In the works of the 10th-century Arabic classical geographers, as represented by al-Iṣŭakhrī (c. 318–321/930–933) and Ibn Ḥawqal (c. 367/977), there appears a passage which deals with three “kinds” (ṣinf) of Rus. At the mention of the first kind of Rus, only the name of their city is given, while the name of the city of the second “kind”—apart from that of the kind themselves—though mentioned by Ibn Ḥawqal, is not given by al-Iṣṭakhrī.

The geographer Ibn Ḥawqal, who wrote his invaluable description of the Muslim world in the 10th century, devotes a paragraph to Sīrāf, the great port of the Persian Gulf. In the 12th century an anonymous author made an epitome of Ibn Ḥawqal's book, adding, however, a number of remarks concerning his own period. In the description of Sīrāf he interpolated the following passage:

Its inhabitants are very rich. I was told that one of them, feeling ill, made his testament; the third part of his fortune, which he had in cash, amounted to a million dīnārs, not counting the capital which he laid out to people who undertook to trade with it on commenda basis. Then there is Rāmisht, whose son Mūsā I have met in Aden, in the year 539; he told me that the silver plate used by him was, when weighed, found to be 1,200 manns. Mūsā is the youngest of his sons and has the least merchandise; Rāmisht has four servants, each of whom is said to be richer than his son Mūsā. I have met 'Alī al-Nīlī from the countryside of al-Ḥilla, Rāmisht's clerk, and he told me that when he came back from China twenty years before, his merchandise was worth half a million dīnārs; if that is the wealth of his clerk, what will he himself be worth! It was Rāmisht who removed the silver water-spout of the Ka'ba and replaced it with a golden one, and also covered the Ka'ba with Chinese cloth, the value of which cannot be estimated. In short, I have heard of no merchant in our time who has equalled Rāmisht in wealth or prestige.

Of the poems found in the Sīra, four only are introduced as elegies on the death of the Prophet Muḥammad, all of which are ascribed to Ḥassān b. Thābit. They can, however, be seen on internal evidence to be the work of later Anṣarīs, and to reflect the inferior status to which the Anṣārīs were reduced after the sack of Madlna in 63/683; a consciousness of the restriction of their importance to the part they, as a community, played in supporting the Prophet in the early stages; a degree of resigned resentment at their meagre share in the fruits of power, and an intense sentimentality in concentrating their thoughts on the Prophet himself, with whom their glorious past was closely connected. They wished to view this as a personal relation and a privilege which by then was in fact a consolation. Occasionally one also senses Shi'ī undertones in the sentimental adulation of the Prophet (clearly a remote figure), and, as will be demonstrated below, one also notices the occurrence of the epithet “mahdi” and words of the same root. Both these tendencies are of particular significance in relation to the late Umayyad and early ‘Abbāsid periods.

The Khotanese version of the well-known Buddhist prophecy concerning Maitreya forms chapter 22 in the unnamed Buddhist miscellany in Khotanese verse, of which more than 4,000 complete lines are extant. The chapter concerning Maitreya was edited separately by E. Leumann (Maitreya-samiti, 1919), and later the whole work was edited and translated by the same scholar (E, 1933–6). The Maitreya story contains the verses:

pātcä Ānandi tta hvate ba|lysä ttu scätu Mittrai vīrä

ṣäte Ja⹃butīvä bihīysde | drrai ysārä ggaṃpha kho vaysña 3

ttī dasau ysāre hämäte ggaṃ|pha Jaṃbutïvä hamaṅgä

kho ju hva'ndi rraṣṭä nänārri | hārūṣkä āho jīye 4 (E 22.113–4).

1. In his fifth pillar edict, issued in the 26th year of his reign, Aśoka forbade the killing of certain animals. The relevant portion of the edict, as it appears on the Delhi-Topra pillar, is as follows: imāni jātāni avadhiyāni kaṭāni seyathā suke sālikā alune cakavāke haṃse naṃdīmukhe gelāṭe aṃbākäpīlikä (Allahabad version -kipilikā) daḷī (Allahabad version duḍī; Araraj, Nandangarh, and Rampurva versions duḷi) anaṭhikamache vedaveyake gaṇgāpupuṭake saṃkujamache kaphaṭasayake (Araraj, Nandangarh, Rampurva versions -seyake) paṃnasase simale saṃḍake okapiṃḍe palasate setakapote gâmakapote save catupade ye paṭibhogaṃ no eti na ca khādiyatī.