Beginning in the seventh century, the expansion of Islam brought with it an outpouring of peoples from the Arabian Peninsula. While the composition of these Islamic armies became more diverse as the religion spread through the Near East and across North Africa to Western Europe, there were clearly elements of both the urban Arabian population, of which the Prophet was a member, and the rural Bedouins, whose migrations from their original homeland continued sporadically for several centuries. This slowed during the period of Turkish hegemony, but it left a scattering of enclaves identifying themselves as ethnic Arabs throughout the Islamic world.

For several years now the Lafayette Project has been compiling a data base of portrait photographs from the Copy I collection at the Public Record Office, Kew (PRO). The Lafayette Project was founded to further the cataloguing of historic photographs and funding by the Elm Trust has enabled the project to set new standards for the documentation of historic photographs based on careful analysis of an image and its contents as a historical source. The data base is a means not only of investigating portraits but also a starting point for entering into the wider scope of the collection to pursue historical research.

In South India Cochin is well known for its Jewish settlement, but the rich Muslim heritage of the town has so far remained almost unknown. A reason for this anonymity lies perhaps in that the Muslim community of Cochin – unlike that of Calicut – while highly influential in the commerce of the region, kept a low profile with regard to political affairs, at least from the time of the appearance of the Portuguese. Cochin, situated at 9° 58′ N and 760° 14′ E, occupies the northern part of a long stretch of land, about half a kilometre south of the Island of Vypin (Baypin or Vypeen) and 1.5 km west of the shores of the mainland, now occupied by the modern town of Ernakulam. Between Cochin and Ernakulam is a long expanse of sheltered but navigable water, at the mouth of which is Willingdon Island, housing the modern sea port and the airport.

“The recognition as well as interpretation of archaeological evidence will always be biased and incomplete. There can be no archaeologically achieved final truths or wholly objective interpretations. But to recognize such limitation is not to reduce the subject to a set of mere perceptual constructs. Archaeology is a societal activity that embodies both the residues of its past and its changing attitudes towards the past. We call the residues evidence and the attitudes interpretation. The continuing dialogue between the two enables archaeology, always open to new questions, to reveal new knowledge.”

In the late thirteenth century the openness and religious toleration of the Mongol Empire created unique conditions which encouraged European missionaries to venture into Asia. The Franciscans and Dominicans who answered the call to evangelize in territories under Tartar dominion enjoyed such success by the early fourteenth century that the papacy created archbishoprics and suffragan sees in Central Asia and China, and entertained dreams of new Christian communities aligned with the Roman Church. This paper focuses on a special set of circumstances which briefly encouraged those expectations. Western missionaries to the Mongols found influential Christian women, the mothers and consorts of rulers, at the courts of several khans. Because these Mongol queens played powerful political roles, their prayers and example might encourage the conversion of their people and those subject to them. Faithful wives of pagan rulers, in times long gone, had played a dynamic part in the conversion of husbands or sons, and of their realms, thus contributing to the spread of Christianity in Europe. Once again, at the close of the thirteenth century, hopes were voiced that pious women might perform a similar task in Asia.

The publication of two volumes of collected papers by Nathan Sivin is an event that should be welcomed by every centre where Chinese studies are taken seriously. For all his considerable reputation in a difficult area of specialized research namely the history of Chinese science, he has never sought to capitalize on his status as a specialist to “blind us with science”, but rather has written with an eye to broader problems, problems of concern at least to anyone professionally interested in the Chinese element in human experience, and (one would hope) many more besides. The spread of his concerns has meant in the past that many smaller college libraries have not possessed the periodicals and conference volumes in which his work has appeared, so this set of republished papers serves a useful function in itself. But in the second of these volumes in particular we find a number of previously unpublished works, including one of over seventy pages on a topic of considerable importance. Rather than leave this unexpected bounty simply for college librarians to acquire in order to make good existing gaps (and to have on the record the full Sivin bibliography to 1995 which may be found in the second volume), there would seem to be every reason to draw the attention of a broader number of readers to the appearance of important work which has existed for a while in draft form, but which has not been made generally available until now.