The one text that has influenced the history of Jewish – not to mention Christian – mysticism and apocalyptic literature more than any other is undoubtedly the book of Ezekiel; and the single most influential passage in it is undoubtedly the opening chapter, centring on Ezekiel's vision of the “likeness of the glory of God”.

According to Musil, the bedouin of North Arabia know five seasons, distinguished by different types of rain or its absence. The rains within each season are also thought to be governed by particular stars. The following table sets out these five seasons with the associated rains and stars.

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.

Since the Shī'ī response to constitutionalist notions of government is potentially a very large subject, for the purposes of this discussion Shī'ī will be taken to mean the members of the orthodox 'ulamā, those most committed to the sharī'a and learned in its precepts. Whilst even within this group there is a wide diversity of opinion, it is hoped that, by looking at works written over a longer period, the discussion will show that the response by a particular ‘ālim to constitutionalism is to some extent influenced by the political conditions prevailing at the time of writing. These form a factor together with the restrictions imposed by the sharī'a in shaping the views of particular writers. The ideology under consideration is constitutionalism, but it will be observed that for a large part the subject matter treated consists of ideas such as representation, consultation, legislation, freedom and equality, which are allied to the constitutionalist theory of government, rather than the complete theory itself.

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.

The siwāk or miswāk (pi. masāwīk) is often mentioned as a symbol for the emphasis given in medieval Islam to dental health. Although not mentioned in the Qur'ān—the prime source of legitimacy in Islam—the siwāk gained popularity through being attributed to the daily practice of the Prophet Muhammad whose advanced understanding of preventive dentistry is lauded as being only part of his general concern with preventive medicine. Even on his death bed the Prophet is said not to have given up the use of the siwāk, since he always ordered Muslims to “purify your mouths for they are the channels through which utterances of praise to God (subḥāna Allāh) travel”. The word siwāk derives from the Arabic root swk, which indicates rubbing for the purpose of cleaning. Hence siwāk or miswāk are the names of the wooden instrument which has been used as a “tooth-stick” (Zahnstocher), or as an early form of the toothbrush, to clean the teeth and deodorize the mouth. The siwak is a wooden stick about 8 inches long and as wide as a finger. The edge is usually chewed so that the fibres separate to become like a brush. In contemporary Islamic ethics, of which the fatāwā literature (legal responsa) is only one example, the siwāk has regained recognition and is often praised as the preferred means for dental care.

The city of Yazd is situated on the edge of the Dasht-i Kavīr in the Ardistān-Yazd basin, which stretches some 250 miles from near Kāshān to south of Bāfq. It lies at a height of 4,000 ft. West of Yazd, the Shīr Kūh massif rises to 13,370 ft. It receives considerable moisture including heavy snow but the rainfall of Yazd itself is less than 5 in. per annum. Near Yazd groundwater which originates in the Shīr Kūh mountains follows a northward slope from Mihrīz towards Ardakān. Before the sinking of semi-deep power-operated wells from about 1950 onwards, Yazd obtained its water from long qanāts originating in the mountains west of Taft and Mihrīz. The qanāts of the villages to the north-west of Yazd tap water in the highest elevations of the basins to the north-east. Some of these qanāts flow underneath Yazd, while a few originate in Yazd itself.

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.

Robert Orme is probably now chiefly remembered as the author of the History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan. First published in 1763 and 1778, the History was widely admired in its time. Since then, however, Orme has been steadily displaced by later historians from James Mill onwards. The result is that today he is hardly read at all. The purpose of this article is to rescue Robert Orme from the anonymity to which he has been relegated.

L'histoire de Khuttal' au Moyen-Age a éveillé l'intérêt de plus d'une génération de chercheurs, mais le caractére fragmentaire des informations fournies par les sources écrites n'a permis de se faire qu'une idée schématique de cette région, pourtant importante aussi bien sur le plan politique qu'économique.

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.

By the ghats in Benares, a young woman appears at the head of a small procession composed of her relations, some priests and a band of musicians. The procession moves towards the corpse of a man, draped in cloth and laid out at the edge of the river. They are observed by an Englishman who experiences a mixture of emotions: his horror and moral outrage do not entirely destroy his delight that he is about to witness an instance of what he considers a most fascinating Hindu custom–sati. The date is October 1781, and the Englishman is the artist William Hodges.

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 popular image of pre-1950 Tibet is of a remote land seldom visited by outsiders. But more than a hundred British officials served in Tibet during the early part of this century. Between 1904 and 1947 Agents from the Indian Political Service, and supporting staff, were stationed in Gyantse and Yatung, under the control of the Political Officer in Sikkim. An Agency was also maintained at Gartok in Western Tibet, where a native officer was posted as the Trade Agent. After 1936 a mission was stationed at Lhasa. The last British official in Lhasa, Hugh Richardson, departed in 1950 following the Chinese invasion of Tibet. For the British Trade Agents, an almost forgotten section of British colonial administration in Asia, Tibet was an official posting. Their isolation, and the lack of trade, meant that they had the time to study a variety of aspects of Tibet, and to gain a great knowledge of the country and its people.

This study has a limited object, but it touches upon a pregnant theme. Not long ago it was supposed that Indian texts which resembled Western were either so clearly older than the latter that, if contact could be posited, the latter must have learnt from the former, or the themes must be testimony to a common inheritance of the sundered portions of an Indo-European “race”. The relative dates of texts have come into question, and the prospect that Indian authors could have been inspired, at least in part, by Western authors (obvious in some contexts) is no longer alarming. That Buddhist authors could have learned from Judaeo-Christian stories is no longer surprising, or baffling.A later movement of Buddhist stories westwards is proved (as is well known) by the story of Barlaam and Ioasaph attributed to St John Damascene; and I recently stumbled across a piece of Buddhist mythology adapted to a Jewish situation. 4 Since this is the immediate cause of the present disclosure a very brief summary is needed.

I have read Dr Nigel Allan's article in the above issue of the most attractively revamped JRAS with great interest, partly because the Constantinople 1505 printing of Rashi's commentary to Exodus 28:6 (reproduced on p. 351) reminds me strongly of the Constantinople 1519 printing of the Hebrew letter from Prester John to “the Pope at Rome”, and partly on account of some pregnant differences in Rashi's text as between the Wellcome version and that in the Miqra'ot Gәdolot of the well-known Warsaw 1874 edition.

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).