During the summer of 330 b.c. Alexander the Great pursued the Persian king Darius III through Northern Media, past the Caspian Gates, and eastward into the Achaemenid satrapy of Parthava (Parthia). Upon reaching Darius, Alexander found the king murdered by the usurper Bessus. The Macedonian thereafter advanced east for three more days until he arrived at the wealthy city which was later to be called Hecatompylos. It is the problems of Hecatompylos and the several related questions of its home district, called Comisene by the Greeks, which this paper will consider.

It was a pleasant surprise during the Christmas vacation of 1966 to receive a letter from a Mrs. C. T. Williams, who described herself as “a graduate student in oriental art history at Harvard University” working on Khotanese painting, and enclosed the four photographs which are now published here. They provide four previously unpublished Khotanese inscriptions, which, though difficult to read and providing little information, are of interest because of their occurrence on objets d'art. Three are written in the late cursive script and one (Kha. i C 0096) in the old square script.

If it were not for the birth of Mahāvīra amongst the Nāya-Khattiyas of Kuṇḍapura, we should probably never have heard of this people. It is mainly in connexion with the last Tīsrthaṅkara of the Jainas and the doctrine of severe asceticism which he expounded that we find a few references to the Nāyas and some scanty allusions to their political institutions in the sacred books of the Jainas, the Pāli Canon, the commentaries on these texts, and some later epigraphic records. No study of their political institutions has yet been undertaken, but the scattered data collected from these sources do present a fairly cohesive whole; though some points remain vague owing to the dearth of material.

The traditional forms of landholding and the government's land policy are two problems in the study of the nature of social change in 19th-century Western India; as the necessary aetiology of agrarian movements they are also linked with the organization and idiom of popular protest on the one hand, and the structure and temper of official institutions on the other. The Khandesh Survey riots are a microcosm of these problems as they existed in a raīyatwārī (peasant-proprietary) area of the Bombay Presidency, five years before the Mutiny. An analysis of the agrarian relations—partly as seen articulated in the movement of the riots—seems to have an undiminished relevance for later periods, and may perhaps qualify an impression of the Bombay raīyatwārī system as one where the government as landlord had a uniformly direct relationship with a standard cultivatortenant.

The Thai kingdom of Ayudhyā endured several periods of crisis during its long history from 1350 to 1767, but the crisis which will concern us here happened in 1592. During that year the king, Nareśvara, was well aware that he lived in a hostile world of unusually wide dimensions. His behaviour will be discussed as a basis for a brief consideration of Ayudhyā's attitude towards the world, a subject of more than diplomatic interest.