Although the Wellcome Collection of Hebraica does not constitute one of the larger and more distinguished collections of oriental material in the Wellcome Institute, it nevertheless comprises a number of important manuscripts along with early printed books representative of several sixteenth and seventeenth-century Hebrew presses. One of these is a fragment of a larger work printed in Constantinople in 1505 at the press of David and Samuel Nahmias. It is the second earliest example of printing in Turkey, the first also coming from the press of the Nahmias brothers.

It is difficult to lose a good story. Many of the best folk tales transcend the boundaries of language and nationality, and the Gilgamesh Epic, attested in Human, Hittite, Elamite and Akkadian cuneiform, is no exception. The latest Akkadian tablets to be inscribed with the story come from the site of Uruk of the late Babylonian period, some time after the fall of Babylon in 539 B.C. and perhaps as late as the Seleurid period, after the reign of Alexander the Great. The story had been popular for some two thousand years. Despite this popularity in so many countries and for such a very long period of time, the story of Gilgamesh was supposed to have died more or less with the death of cuneiform writing, although some residual themes were recognised in various versions of the Alexander Romance.

The standard criteria for using apocalypses as historical sources were established by the late Byzantinist, Paul J. Alexander. Examining the process of literary embellishment and adjustment of a few Syriac and Greek apocalypses, he arrived at the conclusion that historical apocalypses are in fact “prophecies ex-eventu”, i.e. having actually already materialised around the time of their circulation. The amount of such material, he argued, may serve as a kind of barometer for measuring the eschatological pressure at a given time in history since apocalypses are written to provide comfort in times of tribulation, particularly during grave military crises.

It has been suggested that all historical sources are subjective from their inception and that authors' styles, commitments and views determine the bases of historical writings. Claude Lévi-Strauss has ventured so far as to claim: “Besides, historical fact has no objective reality. It only exists as a result of a retrospective construction undertaken by people who have lived the events they speak of in a purely arbitrative sense.” Indeed, historical narratives are fraught with danger when used as sources of actual information, for factual accuracy often does not extend to validity in representation of events. Formal histories such as dynastic chronicles were particularly vulnerable to misrepresentation. They usually were composed either with the intent of flattering the rulers who served as patrons of the author's efforts - and, hence, reflect royal ideology and imperial propaganda - or as a means of disparaging and vilifying the royal house

The reign of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Khān (1880–1901) is considered by most historians to have been the foundation stone of modern Afghanistan and consequently much has been written about this formative period of Afghanistan's history. However, despite the extensive literature available on his reign, several important features about the Afghan Amīr appear to have been either overlooked or ignored.

Hülegü (d. A.D. 1265) and his successors were known by the title īlkhān, which has provided modern scholars with a convenient label for the dynasty. In general, īlkhān has been glossed as “subject” or “submissive” khān. There is less agreement, however, over the circumstances in which īlkhān was adopted by Hülegü. This, in turn, is connected to the more general discussion on the manner in which Hülegü's dynasty was established. Without purporting to resolve these questions, in the following article some evidence is offered which sheds light on these matters.

During the fourteenth century on the Travancore coast of South India an independent Muslim sultanate was established which lasted for less than half a century, and was eventually terminated by the newly established neighbouring kingdom of Vijayanagar. The short, brutal and enigmatic period of this sultanate has attracted the attention of a number of modern scholars who have tried to put together its history through study of the coins, a few inscriptions, and the brief, often dismissive remarks found in the North Indian histories, as well as, most informative of all, the travel account of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, who visited the region when the power of the sultanate was at its peak. However, none of these studies agrees even in the number and chronology of the sultans, let alone the details of the events: a confusion which is a direct result of the lack of adequate information at the present time. Under the circumstances it may appear presumptuous to embark on a description of the architectural monuments of this sultanate.

In our article on the Aśokan inscriptions, Dr Raymond Allchin and I pointed out the need for a new edition of Hultzsch's Inscriptions of Asoka, bringing it up to date by including the Aśokan inscriptions in Prakrit found in India, and those in Greek and Aramaic found in Afghanistan, since the publication of Hultzsch's work in 1925. Our statement was particularly applicable to the MREs, since only ten versions of MRE I were known to Hultzsch, of which three had the extra portion at the end usually designated as MRE II. To some extent the need for a replacement of Hultzsch's work had been filled by D. C. Sircar's Aśokan Studies which included reprints of all Sircar's articles dealing with new Aśokan inscriptions. Sircar had published a synoptic version of the 17 versions of MRE I and the seven versions of MRE II which are known to date, and a corrected version of this appeared in his Aśokan Studies, but even the corrected version was not entirely satisfactory, in as much as it did not give new editions of the versions already known to Hultzsch.

Jean Deloche in a series of valuable publications has given an overall view of the Indian road network in the period up to about 1820 when the general pacification that followed the collapse of the Maratha kingdom gave British engineers the chance to transform the communications of India, first with military roads and later with railways. This transformation was nowhere more complete than in Central India and particularly in Malwa, the Mughal subha through which led the great road from Delhi and Agra to Burhanpur and the Deccan – a road which was followed by many of the European merchants and diplomats travelling between Surat and Agra and in part by the Maratha armies in the eighteenth century as they first raided and then conquered territory all the way up to Delhi. The other route from Surat to the north lay through Gujarat and the semi-deserts of Rajasthan (Deloche, 1980, pp. 55–7) and will not concern us here. Our route follows the Tapti valley east to Burhanpur, through the gap guarded by Asirgarh and then, after the unavoidable difficulties of the Narmada crossing and the climb up the Vindhya escarpment, takes an easy line through the flat well-cultivated Malwa plateau from Sironj to Narwar, following the grain of the country between the north-flowing tributaries of the Chambal.

As is usual in texts which were composed more as panegyrics than as strict historical records, the epitaph inscription for Wu Liang , who died at the age of 74 in A.D. 151, tells of his virtues and his qualities as a scholar. But in common with a number of famous men of ability and learning of his time, such as Zhang Heng (78–139), Ma Rong (79–166) or Wang Fu (c. 90–165), Wu Liang showed a persistent reluctance to serve in an official capacity, preferring to devote himself to a study of history and philosophy. In all probability he felt, like the others, that in the prevailing political circumstances, it was not possible both to embark on an official career and to retain a measure of personal integrity. Be that as it may, other members of his family evidently felt no such scruples; his nephew Wu Ban , for example, was appointed to be chief clerk at Dunhuang.

Several of the manuscripts from Tunhuang in the invaluable Choix de Documents Tibétains conservés à la Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris, 1978 and 1979) record cases of civil litigation and administrative or judicial decisions on them in some instances. Fewer deal with criminal matters. Although students of Tibetan have referred to such documents in books and articles, published translations of any of them appear to be rare. In Journal Asiatique, 1955, Mlle Marcelle Lalou, a pioneer in studies of the Tunhuang material, translated Fonds Pelliot Tibétain (Pell. T.) 1089 concerning the appointment of a wide range of officials in the border region. The translation of orders on two short petitions from citizens of Shacu is included in Tsipon Shakabpa's Tibet, a Political History (1967). F. W. Thomas translated the “Law of theft in Chinese Kansu, a IXth–Xth century fragment from Tunhuang”, in Zeitschrift für Verglekhende Rechtswissenschaft, L (1936).

Among the many manuscripts relating to Ch’an Buddhism included in the Tun-huang finds of the early years of this century, the Leng-chia shih-tzu chi has always been regarded by scholars as a discovery of unusual importance, since it presents an unrivalled picture of the early development of this type of Buddhism from the long-obscured viewpoint of the so-called Northern school of Ch’an. The text has been rendered into English lately by J. C. Cleary, but only in a translation intended for a non-scholarly audience. Fortunately, however, the new French-language translation and study by Bernard Faure is everything a scholar could wish for, a worthy product of many years of research, including several spent at the feet of Yanagida Seizan, Japan's outstanding authority on the early historiography of Ch’an. Faure's work, not surprisingly, shows a complete grasp of the complex issues of intellectual history raised by his text, and also provides copious commentary on its author, Ching-chüeh (683–c. 750), and his background.

Indian commercial relations with the Red Sea area, and in particular with Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, date back to the dawn of history. Craftsmen from the sub-continent were also active in the Ethiopian region for many centuries, most notably in the early 1620s when “a noble Indian” there is said, by the Jesuit Affonso Mendes, to have thrown white pebbles into the fire, as he had seen done in Cambay, and to have thereby produced “a very glutinous lime”. The then ruler of the country, Emperor Susenyos, was reported by another of the Jesuits, Manoel de Almeida, to have shortly afterwards given orders for the construction of a stone bridge which was erected by a craftsman from India. The latter, according to a contemporary Ethiopian chronicle, was a Banyan called Abdāl Kerim who was also responsible for building Susenyos a palace at his capital Dānqāz.