Although it is difficult to envisage the history of Islamic art without considering the role of ornament, many distinguished scholars have found it an embarrassment. Professor Necipoğlu's achievement here is to have written an exhaustive historical analysis of the angular interlace (girih) and its 3-dimensional counterpart, the muqarnas and their place in the ornament of Islam as a whole.

1. Bray's excellent work (1909, 1934) on Brahui, the Dravidian language spoken, so improbably, in Baluchistan, could not help but be used to the full by Burrow and myself in our 35 years of work on Dravidian etymologies. My very short contact, no more than eight hours, with Brahui speakers at the Chanhu-daro excavation early in 1936 (Emeneau, 1937) had stimulated me and provided a background for intensive etymological study based on Bray's material. This resulted in my publications, especially in 1962, reprinted in part and with some slight change in 1980a (pp. 315–49). In this latter publication (p. 318) I ventured a statement: ‘More descriptive field-work would certainly provide [more material on the language]. Whether much more would emerge to add to Bray's account is uncertain. Certainly it seems that vocabulary additions would probably include no new items from the Dravidian heritage’.

The Gurung language made its Bulletin début in 1955 with an article by Burton-Page: ‘Two studies in Gurungkura: I. tone; II. rhotacization and retroflexion’ (BSOAS, 17/1, 1955, 111ff.). Since tone is the subject of one of these studies, it might seem that there would be little point in adding a further study of that same topic, important though it is; but a different dialect can lead to a considerable difference in the appearance of Gurung phonology as a whole, and so, too, can a difference in technique of analysis. As Burton-Page himself writes: ‘it should be mentioned that the material presented here is relevant only to the Ghandrung dialect, which of the four or five major Gurungkura dialects is accorded the greatest prestige-value by the Gurungs themselves’; his informant was G./Lieut. Ganesh Gurung, M.C., 1/2nd K. E. O. Goorkha Rifles (Burton-Page, 1955: 111).

In terms of number of speakers, Tibeto-Burman vies with Indo-European for the title of the world's largest language family. Yet by comparison little is known of its past. In linguistic terms, eastern Eurasia has always been much more of a terra incognita than western Eurasia. Speakers of Tibeto-Burman languages occupy a vast area in the heartland of eastern Eurasia, but Tibeto- Burman peoples are by no means the only inhabitants of the Orient. Yet at one time it was believed that virtually all languages spoken by what was impressionistically called ‘the Mongoloid race’ or ‘Mongolian races’ belonged to a vast language family known as Turanian. In the middle of the last century, Friedrich Max Müller, a celebrated champion of this theory, divided the languages of the Old World into three language families.

Sir Henry Wellcome (1853–1936), the founder of the Wellcome Trust, left at his death a superb collection of oriental materials relating to medicine which is now housed in the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London.1 Although he had a keen interest in China, which is reflected in the substantial collection of Chinese materials, he never made any systematic effort to acquire Japanese materials. Nevertheless, the Japanese collection contains a number of rarities and items of bibliographical or medical interest, and the most significant are described below.

The literature on the cultural interrelations of East and West published up to the present time is enormous. Even so, every new scholarly study in this field cannot but provoke interest, so important is the topic, particularly today in the era of so-called globalization. The books under review here, edited and introduced by Andrew Gerstle (SOAS) and Anthony Milner (ANU),1 are based on papers presented at conferences held by the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University. The theme of the conferences—‘Europe and the Orient‘—attracted a great number of specialists in art history, musicology, anthropology and history, Asianists and Europeanists, from Europe, the United States and Australia. It is worth noting that the most of the papers are based on published works in which their authors have discussed the same or closely related topics. In presenting the principal ideas of those publications, these collections of papers form a ‘miniature library’ of works on East-West comparative cultural studies. The interdisciplinarity of the articles—their extraordinary ‘polyphony’, the diversity of their often mutually contradictory and polemical approaches, judgements and evaluations—reveals the complexity, multifacetedness and theoretical difficulties which are only too characteristic of the study of comparative culture. The reader is here provided with quite a complete picture of the contemporary state of the field, as well as of the strong and weak sides of its investigations. This breadth of coverage is one of the main strengths of the volumes.

Nankingese is today classed as a Jiānghuái Mandarin dialect. As recently reported (Liú, 1994), velar initials do not occur before high front vowels in this language except in the two vernacular words ki11 ‘give’ and k ′ i ‘go’. There is, however, a series of palatal initials, , which appear exclusively before high front vowels; and in certain instances these consonants correspond to the gutturals k-, k′-, and h- in more conservative dialect groups such as Cantonese, Hakka, and Min. This suggests that the Nanking palatals in these instances have developed from earlier velars through a process of palatalization. The present paper will attempt to trace and date this process.

One of the arguments for supposing that the ‘world's earliest printed book’, the Diamond Sūtra in the Stein collection in London, is actually the outcome of a long process of development relies on the very high quality of the images contained in the frontispiece. It is possible, of course, to point to much more crudely formed Buddha images stamped on paper from the same source at Tunhuang, but the dated examples that have been studied are actually later than the Stein Diamond Sūtra itself.1 The practice of printing Buddha images on paper and silk in India is attested in 792 by the Nan-hai chi-kuei nei-fa chuan of I-ching who was in India 673–85, and Paul Pelliot for one was prepared to believe that this practice, using Chinese materials, was originally derived from China itself.2 Frustratingly enough, however, no Chinese source has so far been identified which clearly mentions printing on paper at any point earlier than I-ching's text, which itself does not antedate by more than half a century or so the earliest printed materials we actually possess, notably in the form of a dharaṇī from Korea.3