Dayr Dubbān was a small village, now in ruins, near themodern village of Luzit, situated to the north ofthe main road about half way from Jerusalem toAscalon.

On May 21 1863, Victor Guérin the famous Frenchexplorer of the Holy Land visited a small village(“seven or eight poor peasant families living inhalf dilapidated huts”) called Dayr Dubbān (aMonastery of the Flies). On the rugged plateau onwhich this little village was built, Guérin foundmany round openings in the rocks which looked likeopenings of wells. In spite of the fact that thelocal inhabitants called themal-biyār, these were not wellsbut round apertures giving access to, and lightinghuge underground cavities dug into the whitelimestone.

In 1076, some twenty years before the First Crusade waslaunched, Pope Gregory VII wrote to al-Nāşir, Sultanof Bougie in what is now Algeria:

For there is nothing which Almighty God, who wishesthat all men should be saved and that no man shouldperish, more approves in our conduct, than that aman should first love God and then his fellow men …Most certainly you and we ought to love each otherin this way more than other races of men, because webelieve and confess one God, albeit in differentways, whom each day we praise and reverence as thecreator of all ages and the governor of this world.For, as the Apostle says: “He is our peace, who hathmade both one”.

This enlightened view of Islam was not widely shared inLatin Christendom at that time, nor was it rooted inany very profound knowledge of the Muslim religion.B. Z. Kedar is, I think, correct in his view that agood deal of information about Islam was availablein the West before the crusades, both in written andoral sources, but because there was a general lackof interest in the subject, no attempt had been madeto coordinate this knowledge.

On an October day in 1869 Lord Houghton, friend ofThackeray and Tennyson, appeared in the cemetery atKensal Green, in West London. He was there to unveila tomb memorial to the poet Leigh Hunt; this wassurmounted by a bust, and bore the legend:

It is not really surprising that place of honour onLeigh Hunt's tomb is taken by a quotation from “hisexquisite little fable ‘Abou ben Adhem’” which “hasassured him a permanent place in the records of theEnglish language”,1 and whose “touch ofglory, like a sacred flame on a clear and gracefulaltar, has captured the succeedinggenerations”.2 The poet himself, LeighHunt, regarded this poem as one of hisbest.3 It is recorded that a friendpresented to him an illuminated copy of it, which hehung above his writing table.4

The Persian inscriptions of India, which constitute animportant source, particularly for the local historyof a region, a district, a tehsil, a town and avillage, have received inadequate if not scantattention from our historians. Worse and far moreregrettable is the neglect of visitors' ortravellers' records on the walls of sarais, tombs ormosques, and similar buildings which they passed andwhere they made a halt, overnight and otherwise.Against the commemorative stone tablets set in amonument to perpetuate the name of the builder,visitors' or travellers' records or graffiti, asthey are also called, were written usually in inkand hence were of comparatively much less durablenature. Many of these graffiti have disappeared inthe natural course with the passage of time.

In the course of my research into the character, roleand influence of the British officials in Tibetduring the 1904–47 period, it became apparent thatprevious scholarship had failed fully to confront anissue which would explain the clear decline inAnglo-Tibetan relations during the latter half ofthe 1920s. There is considerable evidence to suggestthat the British officer then in immediate charge ofAnglo-Tibetan relations attempted to promote acoup d'état in Tibet, in order totransfer secular power from the Dalai Lama and hiscourt to Tsarong Shape, the forward-thinkingCommander-in-Chief of the Tibetan Army. Thispossibility has been rejected by the leadingEuropean historians of the period, but theirconclusions are, I will argue, in need ofreassessment.

The development of the Prester John legend and mattersassociated with it are complex, and no significantwork of book length in English has appeared on thesubject since V. Slessarev's Prester John.The Letter and the Legend (1959). Therecent publication of a collection of texts andinterpretive essays will therefore be warmlywelcomed. The texts are among those published byZarncke in the Abhandlungen der königlichensāchsischen Gesellschaft derWissenschaften, vii (1879), and includethe famous “letter” of Prester John, together with anote by Hamilton on additional Latin manuscriptsthat have since come to light. The essays compriseboth reprints of work that has appeared over thepast five decades and six fresh studies that now seethe light of day for the first time.