This paper revisits the intersection of the 19th and 20th century to bring into focus hitherto unused archival and diplomatic correspondence from the attempts to define and delimit a boundary between India and China. The theoretical point of departure for the paper is to discern how perception (knowledge, beliefs, and norms) relating to the boundary evolved over time to alter the meaning and construction of the material reality i.e. the boundary itself. In doing so it establishes how what each country deems today, as its ‘traditional customary boundary’ was not an unambiguous fixed one, but was mutable across different time periods. The political importance of the selection of these boundary lines did not lie in their being ‘true’, or in the claim being ‘real’ but in their being shared by a process of political selection, and then being reified in the respective countries.

For the understanding of the period of history to which the name Indo-Greek (in perhaps more precise terminology Indo-Bactrian) is usually given, the reign of Menander has to be treated as central. For the Indo-Bactrian kingdom, this reign must have constituted the main period of stability and consolidation. Whatever we can hope to detect of Indo-Bactrian organizational structure must have assumed during those years its most coherent form. They had been preceded by several decades of expansion and improvization. The aftermath, as we shall attempt to show, was one of division, perhaps of dissension. At neither extreme could we expect a pattern of administrative continuity to stand out from so fragmentary an historical tradition. Since the evidence of texts and archaeology, despite noble efforts that have been devoted to them, is alike scanty for this episode of Macedonian government southward from the Hindu Kush to the eastern fringe of the Panjāb, it is from the copious coinage that inquiry must still be made. We may fittingly dedicate to Sir Mortimer Wheeler, excavator of Menander's capital at Chārsada, a new attempt to interpret the coinage of Menander. His own authority may be cited for the judgment that previous numismatic studies, notwithstanding great merits, have not yet revealed all that the archaeologist needs to know. In an age of technological progress, it may still be said that an excavator's finds of coins, once fully understood, could continue to provide his most accurate indication of dating. The present analysis derives from an inquiry conducted at Kabul during study leave from the School of Oriental and African Studies in the summer of 1969. The writer is indebted to H.E. Dr. Muhammad Anas, Minister of Culture and Information of the Royal Afghan Government, for permission to examine the copious material of the Mir Zakah hoard; to Dr. A. A. Motamedi, Director-General of the Kabul Museum, both for the initial invitation which made the visit possible, and for his generous allocation of the Museum's facilities while the work was in progress; and to Dr. Paul Bernard for his hospitable welcome at the Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan.

The following notes are perhaps somewhat miscellancous, but they may help to re-direct attention to an interesting subject, recalling the history of European studies of it with some of the results obtained. And since the scheme arranged by Mr. Whitley Stokes for cataloguing the Sanskrit works in Indian libraries, private and other, and for obtaining copies of the rarer ones has yielded such excellent results in all departments, it will perhaps be possible for Orientalists now to publish and translate some of the more important Siddhântas and Karaṇas hitherto inaccessible, and which would be most useful in tracing the origins and history of this Indian science.

As regards the Mongols, our knowledge of their history,of their customs, of their way of life, ourrelations with them, England presents an interestingcase. We do not know the extent of the material loston the Continent, but, in this (for the Mongols)remote corner of Europe, (in places safe from theirdevastation) documentation is to be found. A monk ofSaint Albans, the chronicler Matthew Paris who diedin 1259, is an important source. He was the onlyperson to preserve Ivo of Narbonne's confession(which reveals that an Englishman was one of thefirst envoys of the Mongols to King Bela ofHungary), the report of Bishop Peter of Russia givenat the council of Lyons in 1245 and informationabout André of Longjumeau's mission after thecouncil. Incidently, twice at the end of hisChronica Majora, in an entry forthe year 1257, Matthew Paris refers to a manuscriptconcerning ‘Tartarorum immunditias, vitam(spurcissimam) et mores (…) necnon et Assessinorumfurorem et superstitionem’. It is thesame work which is mentioned by John of Oxnead, inhis Chronka under the year 1258, as a writtencommand (mandatum scriptum) sent toSimon de Montfort, containing letters the length ofa Psalter, and entitled De vita et moribusTartarorum (…) et de eorumfortitudine etguerra, et deadquisitionibus which was to be found inthe book of Additions. Unfortunately this work hasnot survived. (Nevertheless it is tempting to seehere a mention of William of Rubruck's report of hisjourney, which has the form of a letter and whichwas written in 1257, but which has littleinformation about the Assassins. Later anotherEnglishman, the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon (†1294) met William of Rubruck and became interestedin the Mongols.)

like Anaw-rahta's conquest of Thahton or the Mongol expeditions against Pagan, Tha-lun's transfer of capital from Pegu to Ava in 1634—5 is one of those prominent transitions in Burmese history which always attract comment in standard surveys. The pioneer historian of Burma G. E. Harvey claimed that the decision by Tha-lun (r. 1629–48) to forsake the coast in favour of the interior signified the abandonment of his predecessors' goal of a Burmese–Mon national kingship, and contributed to the subsequent isolation of the Burmese from international intercourse. D. G. E. Hall, expanding the latter theme, wrote that “(t)he removal of the Burmese capital from Pegu to Ava in 1635 was, without doubt, one of the cardinal events of Burmese history … it signalised the triumph of the more intransigent elements in Burmese character and governmental policy” and contributed ultimately to the political ruin of the country.

From the close of the eighth century A.H. till the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in A.H. 922 the Mamlûk army underwent a slow but steady decline. There were three main causes:—

(a) Economic: the exhaustion of Egypt's rich resources due to the predatory economic system of the Mamlûks.

(b) Military: deterioration of discipline in the army; its excessive occupation with politics; the corrupt practice in one section of the army to obtain, for payment, exemption from participation in military expeditions; neglect of the traditional military training (based mainly on the furûsiyya games); the insufficient use of new methods of warfare arising from the introduction of firearms.

(c) Reduced manpower: the continuous decrease of the population in the native countries of the Mamlûks (especially the steppes of Southern Russia and the Caucasus); the outbreaks of plague in Egypt.

In some verses from the Manichaean Middle Persian hymn-cycle, the Gōwišn īg grīw zīndag, the Light Self, or sum of the light elements in the world, speaks in the character both of the sacred fire of the Zoroastrians, and of the pure water reverenced by them. The editors of these verses pointed out that the use of certain technical terms shows that the Manichaean author had an intimate knowledge of Zoroastrian ritual. The publication since then of further Zoroastrian works has established this fact even more plainly; for it is now apparent that the term zōhr, which occurs twice in the text, is used in fact for two separate Zoroastrian offerings, the offering to fire, the ātaš-zōhr, as well as that to water, the āb-zōhr.

The following remarks were originally drafted to serve as the thirty-seventh Evans-Wentz Lecture in Asian Philosophy, Religion and Ethics at Stanford University in May 2006, and take therefore as their tacit point of departure the work of Walter Y Evans-Wentz (1878–1965). His Tibetan Book of the Dead, first published by Oxford University Press in 1927, long remained the most influential account of the way in which Buddhists confronted their future as mortal beings, though in this lecture the scope of my own inquiry is widened from the individual to encompass fears concerning the transience of human society as a whole. This broader approach, moreover, allows for a degree of innovation. Ever since the era of Evans-Wentz, if not earlier, the problem of presenting the impulses behind traditions as unfamiliar as those of South and East Asia without simply confirming their apparent ‘exoticism’ has been difficult to solve, but over recent years our greatly increased knowledge of the history of the planetary environment that we all inhabit has offered an unprecedented perspective on the widely shared hopes and fears of the past. This is because we now know that at times different regions of the planet were subjected to events caused by the same catastrophic upheavals in climate. By taking one of the best known of these in the sixth century CE – and the information given below by no means exhausts what has been discovered about this phenomenon – and looking at its impact in terms of the sense of foreboding it engendered, it is therefore possible to trace the extent to which Europe and East Asia reacted in similar ways.

Maps are graphic interpretations of real or imaginedspace. Although utilitarian by nature, they are ofintrinsic aesthetic and artistic value. In additionto their material qualities, they are constructs ofthe human mind at a specific time and in a specificculture. Traditionally judged on the basis of theirCartesian rather than artistic qualities, maps arecategorised by their spatial accuracy according to apositivist construct. This criterion has recentlybeen re-examined to address mapmaking acrosscultures and through time. A new definitiondeveloped by the History of Cartography Project notonly treats maps as material culture, but furtherbroadens the concept of the map to include allartifacts that depict space.1 In thistheoretical framework, maps discovered inarchaeological contexts are rare artifacts thatprovide a window into the minds of their makers andusers, the way in which space was perceived, as wellas the relevance and function of maps in ancientsocieties. By definition, this is an attempt toaddress an emic perspective.2

This article is part of a larger effort to broaden the source-base for understanding Mughal-period India by engaging with the Hindi literary archive. I analyze the vignettes of Aurangzeb and other Mughal figures that are available in Lāl Kavi's Chatraprakāś (Light of Chatrasal, c. 1710), a Brajbhasha (classical Hindi) historical poem commissioned by the Bundela ruler Chatrasal (1649–1731). Written shortly after Aurangzeb's death, the Chatraprakāś is in part a retrospective on Aurangzeb's reign. It is also a valuable source of regional history that gives voice to how the Mughal Empire was perceived from a local court that went in and out of political favour. In places, Lāl Kavi engages in trenchant political critique, expressing the court's strong disillusionment with the Mughal manṣabdārī system as well as more local grievances. While by no means the dominant tone of the work, there are occasional hints of the court's outrage at Mughal offenses against what Lal Kavi explicitly terms “Hindu dharma.” Parsing the Chatraprakāś as both poetry and history, I probe the text's complex perspectives on Mughal rule.

In the early 1830s and 1840s, a British colonial official by the name of Colonel James Low uncovered evidence for an early culture with Indic traits in a river system known as the Bujang Valley. On the west coast of the Thai-Malay peninsula, the Bujang Valley is today located in the Malaysian state of Kedah. However, it wasn't until just before World War II that excavations took place, conducted by H. G. Quaritch Wales and his wife Dorothy. Their discoveries and subsequent publications led to the first real attempts to explain the origins and extent of this civilisation and its place within the larger South and Southeast Asian world. In the intervening years between Quaritch Wales's excavations and the present day, considerably more research has taken place within the Bujang Valley, though this has not been without controversy. Recently claims and counter-claims regarding the antiquity of Hinduism and Buddhism at the site have arisen in some quarters within Malaysia. It therefore seems pertinent that this material be re-evaluated in light of new scholarship and discoveries as well as the prevailing paradigms of interactions between South and Southeast Asia. This paper presents an updated reading of this material and argues that the Bujang Valley should be seen as a cosmopolitan trading port with substantive evidence for the presence of Hinduism and Buddhism.

Any complete biography of Qādī an-Nu'mān, the most illustrious of Ismā'īlī jurists, must necessarily be based on two kinds of sources, internal and external. He was a very prolific author, and although not all his works which were extant some 400 years ago have come down to us, a good many of his akhbār and fiqh works are still preserved. It would be necessary to go through all of these and collect all autobiographical information before the definitive biography of the Qāḍī can be attempted. Even purely fiqh works like the Mukhtaṣaru'l-Athār contain occasional references to contemporary events. The brief biography given below does not profess to be exhaustive; it is based in the main on three external sources, which seem to contain all that was definitely known of this great lawyer, the founder and the greatest exponent of Ismā'īlī jurisprudence. The difficulty of writing on Ismā'īlī subjects is well known; it is next to impossible to expect any co-operation from the sectarians themselves. I am trying, however, to obtain information from different sources, and if ever I am able to study all the works extant of the Qāḍī, a more comprehensive biography may be attempted.

The nucleus of the present article was meant in the first instance to be added as a note to a chronological list of definitions of the terms ‘Ṣúfí’ and ‘Taṣawwuf’ chiefly compiled from the Risála of Qushayrí (Cairo, 1287 a.h.), the Tadhkiratu'l-Awliyá of Farídu'ddín ‘Aṭṭár (cited as T.A.), and the Nafaḥátu'l-Uns of Jámí (Calcutta, 1859). These works contain about a hundred definitions of ‘Ṣúfí’ and ‘Taṣawwuf,’ none of which exceeds a few lines in length. I thought that it might be interesting, and possibly instructive, to arrange the most important in their chronological sequence, so far as that can be determined, since only in this way are they capable of throwing any light upon the historical development of Ṣúfiism. The result, however, was somewhat meagre. Taken as a whole, those brief sentences which often represent merely a single aspect of the thing defined, a characteristic point of view, or perhaps a momentarily dominant mood, do undoubtedly exhibit the gradual progress of mystical thought in Islam from the beginning of the third to the end of the fourth century after the Hijra, but the evidence which they supply is limited to a vague outline. Accordingly, I resolved to undertake a chronological examination of the doctrine taught by the authors of these definitions and by other distinguished Ṣúfís, and I have here set down the conclusions to which I have come. I do not claim to have exhausted all the available material.

This article provides an historical review of theArabic rendering of Swahili, while Appendix A (PartsI and II) contains proposals for the development ofArabic script to yield a phonologically adequatewriting system for a variety of Swahili spoken onthe East African coast – the variety known askiMvita (central Swahili), andspoken from just north of T’akaungu to Mombasa, andthence as far south as Gasi. Parallel possibilitiesfor the refinement of romanised script are notconsidered in any detail.

It should be stressed that kiMvita,the variety of Swahili here described, is not thestandardised language. For a number of reasons, theSwahili speech of Zanzibar town, together with theSwahili spoken by Africans from the interior of thecontinent but resident in Zanzibar, were thevarieties of Swahili with which the pioneeringstandardises of Swahili were familiar.

Considering the fact that the Mīmāṃsā, the Vedānta, the Sāṃkhya, and the Yoga schools owe their origin directly to the Vedas, the Brāhmaṇas, and the Upaniṣads, it may be expected that the doctrines of these would have been systematized and put together into the form of the Sūtras earlier than those of the Vaiśeṣika and the Nyāya schools, the essential tenets of which had their beginnings in a later and different kind of literature. This expectation, however, seems to be belied by the fact that the present Sāṃkhya-sūtras have been proved to belong to a very late period, as late as the fourteenth century a.d.; and the Yoga-sūtras are now believed by a number of scholars, following Professors Jacobi and Woods, to be as late as the fourth or fifth century a.d. Now, while the gap of an early systematic work on the Sāṃkhya is filled up by the Sāṃkhya-kārikā, or it may be explained by the surmise that there was an early Sūtra work, either a shorter form of the present one or altogether different from it, which is lost, the Yoga-sūtras are all that we have as a systematic exposition of the Yoga doctrines, and there is no reason to believe that they were preceded by another work of a similar nature. • The question, then, is whether the systematization of such an early school of thought as the Yoga would have been postponed until as late as the fourth or fifth century a.d., and until after the systematization of the doctrines of even the Vaiśeṣika and the Nyāya schools, which began later on, and the Sūtras of which definitely contain a reference to the Yoga doctrines of mystic intuition and concentration.

In Rajasthan, one of the north-western states of India,whoever has heard of the Kāmaḍ (or Kāmaḍiyā) woulddefine them as wandering minstrels or jugglers,singing hymns in praise of Bābā Rāmdeo, a famoussaint from Mārwāṛ, whose footprints they worship.Most people could not say much more about thiscommunity of religious singers who, sinceIndependence, have been listed among the “scheduledcastes”. In any case, everybody seems to be aware oftheir connection with Rāmdeo, a famous folk deity,also popular in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, nowvenerated by devotees of all castes and creeds, butmostly by Hindus, as an avatār ofVishnu-Krishna.

The siwāk or miswāk (pi. masāwīk) isoften mentioned as a symbol for the emphasis givenin medieval Islam to dental health. Although notmentioned in the Qur'ān—the prime source oflegitimacy in Islam—the siwāk gained popularitythrough being attributed to the daily practice ofthe Prophet Muhammad whose advanced understanding ofpreventive dentistry is lauded as being only part ofhis general concern with preventive medicine. Evenon his death bed the Prophet is said not to havegiven up the use of the siwāk, since he alwaysordered Muslims to “purify your mouths for they arethe channels through which utterances of praise toGod (subḥāna Allāh) travel”. Theword siwāk derives from the Arabic rootswk, which indicates rubbing forthe purpose of cleaning. Hence siwāk or miswāk arethe names of the wooden instrument which has beenused as a “tooth-stick”(Zahnstocher), or as an earlyform of the toothbrush, to clean the teeth anddeodorize the mouth. The siwak is a wooden stickabout 8 inches long and as wide as a finger. Theedge is usually chewed so that the fibres separateto become like a brush. In contemporary Islamicethics, of which the fatāwāliterature (legal responsa) is only one example, thesiwāk has regained recognition and is often praisedas the preferred means for dental care.

Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole is considered to fallwithin the group of Indo-Portuguese Creoles, whichwere Portuguese-based Creoles that once flourishedaround coastal India and Sri Lanka. Sri LankaPortuguese Creole arose when the Portugueseestablished trading posts and fortresses in SriLanka from 1517 onwards. The purpose of this paperis to examine critically the influence of substratum(indigenous) languages on Sri Lanka PortugueseCreole.

Before the invention of printing, when copies of a book were few, it was common to find works falsely attributed to an author. The person of unorthodox opinions, like the PseudoDionysius, assigned his works to someone of unimpeachable reputation in order to avoid censorship or other obstacles to circulation. Or a man might insert heretical material into a rival's book to discredit him. Of al-Ghazali's Maḍnūn (? aṣ-Ṣaghīr), D. B. Macdonald wrote: —

“Of course it is quite possible and in accordance with the rules of Muslim polemic that there should also have been in circulation a false Maḍnūn teaching these heretical doctrines. Many such cases occur. A book against the belief in saints was ascribed to Abū Bakr ar-Rāzī (d. cir. 290–320) … and, it was suspected, falsely, in order to bring him into discredit. The same thing happened to ash-Sha'rānī. One of his enemies obtained a copy of his Al-Baḥr al-Mawrūd, left out parts and inserted others of a heretical nature, and then spread it as the original work. In defence ash-Sha'rānī was compelled to lay before the ‘Ulamā’ of Cairo his original copy signed by themselves, and so demonstrate the spuriousness of the other. Again, ash-Sha'rānī had to defend Ibn al-'Arabī against a similar injury. Some hostile theologians interpolated his Futūḥāt with heresy. Even Fakhrad-Din ar-Rāzī suffered from this; and there were enough suchcases for ‘Alī b. Muḥammad al-Miṣrī to make up a list of them. So we need not be at all surprised if this befell al-Ghazālī also …”