Much of the work that is attempted in the field of early Iranian historical geography is by necessity hypothetical, since there are no explicit descriptions of the spatial nature of political control in Iran before the accounts of Greek writers of the 5th century B.C. and later. The actual geography of Iran is however so precisely delimited that careful study of available accounts, when linked with a knowledge of the local topography of any area under investigation, will allow the student to suggest reconstructions for the scenes of various actions. In this case, I shall propose a possible geographical framework for a sequence of events that is recorded in the inscription of Darius I at Behistun, and which has not been satisfactorily localized before. Tentative as it is, the reconstruction seems to clarify a passage that dealt with events of the greatest importance for subsequent Achaemenid history.

One of the monuments of Peripatetic scholarship which time and the long shadow of Aristotle have concealed from full view, and barred from general acclaim, is “The opinions of the natural philosophers” by his colleague and successor, Theophrastus of Lesbos. The work established the fields of intellectual history in the form of “doxography” in general, and of the history of natural science in particular, as separate branches of study, and laid the foundation for all subsequent research on the Presocratic thinkers and the origins of philosophy. Its pervasive influence and the tradition it generated may be briefly recounted: shortly after the turn of the 1st century B.C. there appeared in the school of Poseidonius a revised and updated edition of the work, which also included the opinions of philosophers posterior to Theophrastus. In the following century the supplemented compilation was edited anew by an otherwise unknown Aetius, under the simple title “Opinions” (Placita). Around A.D. 150 Aetius's edition reappeared in an epitome falsely attributed to Plutarch and bearing the title, “Epitome of the Natural Opinions of the Philosophers” (Placita philosophorum). Of these works, only the last named has survived intact in Greek: its attribution to a famous author and its wide use, especially by Christians in their polemical writings, seem to have contributed to its preservation. One may further hazard the guess that by the same token, and because a tradition of reference to, and respect for, this Placita had been created in Christian circles, it was translated into Arabic by a person in the same tradition, a Syriac Christian of Greek descent, Qusṭā ibn Lūqā (died c. A.D. 912). In Arabic translation it saw the widest diffusion possible among authors interested in ancient philosophy (see the diagram in the work reviewed, p. 88).

“With the Mongols there is neither slave nor free man; neither believer nor pagan…. And every one who approacheth them and offereth to them any of the mammon of the world, they accept it from him, and they entrust to him whatsoever office he seeketh, whether it be great or whether it be little, whether he knoweth how to administer it, or whether he doth not. All they demand is strenuous service and submission which is beyond the power (of man to render).”

The silver coin presented here (Plate I) was acquired from a travelling dealer. It was sold to the writer in isolation, without accompanying coins or information which might have given some clue to its provenance. The dealer, although ignorant of the Pahlavi script, was clever enough to realise the value of the piece. He offered it as a coin of Khusraw II, but demanded three times the usual price on the grounds that it was of a mint rarely encountered

The Kharoṣṭhī inscription here published (in private possession) has been referred to me by an interested friend for a reading. The Kharoṣṭhī script, and the North-West Prakrit language written in it still remain problematic, so that as usual the following translation is preliminary. The accompanying photographs (Plates II and III) will offer specialists in Kharoṣṭhī the necessary basis for study.

The inscription is on the halo of a standing Buddha (height 96.52 cm). Two photographs are given so that the letters behind the head can be seen.

Almost half a century ago I pointed to the similarity between the national Achehnese verse form sanja' and a related Cham verse used in the song of the kadhar (a musician-officiant) at the ceremony of the sacrifice of the buffalo (Cowan, 1933). It will be useful to recall here the main points of that paper.

The Achehnese sanja' in its simplest form consists of lines of eight dissyllabic metrical feet or rather four pairs of such feet, whose two middle pairs rhyme with each other, while the final syllable of each line rhymes with that of the following line. Or in other words it is a double-eight-syllable metre with an internal rhyme on the eighth syllable of the first and the fourth syllable of the second half of the verse line, and with a final rhyme at the end of each line. Thus:

If I, first of all, may express my gratitude to the Royal Asiatic Society for its decision to institute this lecture in memory of Paul Demiéville, please believe that this is more than a ritual gesture. He, indeed, was a person to be remembered both as a man and as a scholar. I shall not speak about his human qualities, for it is impossible to do justice to them in a few words. As a scholar, he was a man of astonishing breadth of vision, as is shown by the many different fields which he covered: Chinese philosophy, Chinese literature; historiography; Sino-Indian studies; the history of Chinese Buddhism, to mention only his main fields of interest, all of which were based on a truly stupendous erudition. For in his case breadth was always combined with depth, accuracy, and utter reliability; with the patient and painstaking labour of philology. Needless to say that, faced with the task of giving a lecture that bears his name, I feel both honoured and embarrassed, for I know that I, at best, can only do justice to one of the fields he covered, the study of Chinese Buddhism – an area in which he made bis most outstanding contributions. It is true that in doing so he worked in line with a great tradition in French sinology, alive ever since the heroic times of Stanislas Julien, that had also been carried on by his teacher Édouard Chavannes and his elder colleagues Paul Pelliot and Henri Maspero. However, it remains true that, also in this field, no other scholar has equalled Paul Demiéville in scope and depth, for his studies cover almost the whole field, from the earliest treatises on dhyāna to late Chinese Buddhist iconography; from the most sophisticated products of Buddhist philosophy to popular Buddhist literature, and from the most rational type of scholasticism to the utter irrationality of those early Ch‘an masters that were so dear to him. His works constitute a vantage-point from which we can overlook the field, and plan future inroads; and if to-day we see some new perspectives, we can only do so by standing on his shoulders.