During the summer of 330 b.c. Alexander the Great pursued the Persian king Darius III through Northern Media, past the Caspian Gates, and eastward into the Achaemenid satrapy of Parthava (Parthia). Upon reaching Darius, Alexander found the king murdered by the usurper Bessus. The Macedonian thereafter advanced east for three more days until he arrived at the wealthy city which was later to be called Hecatompylos. It is the problems of Hecatompylos and the several related questions of its home district, called Comisene by the Greeks, which this paper will consider.

The 26 inscribed stones which are described here were found during a visit to the north-western part of the territory, close to the border with the Yemen. It was realized that they were important for palaeographic and historical reasons and that they belonged to the later period of Saba'.

It was a pleasant surprise during the Christmas vacation of 1966 to receive a letter from a Mrs. C. T. Williams, who described herself as “a graduate student in oriental art history at Harvard University” working on Khotanese painting, and enclosed the four photographs which are now published here. They provide four previously unpublished Khotanese inscriptions, which, though difficult to read and providing little information, are of interest because of their occurrence on objets d'art. Three are written in the late cursive script and one (Kha. i C 0096) in the old square script.

The significant changes that were introduced in the organization of Mughal government and the accompanying shifts in Akbar's administrative and religious policies during the period 1560–80 have remained for long a favourite subject of study for a number of modern historians. The existing interpretation of these changes seems largely to run parallel to Abul Fazl's line of argument which seeks to explain the growth of institutions and policies in terms of the unfolding of Akbar' personality. Abul Fazl often tries to ignore, or brush aside as the outcome of “evil advice”, all those measures or decisions which appeared to him inconsistent with Akbar's policy during the last 25 years of his reign. The impression created by Abul Fazl is reinforced by a similar tendency in Badauni, who, from an opposite point of view, quite frequently mixes up his comments on some of Akbar's enlightened measures of the later period with the events of the earlier phase when there was hardly any ground for him to find fault with Akbar from a doctrinal angle. Under the influence of these interpretations modern historians also tend to disregard facts that are inconsistent with Abul Fazl's theory of Akbar's gradual “unveiling” of himself as “the superman”, through the introduction, one after another, of his policies based on the principles of Sulh-i Kul and universal kingship.

If it were not for the birth of Mahāvīra amongst the Nāya-Khattiyas of Kuṇḍapura, we should probably never have heard of this people. It is mainly in connexion with the last Tīsrthaṅkara of the Jainas and the doctrine of severe asceticism which he expounded that we find a few references to the Nāyas and some scanty allusions to their political institutions in the sacred books of the Jainas, the Pāli Canon, the commentaries on these texts, and some later epigraphic records. No study of their political institutions has yet been undertaken, but the scattered data collected from these sources do present a fairly cohesive whole; though some points remain vague owing to the dearth of material.

The traditional forms of landholding and the government's land policy are two problems in the study of the nature of social change in 19th-century Western India; as the necessary aetiology of agrarian movements they are also linked with the organization and idiom of popular protest on the one hand, and the structure and temper of official institutions on the other. The Khandesh Survey riots are a microcosm of these problems as they existed in a raīyatwārī (peasant-proprietary) area of the Bombay Presidency, five years before the Mutiny. An analysis of the agrarian relations—partly as seen articulated in the movement of the riots—seems to have an undiminished relevance for later periods, and may perhaps qualify an impression of the Bombay raīyatwārī system as one where the government as landlord had a uniformly direct relationship with a standard cultivatortenant.

When the european war ended in November 1918 the fate of the defeated Turkish Empire was no longer in doubt. The other fallen empire, Austria-Hungary, had been dismembered, and the Ottoman Turks could not hope to escape the consequences of allying themselves with Germany. For Indian Muslims this raised grave issues of the political power of Islam. They had provided a large number of recruits in the war and had contributed materially towards the defeat of Turkey. Their political leaders had regretted Turkey's entry into the war on the side of Britain's enemies; their sympathies, however, were with the Turks, for the Turkish Sultan was looked upon as the Khalifa, the temporal and spiritual leader of the Islamic community, and—still more important for Indian Muslims—the Khalifa stood for the unity of the Islamic people, and the Turkish Empire, by then the only surviving Islamic Empire, was the symbol of Islam's worldly power. Muslims in India fervently believed in the ideal of Islamic brotherhood. This had always been an integral part of the religious outlook of Islam, but Pan-Islamism appealed especially to Muslims in India because of their minority status. Their interest in the Khalifate was largely due to the fact that it was the one centre of authority to which they could look for protection. The spread of nationalism threatened to submerge them and made them anxious to preserve and strengthen the Khalifate as an institution which might provide them with a rallying point and mobilize in their defence the united forces of the Islamic world.

By rejecting animism and ritualism and emphasizing a rational outlook which treats reality as a causally and functionally determined system of plural synergies (saṁskāras), the emergence of Buddhism marks an important event in the history of Indian thought. The most distinctive feature of Buddhist ethics is its freedom from theism, which leaves room for rationalism and rules out submission to some superhuman power controlling the world-process. Prior to the advent of Buddhism even the Upaniṣads were not completely free from theistic influence in their speculations. It is proposed here to point to the Buddhist contribution to the growth of scientific outlook and methodology in India.

The Thai kingdom of Ayudhyā endured several periods of crisis during its long history from 1350 to 1767, but the crisis which will concern us here happened in 1592. During that year the king, Nareśvara, was well aware that he lived in a hostile world of unusually wide dimensions. His behaviour will be discussed as a basis for a brief consideration of Ayudhyā's attitude towards the world, a subject of more than diplomatic interest.

In the new edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam part of the article “ ‘Arabiyya” is devoted to a study of the Arabic vernaculars. In his treatment of the Eastern dialects H. Fleisch raises the following problem: “Certain loan-words pose questions: how did the Persian keshtebān ‘thimble’, which is not known in literary Arabic or in Turkish reach S-L [Syrian and Lebanese]? How did the Pahlawī randa ‘plane’, an early loan-word, of which there is no evidence in literary Arabic or Turkish (Persian randa), reach Aleppo, and by what route? The comparative study of vocabulary has not yet been pursued sufficiently to enable us to dwell further on this subject here.” To the problem of keshtebān the solution probably lies in an unexpected sphere, namely, that of the toxophilite, and is suggested by the evidence to be outlined below. It is not unlikely that the answer to the question posed by randaj should be sought in the same general field, though on this point I can only surmise.

In the new journal of the Faculty of Letters of Isfahan University there is an article by Aziz Pajand entitled “Purim”. It comprises facsimiles of two texts, two pages in square Hebrew script of Hebrew described as klâsik, and four pages in Rashi script of ‘ebri-ye maḥalli-ye Eṣfahân, with a close Persian translation of the latter, describing the origins of the festival of Purim to a Persian audience. Apart from its content, however, the text in Isfahani Jewish Persian is of considerable dialectological interest. It is therefore reprinted below, with a transcription, translation, and linguistic notes.