The caliphate of Hisham ibn ‘Abd al-Malik (105–25/724–43) was undoubtedly one of the most important periods in early Islamic history, and as witness to the history of this era a source of paramount importance is certainly the Ta'rīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk of al-Ṭabarī. This in itself makes the publication of Volume xxv of the English translation of this work by Dr Khalid Yahya Blankinship, covering all but the last five years of Hishām's long reign, a matter of special interest to historians of the eastern lands of Islam. The reader will immediately notice that al-Ṭabarī devotes the bulk of his narrative for this period to events in Khurāsān and Transoxania, specifically, to the Umayyad campaigns there and hostilities with the Türgish khāqān Sü-lü Čur. In the course of this narrative one finds not only a wealth of information on military matters, but also much valuable data on the customs of the western Turks and life in Central Asia in general. The author's reasons for giving his work such a markedly eastern emphasis at this point are not unrelated to a desire, as Blankinship observes, to set forth the background for the 'Abbāsid revolution. But most of what al-Ṭabarī reports for this period is in fact not of immediate relevance to the advent of the 'Abbāsids, and indeed, the subject of 'Abbāsid propaganda activities hardly seems to be a prominent one in this volume.

Bien que l'emploi des bouches à feu soit attesté dans les pays de l'lnde antérieurement, la diffusion de l'artillerie, et de ce que l'on appelle du terme générique conventionnel d'arquebuse, a été, au début du XVIe siècle, le fait de transfuges recherchés pour leur habileté à fondre des canons et à manier l'arme à feu portative. Les plus fameux sont les deux Italiens qui, en 1503, passérent au service du Samorin de Calicut. On trouve ensuite parmi eux des “Turcs” ou “Roumes” – dont la plupart semblent, arrivés au Gujarat en 1507, avoir essaimé après le désastre de Diu de 1509, au service d'autres princes, jusqu'au Bengale et au Pégou – et des “Portugais”, ou réputé tels, dont la trace, une fois passés dans le monde d'en face, se perd le plus souvent. Si les activités de quelques-uns de ces aventuriers, revenant en terre chrétienne, étaient trop notoires pour qu'ils donnent le change, d'autres entouraient de fumée leur curriculum incontrôlable et rachetaient par une version édifiante un moment douteux de leur passé.

It takes a determined sceptic to doubt the attribution of the Svapnavoāsavadatta (SV) to Bhāsa, a playwright Kālidāsa himself named as so favoured in his time that the younger generation of nāṭyakāras had a difficult time getting a hearing. After sifting through the evidence, the most likely conclusion is that the play we have of that name (or a variant), first discovered for Indology by T. Ganapati Sastri in 1909, is a somewhat shorter version of the play known to Śāradātanaya, Rāmacandra and Guṇacandra, Sāgaranandin, Abhinavagupta, Bhoja, and others. And one can scarcely admit the genuineness of SV without accepting the Pratijñayaugandharāyaṇa (PY): the two are perfectly complementary in plot, theme, treatment, and style. But even if we could not locate these two plays among the earliest extant of the whole Sanskrit corpus, we would be justified on aesthetic and thematic grounds in including them in any study of the key works of Sanskrit poetry. The plays are simple, yet charming and sophisticated, and more genuinely dramatic – giving us a more complicated sense of conflicting human interests (especially SV) – than any play except the Mudrārākṣasa (MR) of Viśākhadatta, who, however, completely lacks Bhāsa's lightness of touch. The two plays provide a thematic bridge between Kālidāsa and Viśākhadatta, combining the latter's resolute focus on sentiment-negating political demands (artha, utsāha) with the former's luxuriating treatment of the inner world of erotic emotion (kāma, śrṅgāra).

In my discussion of Khmer jā ‘amcās’, Thai pen cau2 “[who] is the Lord”, occurring in Buddhist texts as an epithet for the Buddha himself or his followers and in contexts referring to the Scriptures, the Doctrine, or relics, I cited two instances from the Wat Sri Chum inscription at Sukhothai, Sd.2/#2, dated to the late fourteenth century, and the inscription from Nakhorn Chum, Kamphaeng Phet, Kb.1/# 3, dated to 1357 in which the expressions cau kū and cau rau “my Lord”, “our Lord” occur.

In 1405 Sino–Iranian relations hit a nadir. Tīmūr (1336?–1405), never one to bother with the niceties of diplomacy, had detained and executed Chinese ambassadors sent to his court by the Ming emperors Hung-wu (r. 1368–98) and Yung-lo (r. 1403–24) in 1395, 1402 and 1403, had amused himself by regularly insulting Emperor Hung-wu, publicly calling him the “Pig Emperor”, and had finally decided to invade China to claim it for himself and Islam. Fortunately, for all concerned, Tīmūr drank himself into a stupor on the night of 18 February 1405 and expired at his base camp at Utrār where his troops were assembling for their march to China. The Chinese campaign was immediately abandoned as succession suddenly became a more pressing matter. It would continue to occupy Timurid energies until 1411 when Tīmūr's fourth son, Shāhrukh (1377–1447) gained control of the empire.

The recent books by K. N. Chaudhuri and Janet Abu-Lughod are testimony to the rapidly rising interest in comparative world history in the last few years, and both make notable contributions to it. Both are heavily laden with theory, and both firmly repudiate the view that modern world history can be expounded in terms of what happened (or didn't happen) in western Europe around and after 1500.