Dārzīn is a village located on the main road eastward from Kirmān to Bam, at the point where the branch road diverges to Jīruft (Fig. 1). East of the present village there stand a number of ruined mud-brick buildings of interesting form and ground plan, surrounded by a substantial spread of Islamic pottery containing a fair proportion of slip-painted ware. The latter fabric suggests settlements at least as early as the Sāmānid period. In 1977 the present writer had the opportunity to visit the site, and prepared drawings of the momuments with a view to establishing their probable date. The result of this survey suggests that these ruins could be amongst the earliest Islamic structures still extant in Iran. The purpose of this article is to present this evidence.

The Indian Ocean has for at least two thousand years served as a highway for the exchange of goods and ideas, and the cultural links between the lands bordering it are perhaps closer than over any other region of comparable size. The length of voyages undertaken since early times has been very great, as is forcefully demonstrated by the Indonesian colonization of Madagascar in the first centuries A.D. Commerce has been facilitated by the monsoon which in the western part of the ocean blows for roughly half the year from the northeast and for half in the opposite direction. The eastern and western shores of the western part of the basin share much the same climate and are suited to similar ways of life.

This inscription, in private possession, is on gold, seven centimetres long bearing fourteen lines in Kharoṣṭrī script with some 100 syllables (aḳsaras) to a line. Its importance as containing a date of a king of Oḍi and a reference to the Kušān Emperor Kuyula Kataphśa has made me willing, though no specialist in Kharoṣṭrī texts, to prepare the following transliteration, preliminary translation and comment.

The Broach (Bharoch) hoard found in 1882, though its publication is statistically incomplete, offers evidence of the movement and import of valuta into western India during the 13th and more particularly the 14th century. Broach and Cambay were the principal ports of Gujarat during this period. The hoard, found in a brass pot, consisted of 448 gold coins, besides pieces of coins and a small ingot, and about 1,200 silver coins and pieces. The coinages represented are those of Genoa, Venice, Egypt, Armenia, Persia, southern Arabia and the Dehfi Sultanate. With the exception of two 12th-century coins the dates of minting fall between A.D. 1260 and 1382, which we may take to be the approximate date of burial.

Hunter's Indian Musalmans was completed in mid-June and published in mid-August of 1871. It consists of four chapters of which the first three are devoted to the so-called Indian Wahhābī movement and its aftermath, with particular reference to Bengal. The last chapter analyzes the Muslims' grievances and suggests some modification in the state system of education in order to attract them to it and make them more suitable for official employment, thereby weaning them away from the path of disloyalty. It is principally because of this last chapter that the book has been invested with a new significance in the context of later political developments in British India. Hunter has been regarded as the progenitor of Muslim separatism and has even been linked with a deliberate official policy of divide and rule.

The ancient lunisolar calendar of the Hindus is still widely used in India, especially for ritual purposes. In most of India, months are lunar and the discrepancy between lunar and solar years (12 lunar months equal approximately 354 days) is resolved by the periodic addition of an intercalary month into the year. However, in Tamilnadu, Kerala and eastern India (Bengal, Orissa and Assam), months are solar, but because the lunar calendar is also used, complications arise which are absent in areas employing only the lunar calendar. The aim of this paper is to describe the calendrical system currently in use in Tamilnadu and to explain the basic principles of the Tamil almanacs.

Early in 1944, while I was holding charge of the Mansehra Subdivision of Hazara District in the North-West Frontier Province (then part of India), the following tale was told to me briefly by my friend Muḥammad Ẓarf Khn, a member of the leading family of Kuki Khel Afridis of Tirh, who was at that time serving as Political Tahsildar at Oghi. Tirh is, of course, the celebrated tribal tract lying west of Peshawar in present-day Pakistan. I wrote the tale down exactly as Muhammad Zanf told it to me. To enable the story to be more easily understood, I have slightly expanded the narrative, but I have not added any element which was not in the original version. I see no reason to doubt that the story is, as its narrator claimed, one of the traditional tales which are told round the hearth in the hill-country of Tirah to which he belongs.

like Anaw-rahta's conquest of Thahton or the Mongol expeditions against Pagan, Tha-lun's transfer of capital from Pegu to Ava in 1634—5 is one of those prominent transitions in Burmese history which always attract comment in standard surveys. The pioneer historian of Burma G. E. Harvey claimed that the decision by Tha-lun (r. 1629–48) to forsake the coast in favour of the interior signified the abandonment of his predecessors' goal of a Burmese–Mon national kingship, and contributed to the subsequent isolation of the Burmese from international intercourse. D. G. E. Hall, expanding the latter theme, wrote that “(t)he removal of the Burmese capital from Pegu to Ava in 1635 was, without doubt, one of the cardinal events of Burmese history … it signalised the triumph of the more intransigent elements in Burmese character and governmental policy” and contributed ultimately to the political ruin of the country.

Scrupulousness is associated, where it occurs spontaneously, with certain personality-types, and with certain neurotic conditions. A scrupulous person is somewhat difficult to live with. Where it is a cultural constant, and is observed in and by a whole mass of indiscriminate humanity, it is another phenomenon. The Jewish civilization is familar with the double standard. There is the norm, to which everyone should conform: and there are two extremes, that of the Men of Sodom, who are the dogs in the manger, who will never do the righteous thing even if it costs them nothing, and, on the other hand, the ḥasidm, who are scrupulous. The double standard implies that there are persons, and groups who are voluntarily associated, who choose to be more careful than the average, and though their scrupulosity does not impugn the righteousness of the average, it provides some kind of control upon it, and vice versa. Even the average are exhorted in the Mishnah to build a fence about the Law. This is a normative principle of Pharisaic origin, to the effect that one should so conduct oneself as never to place oneself within reach of breaking the negative commandments. This is scrupulosity, and the difference between the average observant Jew and the Hasid is (in this respect) that the Hasid will pursue the principle, if need be, to his own cost. A good example of the Mishnaic principle in general practice was the 39 stripes: a man was flogged 39 times, so as not to infringe the biblical precept of 40 lashes: one kept just within the margin of the Law.

Western sinologists dealing with texts of any antiquity are usually as aware as their East Asian colleagues of the importance of textual scholarship as the foundation of their studies. Yet despite the considerable sophistication of the techniques developed in the West for editing the texts of our own classical heritage we have until now largely left the collation of Chinese texts to East Asian scholars working on the basis of their indigenous academic traditions, and have generally been content to accept their results even in cases where these are clearly somewhat unsatisfactory. Paul Thompson's magnificent study shows that there is no need to let this situation continue. Taking an ancient work which has been the subject of conspicuous foul play on the part of pre- modern Chinese scholarship, he has produced a book which is in every sense of the word an exemplary demonstration of how the most rigorous techniques of textual and bibliographic analysis should now be applied to problems which have been ignored for too long.