It would, of course, be possible in the case of a man such as Sir Ralph Turner to devote an entire lecture to an extended obituary. Several full obituaries have already been published, but a brief notice of some salient features of his life and career are still, perhaps, in place in a Memorial Lecture in his honour. Ralph Lilley Turner was born in 1888 and educated at The Perse School, Cambridge, and at Christ's College, Cambridge. He entered the Indian Education Service and during the First World War he served with the Gurkha Rifles. After the war he was Professor of Indian Linguistics at Benares University, until he was appointed to the Chair of Sanskrit in London. In 1937 he became Director of the School of Oriental Studies, soon to become the School of Oriental and African Studies, until 1957. He was knighted in 1950, and from 1957 he spent an active retirement working almost until his death in 1983 on the final stages of the supplements to his life's work, the Comparative Dictionary of the Indo-Aryan Languages.

There is a good deal that is tantalizing and rather sad about the life and work of G. H. Luce who has a claim to be considered the most distinguished British scholar to explore Burma's past, with only Sir Arthur Phayre as his peer. Both were pioneers. Both explored Burma's history with deep sympathy and insight. Phayre left as his monument a complete history from the earliest times to the British occupation. In certain respects, for example in his scheme of periodization, this remains the model for his successors. Luce produced a corpus of specialized studies which greatly extended knowledge of the sources of Burma's early medieval history and the details of its infrastructure - far beyond the range of Phayre's researches. Yet he did not nurture his work to full fruition.

The two letters which form the subject of this short paper have come into my possession as part of the Amharic documents left by the noted Orientalist Eugen Mittwoch (1876–1942) and generously passed on to me by his widow (since deceased) and his daughters (who now occupy senior academic posts at University College, London, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, respectively).

This seal, of unknown provenance, has an Aramaic inscription which is engraved on a scaraboid hematite pierced lengthwise. It measures 17×13 mm, with 9 mm of thickness. The oval surface, which is slightly damaged at one point, is divided by a double line into two registers. Six letters are engraved in the upper, and five in the lower register, giving the following reading:

The letters are fairly large and fill the whole space. All the letters in the upper register stand at the same height on the double line. Normally, however, lamed is higher than the ceiling line of the other letters, while nun and taw are usually drawn with a stroke which goes below the bottom line formed by the other letters. In the lower register the taw and the two nuns seem to go farther down than the alef and the dalet.

The history of early settlement of the East African coast is currently interpreted in widely differing ways. One view takes as its premise the idea that the coast was first colonized from Asia. This hypothesis, which has its roots in the work of XlXth century historians suggests that there was substantial settlement by non-Africans who established trading and religious communities. These colonies formed the basis of what has come to be known as the Swahili Culture. At first defensible peninsulas and offshore islands were chosen as safe refuges from the African tribes of the interior. Eventually contact was established between these new communities and the African coastal peoples, to the benefit of both parties. Raw materials were obtained from the hinterland of these trading outposts, which were traded and taken across the Western Indian Ocean on the seasonal monsoons. The foreign merchants married local African women and an Afro-Arab culture developed, building stone towns, mosques, and tombs, that still remain today along the coastline from Somalia to Mozambique.

During the early winter months of 1982, the members of the Tihāmah Expedition, under the leadership of Anderson Bakewell, carried out research in a number of disciplines in the Red Sea coastal plain area of the Yemen Arab Republic. The team included a musicologist, an artist, an ornithologist and wildlife artist, an architect, an architectural artist, an archaeologist and an ethnographer. To augment their own research papers, the members of the expedition invited other contributors to join them in helping to produce the book under review. These contributors included an historian, the directorgeneral of the Tihāmah Development Authority, an agronomist, a zoologist, two lepidopterists, an Arabist and a botanist. The book has been edited by Francine Stone, who was expedition administrative officer, as well as ethnographer.

Composed somewhere between 1040 and 1054, Fakhr al-Dīn As'ad Gurgānī's metrical romance of Vīs and Rāmīn celebrates the adulterous love of Queen Vīs and the King's younger brother, Rāmīn. In his introduction the poet informs us that the tale of Vīs and Rāmīn enjoyed great popularity in his time although it was not widely understood in its Pahlavi version or satisfactorily rendered into New Persian. Based on a lost Pahlavi original, Gurgānī's version takes place in ancient Zoroastrian Iran. Scholars have variously identified its setting as Sasanian (A.D. 226–651) and Arsacid Iran (247 B.C.–A.D. 224). Perhaps our scant knowledge of the Arsacid nobility prevents us from deciding between an Arsacid and a Sasanian setting; moreover, even if the story is of Arsacid origin, its subsequent adaptations and interpretations must have altered its original characteristics.

The study of decorated glassware from the early Islamic period hinges very largely on the classification and dating of fragments, since few complete vessels have survived. Perhaps for this reason the subject, though full of interest for the glass historian, has received rather scant attention in the literature. The purpose of this article is to suggest that surviving examples of painted lustre glass from this period enable us to identify several ways in which manuscript models were used by glass craftsmen in the sphere of early Islam.

“If all you have to tell us is that one barbarian succeeded another barbarian on the banks of the Oxus or Jaxartes, what benefit have you conferred on the public?” Voltaire's question is an awkward one for anyone investigating the transmission and distribution of power in the XVth century Circassian Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria. Even so the question of factionalism and its role in succession crises and other crises in the history of the Islamic lands has to be tackled, for surely the prevalence of factions in the Near East and our lack of understanding of them does add a certain patina of dullness to much of Islamic history. Faction succeeds to faction as “Amurath to Amurath”, and though Macaulay could find the history of England and its latter part, the struggle of Whig and Tory, to be “emphatically the history of progress”, few people have felt similarly confident about the struggle of Ẓāhirī and Manṣūrī factions in medieval Egypt. It is hard to understand past events without imposing a pattern, and at the political level the gyrations of Egyptian factions do not lend themselves easily to the imposition of pattern.

This inscription of great historical importance was discovered by the copyists of J. F. Fleet in 1884 and was first published by him in the Indian Antiquary, XV, in 1886. He subsequently included it in the Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, Vol. III, which he edited and which was published in 1888. Sir R. G. Bhandarkar published some corrections to the text and translation in JBBRAS, XVII (1887–89). F. Kielhorn published the correction of a reading in verse 31 which much improved the sense. The late A. L. Basham presented a fresh study of this epigraph, in his paper read at the symposium on the Gupta Period of Indian history at Carlton College in Northfield, Minnesota, in 1977. The papers presented at this symposium have now been printed under the title Essays on Gupta culture

A visit in October–November 1985 to northern Pakistan provided me with the chance of observing and recording certain types of village grave. Since enquiries revealed that some types are no longer being constructed, and some of the most interesting graves are falling into decay, it seems appropriate to publish these fragmentary observations in the hope that awareness may be stimulated, and that other and more leisured travellers may be able to make more detailed observations while the material is still available.

The following pages were inspired by reading a slender book by one of my esteemed Tamil teachers, Mahavidvan M. V. Venugopala Pillai, Tamiḻ anrum inrum (“Tamil Then and Now”), Madras, 1967. Venugopala Pillai, born on 8 August 1896, died on 2 February 1985.

The Topkapĭ Saray holds one of the world's largest collections of Chinese ceramics, but at the same time one of the least well known. It consists of over ten thousand pieces, of which roughly fifteen percent are on permanent display; only a few hundred items have ever been published, and not more than twenty-five objects have been on exhibition outside Turkey. To compare this collection with the even larger one in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, is quite instructive: the pieces are completely different and have almost no item in common in spite of the fact that they cover largely the same period. What is housed in the National Palace Museum is a substantial part of the former Imperial collection or, at any rate, had once belonged to the holdings of the Imperial palace in Beijing (Peking). It had then been packed up in 1931 when the Japanese invaded Manchuria, and after a sixteen-year trip through China from one supposedly safe place to another, had finally been transported from the mainland to Taiwan when Chiang Kaishek established his government there. It represents a superb cross-section of those ceramics that were produced for the Chinese home market, in particular for the Imperial court and the scholar-official elite with its high standards of artistic perfection.