It is a great honour for me to be asked to give the Richard Barnett memorial lecture. I knew Richard Barnett well, and had the privilege of working with him at the British Museum for three years before his retirement. He was a great source of inspiration, and I and many others owe him a considerable debt of gratitude. I have chosen as my subject recent British Museum excavations in Assyria, partly because I believe this would have been of some slight interest to Dr Barnett. Both the British Museum and Assyria were close to his heart. He worked in the Museum for more than 40 years, and from 1955 to 1974 was Keeper of the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities. Throughout this time Assyria was a special interest, and Dr Barnett did some of his most important work on Nimrud ivories, the Assyrian reliefs and the Balawat Gates. Inevitably, the role of the British Museum in making these pioneering discoveries in the nineteenth century held a particular fascination for him.

Early in the spring of 1990, Professor Josef van Ess of Tübingen University came to visit me at my home at Oxford. In the course of conversation he asked me about an Ethiopic memorial tablet he had seen in Westminster Abbey. To my chagrin I had to own that the existence of such an inscription was quite unknown to me. In the hope of removing (or at least of mitigating) this stain of inexcusable ignorance, I hastened to the Abbey the following week – only to find it closed to visitors on account of a broadcast recording performance. I then wrote to the Assistant Librarian of Westminster Abbey (Mrs Enid Nixon) who proved to be immensely helpful and knowledgeable and was kind enough to answer my queries and to provide me with precious information. I have since been able to inspect the monument in situ.

L'avènement de la vapeur amena les Britanniques, au XlXème siècle, à établir une ligne de navigation avec l'lnde, par la Mer Rouge, tout en conservant ses grands voiliers de charge par la route du Cap. A partir de 1833 les Packets relièrent Londres à Alexandrie, en Egypte. On traversait l'isthme à dos de mulets, pour retrouver à Suez le confort et la vitesse de vaisseaux permettant d'atteindre 15 milles nautiques, soit près de 30 kilomètres à l'heure.

At some time towards the middle of the twelfth/eighteenth century, the young Najdī scholar Muḥammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb (1115–1206/1703f–92) experienced something like a conversion. From that point on, his understanding of monotheism seems to have been such that he considered most of the professed Muslims of his day to be polytheists who should be fought till they accepted Islam. The first Wahhābī state (1158–1233/1745f–1818) was the product of the fusion of this radical vision with the political fortunes of the Āl Sa'ūd, until then the petty chiefs of the Najdī oasis of Dir'iyya.

The Wakhi language, as represented in particular by those of its dialects that are spoken in Afghanistan and the Soviet Pamirs, has been described in more detail than any other Iranian language of the area that has virtually no written tradition. As early as the middle of the last century scholars began studying the language on the basis of mostly short or fragmentary glossaries and collections of texts and additional material became available during the thirties and fifties of the present century. During the sixties and seventies, two Leningrad Iranists, A. L. Grünberg and I. M. Steblin-Kamenskij, worked intensively on Pamirian Wakhi and the kind of Wakhi spoken in Afghan Badakhshan. Their research culminated in the publication of a rich collection of orally transmitted songs, fairy tales, proverbs, and texts of ethnographic interest, accompanied by a detailed analysis of Wakhi grammar and a comprehensive glossary. The material collected by Grünberg and Steblin-Kamenskij like that published by G. Buddruss and in some older articles by Russian scholars, conforms on the whole to what one would expect to find in an exclusively oral tradition. Apart from the usual kinds of fairy tales and songs we find also a kind of popular poetry unique to Wakhi.

The Kathmandu valley in the seventeenth century was very prosperous, the bulk of its wealth derived from the trade which flowed through the valley between Tibet and the Indian plains. The ancient urban centres of the valley, Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur had emerged early in the century as three separate kingdoms. The tradition of jointrulership, whereby rule of each city-state was shared between branches of the ruling Malla dynasty had collapsed. The three kingdoms were engaged in constant rivalry which intermittently spilt over into open hostility and which consumed much of their energy and wealth. Yet it was also this rivalry which stimulated an era of generous royal patronage of the priesthood and the sponsoring of major pūjās and religious festivals, together with the building of new palaces and temples dedicated to the rulers' favourite deities. Support was extended not only to the artists commissioned to decorate the palaces and shrines, but also to poets, writers and musicians who found their work being encouraged, particularly when Nepalese court life underwent something of a renaissance under Mithila influence. This activity reached a peak during the reign of the enlightened and cultured King Pratapamalla of Kathmandu (1641–74), and under that of his contemporary and rival, King Jagatprakas'amalla of Bhaktapur (1643–72).

The Khalkha River (Khalkhin Gol), which forms part of the north-east frontier between the Mongolian People–s Republic (MPR) and the People's Republic of China (PRC), is famous in Mongolian history for the 1939 Battle of Khalkhin Gol (Nomonhan), in which joint Mongolian-Soviet forces finally repulsed the attempted invasion of the MPR by the Japanese Army of Manchukuo. Less well known, however, is the existence on the left bank of that river of one of Mongolia's most interesting religious antiquities, the remains of a gigantic Buddhist statue, known as the Great Buddha (Ikh Burkhan).

No one has done more over recent years to promote the study of the genre of Chinese literature known as pien-wen in the English-speaking world than Victor Mair of the University of Pennsylvania. Since the discovery of this type of T'ang popular tale among the Tun-huang manuscripts which were recovered at the start of this century, a considerable body of scholarship has been produced to explain its origins and affiliations. The results of all this academic effort are now surveyed in three volumes by Mair: one a selection of translations, one a survey of comparable phenomena outside China, and one (dealt with here) addressed to the main problems raised by the Chinese materials.