Although the Wellcome Collection of Hebraica does notconstitute one of the larger and more distinguishedcollections of oriental material in the WellcomeInstitute, it nevertheless comprises a number ofimportant manuscripts along with early printed booksrepresentative of several sixteenth andseventeenth-century Hebrew presses. One of these isa fragment of a larger work printed inConstantinople in 1505 at the press of David andSamuel Nahmias. It is the second earliest example ofprinting in Turkey, the first also coming from thepress of the Nahmias brothers.

Hülegü (d. A.D. 1265) and his successors were known bythe title īlkhān, which hasprovided modern scholars with a convenient label forthe dynasty. In general, īlkhān hasbeen glossed as “subject” or “submissive”khān. There is less agreement,however, over the circumstances in whichīlkhān was adopted by Hülegü.This, in turn, is connected to the more generaldiscussion on the manner in which Hülegü's dynastywas established. Without purporting to resolve thesequestions, in the following article some evidence isoffered which sheds light on these matters.

Jean Deloche in a series of valuable publications hasgiven an overall view of the Indian road network inthe period up to about 1820 when the generalpacification that followed the collapse of theMaratha kingdom gave British engineers the chance totransform the communications of India, first withmilitary roads and later with railways. Thistransformation was nowhere more complete than inCentral India and particularly in Malwa, the Mughalsubha through which led the great road from Delhiand Agra to Burhanpur and the Deccan – a road whichwas followed by many of the European merchants anddiplomats travelling between Surat and Agra and inpart by the Maratha armies in the eighteenth centuryas they first raided and then conquered territoryall the way up to Delhi. The other route from Suratto the north lay through Gujarat and thesemi-deserts of Rajasthan (Deloche, 1980, pp. 55–7)and will not concern us here. Our route follows theTapti valley east to Burhanpur, through the gapguarded by Asirgarh and then, after the unavoidabledifficulties of the Narmada crossing and the climbup the Vindhya escarpment, takes an easy linethrough the flat well-cultivated Malwa plateau fromSironj to Narwar, following the grain of the countrybetween the north-flowing tributaries of theChambal.

Several of the manuscripts from Tunhuang in theinvaluable Choix de Documents Tibétainsconservés à la Bibliothèque Nationale(Paris, 1978 and 1979) record cases of civillitigation and administrative or judicial decisionson them in some instances. Fewer deal with criminalmatters. Although students of Tibetan have referredto such documents in books and articles, publishedtranslations of any of them appear to be rare. InJournal Asiatique, 1955, MlleMarcelle Lalou, a pioneer in studies of the Tunhuangmaterial, translated Fonds Pelliot Tibétain (Pell.T.) 1089 concerning the appointment of a wide rangeof officials in the border region. The translationof orders on two short petitions from citizens ofShacu is included in Tsipon Shakabpa'sTibet, a Political History(1967). F. W. Thomas translated the “Law of theft inChinese Kansu, a IXth–Xth century fragment fromTunhuang”, in Zeitschrift für VerglekhendeRechtswissenschaft, L (1936).

Indian commercial relations with the Red Sea area, andin particular with Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa,date back to the dawn of history. Craftsmen from thesub-continent were also active in the Ethiopianregion for many centuries, most notably in the early1620s when “a noble Indian” there is said, by theJesuit Affonso Mendes, to have thrown white pebblesinto the fire, as he had seen done in Cambay, and tohave thereby produced “a very glutinous lime”. Thethen ruler of the country, Emperor Susenyos, wasreported by another of the Jesuits, Manoel deAlmeida, to have shortly afterwards given orders forthe construction of a stone bridge which was erectedby a craftsman from India. The latter, according toa contemporary Ethiopian chronicle, was a Banyancalled Abdāl Kerim who was also responsible forbuilding Susenyos a palace at his capitalDānqāz.