One of the most complete and entertaining accounts of the instruments of music of Turkey is that given by the chatty and voluble, though highly imaginative writer, Ewliyā Chelebī 1611– ca. 1669. Although his family held high appointments at the Ottoman court, yet young Ewliyā yearned for a literary career and, like many such Parnassian aspirants, began his public life as a ḥāfiẓ in Aya Sofia on the Lailat al-kaḍr of 1045 (=A.D. 1636), whenhe attracted the notice of Sultan Murād IV, who took him into the royal household. Here he was specially favoured, mainly on account of his musical and literary gifts. He had been taught music and singing by one of the best masters of the day, the Khalwatī dervish 'Umar Gulshanī, who lived to the great age of 140 years, himself having been taught by the eminent shaikh Ibrāhīm Gulshanī (d. 1533–4) of Cairo. After two years' service as a muṣāḥib, Ewliyā began his travels which have made him famous.

In the study of Chinese ceramics, the XVIIth century is a period of particular interest, when many changes took place which affected porcelain production in Jingdezhen, the porcelain centre in China. These were fluctuations in economic activity, social upheaval, political turmoil and foreign penetration in trade. However, very few records, dated material or archaeological finds of this period exist which can provide us with a better understanding. This problem is particularly acute from the late Wanli period (1573–1620) to the reinstatement of imperial supervision in Jingdezhen around 1683, the so-called Transitional Period. For this reason, there is still controversy about dating the porcelain of this period, one which has been overlooked, except for a couple of sentences in books on Chinese ceramic history. This attitude, popular in China, arises partly from the traditional neglect of folk wares, and also from the lack of material evidence available for study. Fortunately, Chinese porcelain of this period has been highly regarded by westerners from the day it reached their countries, and this long-lasting enthusiasm has resulted in several studies which have increased our knowledge of it.

Among the many notable finds of the first season of the ill-starred collaboration of Cambridge and Peshawar Universities in excavations at Shaikhān Dherī, Chārsada, in the autumn of 1963, those in the house or shrine D were outstanding. Here in one of the symmetrical and well oriented insulae of the city was discovered a small building constructed of brick and diaper masonry, probably in early Kushān times, and destroyed around the time of Vāsudeva. The destruction was a result of fire and there was every sign that the building had been hastily stripped of its more valuable contents, if not actually looted, before the final collapse of the roof. In the main and largest room, of some 22 by 18 feet, beneath the fallen ceiling, were a remarkable collection of objects, scattered in disarray and including two seated Buddha figures, a standing Bodhisattva, a seated Hariiti, and a small figure of a four-armed city goddess, all being typical examples of the Gandhāran style and in Gandhāran schist; carved stone relic caskets and stūpas, one inscribed in Kharoṣṭhī; a remarkable relic casket of a fine schist, carved in the form of a cruciform building with four vaulted arms and a central circular opening rabbeted to take a now missing lid which was almost certainly in the form of a dome, the ends of the vaults being carved with miniature reliefs of scenes from the life of the Buddha; and a small broken sculpture in Mathurā sandstone of a seated Buddha in the style of the celebrated Mathurā Katrā Keśava Deva figure. It is a matter of great concern and regret that the proper publication of all this important material has been so long delayed, and that it has not been possible for this extremely productive and important excavation to proceed.

Whilst I was engaged last year in making a catalogue of the Oriental MSS. comprised in the libraries of the Society and the Oriental Translation Committee, I met with the historical MS. which is the subject of the following letter. I, at that time, applied to the Council of the Society for permission to forward a description of the MS. to M. Quatremere, who is employed in editing the only portion of the work hitherto known, in the hope that he would represent the matter to the French Government, and cause our MS. to be published in the “Collection Orientale,” as a sequel to his “Histoire des Mongols.” The council acceded to my request, and I accordingly wrote to M. Quatremère on the subject, but whether on account of my letter not having reached its destination or from the press of business, he has not as yet returned any answer to my communication. In the mean time, I think it desirable that the existence of this important volume should be made known to the public, and I have accordingly drawn up the following account of the MS. for insertion in the Journal of the Society.

All things must come to an end, and this series of papers, now running for ten years, is herewith concluded. This final instalment consists of an index, enabling a reader to find at once any character discussed in the series, with the year of the Journal and the page in the latter where the character appears. Naturally the years cannot pass without disclosing much that could be added or improved or qualified. But remembering that he who begins by revising may end by rewriting, I have left these studies as they were published in the Journal.

The conquest of the Persian and half of the Byzantine Empire by the Arabs, under the banner of Islam in the seventh century, was one of the most extraordinary events in the history of the world. On the one side were ranged the forces of two highly-organized military powers, Imperial New Rome and Imperial Persia, which for over three centuries had been engaged in constant conflict with each other. Although this necessarily tended to exhaust the material resources of the combatants, it would naturally be supposed that it must have given them military experience, and their leaders a training in generalship, adequate to enable them to face with confidence of victory enemies hitherto regarded with contempt as mere barbarians. On the other side we see hosts of men, reared in a country where the conditions of life have always been of the hardest and most precarious, divided by tribal feuds and secular hatreds, poorly armed, with no practice in warfare against disciplined foes, and with no allies to swell their legions. Yet from the beginning the progress of the Arabs was one of almost uninterrupted success.

The most popular instrument of music with both the Arabs and the Persians during what we term the Middle Ages was the lute. It was to them what the lyre and cithara were to the Greeks of old. At the same time it was not an instrument of the people. It was the instrument of the professional musician and all music theory was made conformable to its technique.

In examining the development of colonial capitalism in India historians have increasingly recognized the importance of specific cultural contexts in determining the character of the emergent industrial sector. In particular, the impact of pre-capitalist mores on the recruitment, organization and supervision of industrial workers has been an important concern. In the Calcutta jute industry, for instance, Dipesh Chakrabarty has concluded that the authority of factory sardars was derived largely from a pre-capitalist culture with “a strong emphasis on religion, community, kinship, language, and other similar loyalties”. Similarly, Ranajit Das Gupta's exploration of the industrial labour market in north eastern India has revealed that “indebtedness, primordial loyalties and relations of personal dependency were extensively used to keep labour under control”. Studies of trade union development have also acknowledged the enduring importance of the cultural milieu carried by workers to the mills, mines and plantations of colonial India.

When at Lhasa in 1904 I found, in addition to the two earliest historical Tibetan documents yet known (as notified inthis Journal), a very long inscription of the Chinese emperor Chia-ch'ing, of 1808 a.d., which is of considerable historical interest and importance. It gives an official account of the origin of the Grand Lamaship and of the theory of succession to the same by divine reincarnations; it also prescribes the “Ordeal of the Urn” for the selection of the candidate, one of the steps taken by China to secure political control over the succession to the pontifical throne; and it records the building of the Potala palace at Lhasa as one of “the three Potalas”, and of a fourth “Potala”-academy erected by a Chinese emperor at Jehol, to the north-west of Peking.

The Persian literati have always delighted in poetic symbols and metaphors, and subtle plays on words. Therefore we should not be surprised to find that, during a brief period in the first part of the Ṣafavid dynasty when it was possible to use pictures in patterns and designs, these pictures often held symbolic connotations, conveyed through visual puns. Moreover, it seems that the second meaning carried in these puns usually involved a religious message, relating to the spiritual tradition of those Muslim mystics known as Ṣūfīs, who had great influence at court during that same short period. This clever use of pictures to convey ideas was apparently soon forgotten, after the practice was abandoned. But it comes to light again when we undertake to analyse certain early Ṣafavid designs – especially the patterns on various carpets from that period, known to have been woven between approximately 1520 and 1620 of our era.

Albeit with some deterioration in recent years, Malaysia has a state with high levels of capacity that has achieved sustained economic growth through a commitment to macroeconomic stability and other pro-business measures. Recent comparative historical work argues that this state capacity is an institutional legacy of a specific model of British colonisation. While Malaysia is an amalgam of areas formerly under direct and indirect rule; the former – a model of colonisation characterised by the construction of a legal-rational bureaucracy with extensive geographic reach – was more prevalent. Prior to the transition to independence, the British increased the “direct” nature of their rule by creating a powerful central government that brought the various territories together. And, a concerted transition of power to a cohort of “bureaucrats-turned-politicians” ensured that the new nation's leaders inherited an intact state apparatus. However, a disproportionate number of these senior bureaucrats hailed from Johor, a state formerly under indirect rule - a colonial model associated with small, neo-patrimonial states with limited capacity. By using colonial sources to map the contours and composition of the Malayan state under British and, subsequently, Japanese rule, this article will explore the reasons for this paradox.

The Nyāya-sūtra, which is supposed to be the earliest work extant on Nyāya philosophy, treats of four distinct subjects, viz., (1) the art of debate (tarka), (2) the means of valid knowledge (pramāṇa), (3) the doctrine of syllogism (avayava), and (4) the examination of contemporaneous philosophical doctrines (anya-mata-parīkṣā). The first subject, ample references to which are met with in the old Brahmanic, Buddhistic, and Jaina works, seems to have been first handled by a sage named Gotama or Gautama, who is reputed to have flourished in Mithilā (North Behar) about 550 b.c. The second subject, which is also referred to in old books, was associated with the art of debate at a very early stage. These two subjects, combined together, constitute the Tarka - śāstra (the philosophy of reasoning), popularly known as Gautamī vidyā (the Gotamide learning).