The Indian Ocean has for at least two thousand years served as a highway for the exchange of goods and ideas, and the cultural links between the lands bordering it are perhaps closer than over any other region of comparable size. The length of voyages undertaken since early times has been very great, as is forcefully demonstrated by the Indonesian colonization of Madagascar in the first centuries A.D. Commerce has been facilitated by the monsoon which in the western part of the ocean blows for roughly half the year from the northeast and for half in the opposite direction. The eastern and western shores of the western part of the basin share much the same climate and are suited to similar ways of life.

The Broach (Bharoch) hoard found in 1882, though its publication is statistically incomplete, offers evidence of the movement and import of valuta into western India during the 13th and more particularly the 14th century. Broach and Cambay were the principal ports of Gujarat during this period. The hoard, found in a brass pot, consisted of 448 gold coins, besides pieces of coins and a small ingot, and about 1,200 silver coins and pieces. The coinages represented are those of Genoa, Venice, Egypt, Armenia, Persia, southern Arabia and the Dehfi Sultanate. With the exception of two 12th-century coins the dates of minting fall between A.D. 1260 and 1382, which we may take to be the approximate date of burial.

Early in 1944, while I was holding charge of the Mansehra Subdivision of Hazara District in the North-West Frontier Province (then part of India), the following tale was told to me briefly by my friend Muḥammad Ẓarf Khn, a member of the leading family of Kuki Khel Afridis of Tirh, who was at that time serving as Political Tahsildar at Oghi. Tirh is, of course, the celebrated tribal tract lying west of Peshawar in present-day Pakistan. I wrote the tale down exactly as Muhammad Zanf told it to me. To enable the story to be more easily understood, I have slightly expanded the narrative, but I have not added any element which was not in the original version. I see no reason to doubt that the story is, as its narrator claimed, one of the traditional tales which are told round the hearth in the hill-country of Tirah to which he belongs.

Scrupulousness is associated, where it occurs spontaneously, with certain personality-types, and with certain neurotic conditions. A scrupulous person is somewhat difficult to live with. Where it is a cultural constant, and is observed in and by a whole mass of indiscriminate humanity, it is another phenomenon. The Jewish civilization is familar with the double standard. There is the norm, to which everyone should conform: and there are two extremes, that of the Men of Sodom, who are the dogs in the manger, who will never do the righteous thing even if it costs them nothing, and, on the other hand, the ḥasidm, who are scrupulous. The double standard implies that there are persons, and groups who are voluntarily associated, who choose to be more careful than the average, and though their scrupulosity does not impugn the righteousness of the average, it provides some kind of control upon it, and vice versa. Even the average are exhorted in the Mishnah to build a fence about the Law. This is a normative principle of Pharisaic origin, to the effect that one should so conduct oneself as never to place oneself within reach of breaking the negative commandments. This is scrupulosity, and the difference between the average observant Jew and the Hasid is (in this respect) that the Hasid will pursue the principle, if need be, to his own cost. A good example of the Mishnaic principle in general practice was the 39 stripes: a man was flogged 39 times, so as not to infringe the biblical precept of 40 lashes: one kept just within the margin of the Law.

Western sinologists dealing with texts of any antiquity are usually as aware as their East Asian colleagues of the importance of textual scholarship as the foundation of their studies. Yet despite the considerable sophistication of the techniques developed in the West for editing the texts of our own classical heritage we have until now largely left the collation of Chinese texts to East Asian scholars working on the basis of their indigenous academic traditions, and have generally been content to accept their results even in cases where these are clearly somewhat unsatisfactory. Paul Thompson's magnificent study shows that there is no need to let this situation continue. Taking an ancient work which has been the subject of conspicuous foul play on the part of pre- modern Chinese scholarship, he has produced a book which is in every sense of the word an exemplary demonstration of how the most rigorous techniques of textual and bibliographic analysis should now be applied to problems which have been ignored for too long.