This article examines seemingly monotheistic, polytheistic and dualistic features of Zoroastrianism from the point of view of the Zoroastrian creation myth. Exploring the personality of the principal deity, Ahura Mazdā, the origin of the spiritual and material worlds and the worship of the Yazatas, it is argued that Zoroastrianism has its own particular form of monotheism.

In medieval Islamic times and afterwards, the kuttāb was a modest institution for elementary education, with most emphasis being placed on learning the Qurʾān by heart―hence a ‘Qurʾānic school’ in English. Thus far, the topic of the kuttāb has been addressed by only a few modern works, leaving inadequately researched a number of critical related issues. This article is an attempt to give insights into the intellectual development of Muslim pedagogy in such archetypal primary schools. It looks into the teaching programmes and methods adopted for that intellectual preparation as well as their assumptions, rationales, implications, and consequences. The kuttāb's objectives are usually thought of as being universally identical, to help in the formation of a good Muslim. The picture, however, was more multifaceted, and the objectives, as well as means of their realisation, were moulded based on what a ‘good Muslim’ would mean according to those in command. Administrating the katātīb was a source, and a symptom, of competitive rivalry between the different intellectual tendencies in medieval Islam, who jostled for control over these critically significant institutions. The article thus delves into the intellectual, cultural, and socio-economic contexts in which primary education materialised and was practiced in pre-modern Islam.

“Soon after my arrival in Nipál (now six years ago), I began to devise “means of procuring some accurate information relative to Buddhism: “for, though the regular investigation of such a subject was foreign “to my pursuits, my respect for sci ence in general led me cheerfully “to avail myself of the opportunity afforded, by my residence in a “Bauddha country, for collecting and transmitting to Calcutta the “materials for such investigation. There were, however, serious “obstacles in my way, arising out of the jealousy of the people in “regard to any profanation of their sacred things by an European, and “yet more, resulting from the Chinese notions of policy adopted by this “government. I nevertheless persevered; and time, patience, and “dexterous applications to the superior intelligence of the chief minister, “at length rewarded my toils.

In presenting to the Royal Asiatic Society the accompanying two specimens, in crystal, of the Sri Jantra, it will be proper to offer some explanation of the manner in which they came into my hands; of the use to which they are applied by the Hindus; and of the meaning, and apparently great antiquity, of the mysterious symbol of the Double Equilateral Triangle.

In a letter received on the 1st March last from Major Kittoe, engaged in antiquarian researches under the Bengal Government, he informed me that in excavating the mound constituting the rain of the great Buddhist temple of Sárnáth at Benares, he had turned up some scores of miniature chaityas in baked clay, the base of many of them being impressed with an inscription in the carly Deva Nágarí charecters in a seal form. Some of the chaityas being broken transversely at the base, it was found that an independent seal with an inscription, not in itaglio, but in cameo, was enclosed in the base; and that the seal was first prepared and hardened, and the chaitya then fashioned round it while the clay was plastic, was manifest by the raised letters of the seal having imbedded themselves in the clay, and leaving fac-similes of their forms. Major Kittee readily discovered that the seals or stamps comprised the Buddhist religious dogma, or confession of faith, “Ye dhama,” &e.or “Ye dharma,” &c., as it happened to be in Páli or Sanskrit, and he refers their date from the form of the Deva Nágarí letters to the early part of the eleventh century; but why these chaityas, the first of the kind met with, stamped with the confession of faith or containing a seal with the dogma in relief letters upon it should have been lodged with in the temple, Major Kittoe does not discuss. As the discovery of the chaityas is new in antiquarian research in India, and as there are certain circumstances connected with this confession of faith being met with in different parts of India in mongrel Sanskrit, I have thought that a drawing of a chaitya and of the enclosed seal, together with a few remarks upon the confession of faith, might be acceptable for reference in the Journal of the Society.

An indigenous record of the nomade tribes of Tartary, who shook the world with their conquests during the middle ages, would no doubt form an interesting episode in universal history. Although the Mongols made their power to be felt from east to west, comparatively little was known in Europe of their actual condition; but that little is sufficient to stimulate curiosity, and while the names of Genghiz and Tamerlane have gained a world-wide celebrity, very much that pertains to their people, as a nation and as individuals, is left to be filled up by the imagination. Tokens of former grandeur are still to be met with in the northern wilds, suggesting to the mind of the traveller a host of questions, which receive no satisfactory solution from the erratic nomades who inhabit those sterile regions. How many monarchies were overthrown by these children of the desert; how many kingdoms reduced to desolation; how many nations subdued, their power broken, and their inhabitants dispersed ? Questions allied to something higher than the mere inquisitive faculty attach to some of these points; and, while we scan the débris of bye-gone generations, we are impelled by the conviction that all efforts in that direction are auxiliary to the more mature knowledge of the history of the human racé.

The subject of this Memoir was born in the year 1779. He was the fourth son of the eleventh Lord Elphinstone, by Anna, daughter of Lord Buthven. The Elphinstone family is one of great antiquity in Scotland, and many of its members took a considerable part in the political events of their times. It maybe sufficient, as connected with the present sketch, to mention that Mr. Elphinstone's father was a General Officer in the British army, was for some time Governor of Edinburgh Castle, and sat for several Parliaments as one of the representative peers of Scotland; also, that several of his relations were connected about the middle of the last century with the trade and settlements in the East. Mr. Elphinstone's uncle, Mr. Fullerton Elphinstone, was, for many years, a Director of the East India Company; and to this circumstance we may attribute the destination of Mr. Elphinstone, and one of his brothers, to the Civil Service of India.

Writing in Isfahan in 729/1328-9, Ḥusayn b. Muḥammad b. Abī l-Riżā ʿAlavī Āvī produced a translation into Persian of the eleventh-century Arabic Risālat Maḥāsin Iṣfahān (‘Epistle on the Merits of Isfahan’) of Mufaḍḍal b. Saʿd b. al-Ḥusayn al-Māfarrukhī. This article explores the context for and purposes of Āvī’s translation-adaptation with particular reference to the extensive system of networks active in western Iran during the reign of the Ilkhan Abū Saʿīd (r. 716-36/1316-35). It is proposed that Āvī intended his translation to provide a means of entry into the urban élites and an affiliation with the administrative circles associated with the vizier Ghiyāth al-Dīn Muḥammad (d. 736/1336), a son of Rashīd al-Dīn Fażl Allāh, who occupied a position at the apex of this system of networks.

Ancient tombs and hoards across the Eurasian steppe call for a thorough revision of art-historical categories associated with pastoral societies from Mongolia to Crimea. This study focuses on one such category. “Animal style” is an umbrella term traditionally used to categorise portable precious metalwork ornamented with dynamic scenes of vigorous animal fights and entwined zoomorphic designs. With its emphasis on irregular animal anatomies and deeply rooted in a “pars-pro-toto” mode of expression, steppe imagery of fantastic fauna presents a useful case study in broader investigations of composites in the ancient world and their diffusion across cultural spheres. This study views beasts through a binary lens, the structured monsters of Greco-Roman thinkers and the organic composites of nomadic steppe artisans. In the Western canon, “composites” existed within a politically-manufactured framework of governable “otherness”, in which fantastic fauna conveys a certain tension with the exotic, unknown and uncontrollable East. Meanwhile, in the visual rhetoric of steppe artisans, monsters represented a tension with the (cyclical) shifts occurring in one's biota rather than the tumultuous events in one's constructed environment. This paper explores how the contrasting steppe pastoralist and sedentary imperial world-views came to define the various functions and meanings of “composites” in Eurasian Antiquity.

When the Tagebuch of Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921) was published in 1978, it was widely expected that the work would prove to be a mine of information on the life and career of its celebrated author. What was not expected was that so much of this information should consist of bitter criticism and empassioned invective directed against leading personalities in the social and intellectual circles of Budapest and Hungary, particularly in the Jewish community of which Goldziher himself was a leading member. The contrast between the image of the dispassionate and meticulous researcher presented to the public in so many of Goldziher's seminal studies on the religion and culture of Islam, and that of the outraged and sorrowing diarist manifest in the Tagebuch, was most striking.

This analysis of certain rock carvings at Jabal Jusasiyah Qatar is in the form of an Archaeological Report, but is not a full Archaeological Survey. This has been carried out by others – (Hans Kapel Arryan, Qatar National Museum Journal, 1983, pp. 1–126) for Jabal Jusasiyah Qatar. A systematic procedure is adopted for the analysis of a number of these petroglyphs at the sites in Qatar.

The Geography of Mesopotamia during the epoch, of the Baghdād Caliphate has not, I think, received the attention which the subject deserves. With the exception of the small maps found in the Spruner-Menke Atlas, I believe no detailed description or delineation of the country at this date has been attempted. Yet it must be admitted that the history of the Abbasids is almost incomprehensible without such an aid; for the physical and political condition of the country was not then what it is now, as a glance at the accompanying map will show.

That “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”, Rudyard Kipling has impressed on us, and the dictum is widely accepted as an article of popular faith. But as an axiom it is not be to pressed without certain qualifications.

Beyond doubt there prevail certain antipathies, dissympathies, and as it were static estṛangements of populations, deeply rooted in racial sub-consciousness, but capable of becoming profoundly dynamic under appropriate stimulation and appeal.

In offering the following notes I would especially ask for consideration on the part of students of Sinitic languages. I in no way pretend to be familiar with these forms of speech, and I must explain that, while I shall be grateful for criticisms on their part, my remarks are not directly addressed to them, but rather to those students of philology who have not made a special study of Chinese, but who, for purposes of comparison, are compelled to acknowledge a bowing acquaintance with all, or nearly all, the tonic languages of Asia.