solving the many outstanding problems of dating and identification.

The three minarets in the Kirmān region, those of the Masjid-i Malik in Kirmān, the Masjid-i Jāmi‘ in Zarand, and the Masjid-i Jāmi‘ in Nigār, have already been noted in a number of publications, but have so far not formed the subject of a separate article. Diez, referring to the period of Turkish dominance, says that in Kirmān, Yazd, and Shīrāz there are no lofty round towers, but, despite the lack of dating inscriptions on any of the minarets, it is nevertheless possible to date them to this period, two with reasonable accuracy and the third by association.

Sir Mortimer Wheeler has made innumerable contributions to the archaeology of the Roman period in Britain, and in his inaugural lecture as Professor of the Archaeology of the Roman Provinces he declared his faith in training in Romano–British archaeology as the best training for would-be excavators, a faith to which I emphatically adhere. When he extended his field to India, he sought for and found datable products from Rome, Arretine ware, to provide a hitherto completely lacking fixed point in chronology, by means of which he established a chronological framework for much of the 1st millennium b.c. in the Indian sub-continent. Between Britain and India lies Palestine. Probably not many people know how nearly Sir Mortimer went to Palestine c. 1936, as Director of Antiquities. Political events made it impossible, but he has maintained his interest in this area. It seems not inappropriate to offer an article on the Roman impact on Palestine to this volume in his honour.

This year on the eve of his 80th birthday, which we now celebrate, Sir Mortimer Wheeler has been responsible for drafting the report on the UNESCO Mission to Mohenjo Daro. No honour could be better deserved, or give him greater satisfaction, than the implementation of the important and judicious recommendations on which he and his colleagues have agreed for the conservation of this world-famous site and, complementary to this, for its excavation down to the deeply waterlogged levels. For all who are aware of the massive remains of superimposed architecture which still adorns Mohenjo Daro it is staggering to learn that even below the present average flood-plain level “recent borings have shown at more than one spot that brickwork in fact goes down as much as 60 feet (18 m.)”. A combination of international skills, engineering, hydrological, and archaeological, are available to encompass that great task, which is one that deserves the large funds required. Moreover the lessons which would be learned from the application of the practical techniques would be directly relevant to the opening and exploration of world-famous ancient sites in the great alluvial valleys of Western Asia—Nile and Tigris, Euphrates and Ganges as well as the Indus.

This copy (dated 714/1314), which is now on indefinite loan to the British Museum, is perhaps the best known of our illustrated manuscripts. It is one of the few surviving remnants of the vast historical project set in motion by the Ilkhānid wazīr Rashīd al-Dīn Faẓl Allāh (d. 718/1318), and in its present form consists of fragments of the second volume of the Jāmi‘ al-tawārīkh in the Arabic version, amounting to 60 folios, viz.:—

(1) Fragments of the History of the Prophet and his Companions (fol. 2a–9a).

a well-known find of a vehicle-model in the Indus civilization is the fragmentary copper representation of a covered cart found at a depth of 10 feet 6 inches in Stratum IV of Mound F at Harappā (Vats 1940, I, 99, 452; II, Pl. CXXV, 35), illustrated here by a drawing made from the original in 1943 (Fig. 1). It has a virtually exact counterpart from Chanhu-dāro (Mackay 1943, Pl. LVIII, 2) which, however, lacks not only the draught animals but the figure of the driver. The Harappā model clearly shows that in its unbroken condition it had a central draught-pole, with model animals projecting from the body of the cart on rods, the broken stumps of which look for a moment deceptively like an anachronistic pair of shafts. Both models would originally have possessed a pair of wheels carried on an axle turning in the loops below the vehicle.

The student of Persian painting normally approaches manuscripts of Qazwīnī's “Marvels of Creation” (‘Ajā’ib al-Makhlūqāt) with a certain wary apprehension. Copies of the work generally contain a very large number of miniatures, and thus tend to suffer, like some manuscripts of the Shāhnāma, from “painter's fatigue”—in other words the standard of painting deteriorates as the manuscript proceeds, as if the artist, who may have started off with a fine flourish, found himself, after the first hundred or so miniatures, physically wilting and mentally inert. This is, of course, only human, considering that he was required to produce small and stereotyped illustrations of an interminable series of angels, constellations, beasts, birds, insects, trees, and plants. But it means that copies of the “Marvels of Creation” of first-rate quality are exceedingly rare. The present manuscript, though not in the top flight, may be assigned a very respectable place in the second rank, and has in addition one or two other characteristics that make it a more interesting subject of study than the majority of Qazwīnī manuscripts.

The most familiar techniques of the Chinese silversmith in the T‘ang period are chasing, punching, and repoussé. Openwork is not infrequent, but the spherical censers with ajouré ornament over the whole of their surface, the bowl covers and hairpins treated in this fashion, do not belong to the most refined products or the most original designs of the T‘ang masters. The two pieces described in this article use openwork in a different way, as the overlay of a solid ground. The delicacy of the ornament and some of the technical features are exceptional.