Through the generous benefaction of Professor Denis Sinor, sometime Honorary Secretary of the Society, a new Society medal has been inaugurated to honour major scholarship on an Inner Asian subject. The field of eligibility has been spiritedly defined as “from Tehran to Tun Huang”, and the award is to be made every three years, for the first time in 1993.

Not everyone will agree with the view that thePilgrimage is Burton's“outstanding contribution to travel literature”.What is beyond dispute is the unique place itoccupies among his writings. Conscious of thesignificant part it played in her husband's life andcareer, Lady Burton placed it at the head of theMemorial edition of his works. “Although he has beenthe author of some eighty books and pamphlets”, shewrote, “I think that this original edition of threevolumes is the one that his name should live by…”Just over thirty years later, it provided thestarting-point for the Royal Asiatic Society's firstBurton Memorial Lecture.

The caliphate of Hisham ibn ‘Abd al-Malik(105–25/724–43) was undoubtedly one of the mostimportant periods in early Islamic history, and aswitness to the history of this era a source ofparamount importance is certainly theTa'rīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk ofal-Ṭabarī. This in itself makes the publication ofVolume xxv of the English translation of this workby Dr Khalid Yahya Blankinship, covering all but thelast five years of Hishām's long reign, a matter ofspecial interest to historians of the eastern landsof Islam. The reader will immediately notice thatal-Ṭabarī devotes the bulk of his narrative for thisperiod to events in Khurāsān and Transoxania,specifically, to the Umayyad campaigns there andhostilities with the Türgish khāqānSü-lü Čur. In the course of this narrative one findsnot only a wealth of information on militarymatters, but also much valuable data on the customsof the western Turks and life in Central Asia ingeneral. The author's reasons for giving his worksuch a markedly eastern emphasis at this point arenot unrelated to a desire, as Blankinship observes,to set forth the background for the 'Abbāsidrevolution. But most of what al-Ṭabarī reports forthis period is in fact not of immediate relevance tothe advent of the 'Abbāsids, and indeed, the subjectof 'Abbāsid propaganda activities hardly seems to bea prominent one in this volume.

To undergraduates of Western origin, one of the mostalien aspects of Islamic history is the role playedin it by tribes: why did they never disappear ? Toseasoned Islamicists, on the other hand, it is thevirtual disappearance of tribes from Europe afterthe age of invasions that is puzzling: why are thereno Ḥāshid and Bakīl in Switzerland ? Who couldimagine the Yemeni highlands or the Caucasus asplaces renowned for banks and cuckoo clocks ? Thoughtribes were prominent in many parts of Asia, theydid not play the same role in Chinese and Indiancivilisation either as they did in the Muslim MiddleEast; nor is it obvious that they played the samerole in the Middle East before the rise of Islam asthey did thereafter. It is hardly surprising, then,that Islamicists talk so much about tribes thatnon-Islamicists often suffer from the misconceptionthat there is nothing but tribes in the Islamicworld.

Ancient Arabic poetry in general is rightly regarded in Arab circles as one of the paramount monuments of Arabic literature, and it is of course also held in esteem among Western scholars. For the most part, however, this admiration does not, in effect, extend to the specifically historical poetry quoted – sometimes in vast quantities – in the works of such historians as Ibn A‘tham al-Kūfī, al-Balādhurī, and al-Ṭabarī. It is readily apparent that this verse is often of extraordinary difficulty, that some represents retrojections from later times, and that many poems (in particular the later forgeries) are of an inferior quality; but the often-heard views holding that the historical poetry is, as a whole, of no particular historical importance or literary merit are simply false.

Bien que l'emploi des bouches à feu soit attesté dansles pays de l'lnde antérieurement, la diffusion del'artillerie, et de ce que l'on appelle du termegénérique conventionnel d'arquebuse, a été, au débutdu XVIe siècle, le fait de transfuges recherchéspour leur habileté à fondre des canons et à manierl'arme à feu portative. Les plus fameux sont lesdeux Italiens qui, en 1503, passérent au service duSamorin de Calicut. On trouve ensuite parmi eux des“Turcs” ou “Roumes” – dont la plupart semblent,arrivés au Gujarat en 1507, avoir essaimé après ledésastre de Diu de 1509, au service d'autresprinces, jusqu'au Bengale et au Pégou – et des“Portugais”, ou réputé tels, dont la trace, une foispassés dans le monde d'en face, se perd le plussouvent. Si les activités de quelques-uns de cesaventuriers, revenant en terre chrétienne, étaienttrop notoires pour qu'ils donnent le change,d'autres entouraient de fumée leur curriculumincontrôlable et rachetaient par une versionédifiante un moment douteux de leur passé.

Attempts to show that similarities between thereligious cults of different places are due to atransmission of ideas often have little basis infact: the similarities may be more apparent thanreal, and may be more convincingly explained byother factors. Nevertheless, there is strong, albeitnot conclusive, evidence for the followingsuggestion of an example of cultural transmissionfrom the Graeco-Roman world to India.

Among the Arabic fragments within the Taylor–Schechter Genizah Collection in the Cambridge University Library, I came upon a piece from Ibn Buṭlān's The Physicians' Dinner Party (Da‘wat al-’aṭibbā’): one of the earliest examples of the Arabic maqāmah. Although the Jews of Arab lands were acquainted with Arabic literature mainly in the form of scientific and philosophical texts, the discovery of our fragment from the Cairo Genizah provides further evidence that they also had some familiarity with Arabic belleslettres.

It takes a determined sceptic to doubt the attributionof the Svapnavoāsavadatta (SV) toBhāsa, a playwright Kālidāsa himself named as sofavoured in his time that the younger generation ofnāṭyakāras had a difficult timegetting a hearing. After sifting through theevidence, the most likely conclusion is that theplay we have of that name (or a variant), firstdiscovered for Indology by T. Ganapati Sastri in1909, is a somewhat shorter version of the playknown to Śāradātanaya, Rāmacandra and Guṇacandra,Sāgaranandin, Abhinavagupta, Bhoja, and others. Andone can scarcely admit the genuineness of SV withoutaccepting thePratijñayaugandharāyaṇa (PY): thetwo are perfectly complementary in plot, theme,treatment, and style. But even if we could notlocate these two plays among the earliest extant ofthe whole Sanskrit corpus, we would be justified onaesthetic and thematic grounds in including them inany study of the key works of Sanskrit poetry. Theplays are simple, yet charming and sophisticated,and more genuinely dramatic – giving us a morecomplicated sense of conflicting human interests(especially SV) – than any play except theMudrārākṣasa (MR) ofViśākhadatta, who, however, completely lacks Bhāsa'slightness of touch. The two plays provide a thematicbridge between Kālidāsa and Viśākhadatta, combiningthe latter's resolute focus on sentiment-negatingpolitical demands (artha, utsāha)with the former's luxuriating treatment of the innerworld of erotic emotion (kāma,śrṅgāra).

In my discussion of Khmer jā ‘amcās’,Thai pen cau2 “[who] isthe Lord”, occurring in Buddhist texts as an epithetfor the Buddha himself or his followers and incontexts referring to the Scriptures, the Doctrine,or relics, I cited two instances from the Wat SriChum inscription at Sukhothai, Sd.2/#2, dated to thelate fourteenth century, and the inscription fromNakhorn Chum, Kamphaeng Phet, Kb.1/# 3, dated to1357 in which the expressions caukū and cau rau “myLord”, “our Lord” occur.

A number of years ago, Dr D. K. Bassett pointed outthat the English East India Company's objective inre-entering East Asian waters during the second halfof the seventeenth century was the re-establishmentof a direct trade with Japan from which the companyhad withdrawn in 1623. It was a futile pursuit. But,far from being an inconsequential historicalfootnote, the unintended consequence of this policywas the beginning of a direct trade with China,first mooted in the 1610s and which was to prove ofgreater consequence to the company's fortunes thanthe chimera of trade with Tokugawa Japan. It iswithin this context and that of the changingfortunes of the English company and its Dutch rivalas well as the broader East Asian situation that thebrief, and largely ignored, history of the company'sfactory on Taiwan is worth examining.

The coin described below is in the collection of the American Numismatic Society, New York, and, so far as is known, is a unique specimen. The photograph and technical details are by kind permission of the Society, and the authors are grateful to Dr Michael Bates, Curator of Islamic Coins, for his helpfulness here.

The alloying and distribution pattern of early Indian copper and copper-based artefacts and the occurrence of ingots in some archaeological contexts have been variously discussed in Indian archaeological literature. First, the presence of pure copper artefacts in early Indian archaeological contexts is considered to be symptomatic of the scarcity of alloying agents. For instance, D. P. Agrawal has argued that the presence of 70% of pure copper objects among the analysed Harappan artefacts in this metal is reflective of a problem in the procurement of tin; since this metallic ore was not easily available, evidence of copper alloying is scarce. Secondly, the variations in element composition of alloyed artefacts have generally been regarded as evidence of incomplete knowledge of mixing – E. J. H. Mackay's argument that “mixing of the two metals was performed in a most perfunctory manner ” to explain the variations in the average proportions of tin to copper in Mohenjodaro specimens is evocative of this general approach. Thirdly, not many sites which have yielded copper objects have yielded any positive evidence of manufacture – in some cases this may be due to the limited nature of the excavated data, but on the whole one would argue that the sites which can be described as centres of copper metallurgy are comparatively few and far between in the Indian context. Fourthly, the occurrence of copper ingots at different sites has been generally taken to be indicative of trade in this metal.

In 1405 Sino–Iranian relations hit a nadir. Tīmūr(1336?–1405), never one to bother with the nicetiesof diplomacy, had detained and executed Chineseambassadors sent to his court by the Ming emperorsHung-wu (r. 1368–98) and Yung-lo (r. 1403–24) in1395, 1402 and 1403, had amused himself by regularlyinsulting Emperor Hung-wu, publicly calling him the“Pig Emperor”, and had finally decided to invadeChina to claim it for himself and Islam.Fortunately, for all concerned, Tīmūr drank himselfinto a stupor on the night of 18 February 1405 andexpired at his base camp at Utrār where his troopswere assembling for their march to China. TheChinese campaign was immediately abandoned assuccession suddenly became a more pressing matter.It would continue to occupy Timurid energies until1411 when Tīmūr's fourth son, Shāhrukh (1377–1447)gained control of the empire.

The maps illustrating the archaeological surveys of Sir Aurel Stein's Central Asian expeditions remain to this day the most authoritative map series concerning the location of archaeological monuments in the Tarim Basin and Gansu Corridor of western China. The aim of this article is to evaluate the present-day value of Stein's maps for both relocating known ancient sites and attempting to locate additional sites on more recent maps. Figure i of this article shows the general area surveyed by Stein's expeditions. This study will be divided into three main parts: (i) a general description of Stein's cartographic surveys in terms of the regions of Xinjiang and Gansu surveyed and features depicted; (2) map series covering this region produced since Stein's surveys, and an outline of the history of the treatment of place names on both Stein's and subsequent maps; (3) an in-depth study of the Niya site area to illustrate both the extent to which Stein's original findings can be relocated on recent maps and the value of such maps for locating additional ancient sites.

The recent books by K. N. Chaudhuri and JanetAbu-Lughod are testimony to the rapidly risinginterest in comparative world history in the lastfew years, and both make notable contributions toit. Both are heavily laden with theory, and bothfirmly repudiate the view that modern world historycan be expounded in terms of what happened (ordidn't happen) in western Europe around and after1500.