Despite the admonitions of responsible scholars, writers of books on Buddhism still tend to assume that a reasonably historical account of the life and personal teachings of Śākyamuni Buddha may be extracted from the earliest available canonical accounts. This quest of the historical Buddha began as a Western nineteenth-century interest, imitating both in its pre-suppositions and its methods of inquiry the parallel quest of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. The general principle of operation is set forth succinctly by Hermann Oldenberg in his impressive work, Buddha, sein Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde, Berlin, 1881, 92:

‘Abstrahiren wir nun von den Traditionen der bezeichneten Kategorien, welche sämmtlich unhistorisch oder doch des unhistorischen Characters verdachtig sind, so behalten wir als festen Kern der Erzählungen von Buddha eine Reihe positiver Thatsaohen iibrig, die wir als einen zwar sehr bescheidenen, aber vollkommen gesicherten Besitz für die Geschichte in Anspruch nehmen dürfen’.

According to Islamic tradition the companions of Jesus in the Quran, the ḥawāriyyūn, were faithful disciples. Critical scholars largely agree that the Quran means to present the ḥawāriyyūn as such, and generally translate ḥawāriyyūn as “apostles” or “disciples”. Some add that ḥawāriyyūn is related to ḥawāryā, the Geʿez term used for the apostles in the Ethiopic Bible. In the present article I argue that while the Quran indeed means to signal the apostles of Christian tradition with the term ḥawāriyyūn, it does not consider the ḥawāriyyūn to have been faithful. The Quran praises the ḥawāriyyūn for their belief in Jesus (a belief that distinguishes them from other Israelites, i.e. the Jews) but reprimands them for abandoning his message. Hence emerges the exceptional position of Christians in the Quran: they are not condemned but rather exhorted to return to their prophet's teaching.

The Mahasin al-majalis of Ibn al-'Arif (†536/1141) is a Sufi treatise of minor dimensions and inconsiderable importance, one of a multitude of such summaries that bridge the gap between the classical works of Kalabadhi, Qushairi, and Makki, and the phenomenal productivity of Ibn al-'Arabi. For all that, the essay (for it is little more) is not without interest; it is allusive and elliptical in style, thus affording material for commentators; and the author begins his discourse proper by quoting, though not by name, the Mawdqif of Niffari; as Ibn al-'Arabi afterwards used Ibn al-'Arif quite freely and approvingly, it is always possible that he got to know and take an interest in Niffari through this intermediary.

The scarceness of published material renders difficult a true estimate of the development of political ideas in Egypt in the nineteenth century. Nor is it any less difficult to trace the origins of the first political parties.

The Arabi Rebellion of 1881-1882 was preceded by a long period of unrest, which finally crystallized in a self-styled National Party. This faction, led by army officers and civilians, kept its secret character for a few years, coming into the open only at the beginning of the Arabi Rebellion. Its importance in the anti-foreign struggle, however, has drawn attention to its humble but interesting origins. Research has provided us with fairly adequate, if still incomplete, material on this point. But hardly anything has been published, on the other hand, about another secret organization of that time, called ‘Young Egypt’.

The horizontal division of Indian societies into hierarchically ranked castes and sub-castes has been the subject of a considerable literature, and recent anthropological studies of individual villages have largely concentrated on analysing the function and interrelation of such caste groups. The internal organization or vertical divisions of endogamous castes have, on the other hand, received little attention, though the work of Louis Dumont in Tamilnad, of Kathleen Gough in Malabar, and of Adrian C. Mayer in Madhya Bharat, which is for the most part still unpublished, promises to throw considerable light on the internal structure of castes in these areas.

Poem No. CXL in the Diwan of Hassan b. Thabit is usually connected with the incident when the poet was attacked and wounded by Safwan b. al-Mu'attal. However, the poem itself, the incident, and the precise relation between poem and incident all seem to have been the subject of controversy. As for the poem, different versions exist in various sources. The opening line is:—

This article is the first publication of the Bogra copperplate, the eighth known land-grant inscription issued by Śrīcandra (r. c. 925–975 ce), one of the kings of the Candra dynasty of Bengal. A diplomatic transcription is included, together with an annotated English translation and a critically edited text in Devanāgarī. The inscription describes a gift of land to a Brahmin named Śrīkaradatta Śarman, who probably hails from North Bengal (“Hastipada [in the region of] Śrāvasti”). While the praśasti (praise) portions largely parallel the king's other known inscriptions, the inscription contributes new information about place names and regions associated with the Candra dynasty, as well as attesting the movements of Brahmins associated with the Parāśara Gotra and Chandoga Caraṇa. The article also provides an overview and assessment of research on the inscriptions and history of the Candra dynasty, particularly in light of the discovery and identification of this new inscription.

Modern Gujrātī has three phonemes in the group of voiced cerebrals: viz. the unaspirated stop ḍ, the unaspirated tapped ṛ, and the aspirated stop ḍh, there being no corresponding aspirated tapped in the standard language. In Gujrātī script ḍ and ṛ are written with the same symbol, while ḍh has a different symbol.

Among the numerous Kharosthi documents recovered from Chinese Turkestan and transcribed and edited by A. M. Boyer, E. J. Rapson, and E. Senart, is one which is in many ways unique. This is the oblong wooden tablet which is numbered 661 in the second volume of these scholars' Kharosthī Inscriptions, where there is given on plate 12 a photographic reproduction of the document in question. It is one of the few documents discovered at Endere, which seems in ancient times to have been a sort of military fort situated about halfway between Charchan (Calmadāna of the inscriptions) and Nina or Niya (Cad'ota). Not only does it show some marked peculiarities of alphabet, dialect, and general style of composition, but as can be seen from the reproduction the form of writing also is quite unusual.

It is written in a very stiff and archaic form of script, but the ink is fresh and the writing is very well preserved and clear and Konow is probably right when he says in his paper on “ The Names of the Kings in the Niya documents ”, published in Acta Orientalia, that “ it does not seem possible to ascribe a late date to E. vi, ii, i, which is probably not an original but a copy from an old tablet ”. Various indications supporting this view of a very early date for the original of this document will be noticed in the course of the following commentary. For the sake of convenience of reference, I repeat the text of the inscription here.

Passages in received texts and in recently found legal documents show the different ways in which four terms refer to offices of Han imperial government; zhongdu guan indicates offices of the central government in the capital city; duguan signifies offices controlled by the central government but posted to work in the commanderies and counties; xianguan refers to just those offices but it is often used of “the government” in general, and in exceptional cases it specifies the emperor in person; xiandao guan were the offices of provincial government established in the counties (xian) and marches (dao).

Grassmann, in his Wörterbuch zum Rig-Veda (1872), has two separate entries kīrí subst. (m) and kīrín both adj. and subst. (m). To the former he assigns the meaning ‘singer’ and to the latter ‘praising’ and ‘singer’. He lists three occurrences of the forms of kīrín, two as instr. sg. kīríṇā 5.4.10 (= TS 1.4.46.1) and 5.40.8, and one as nom. pl. kīríṇas 5.52.12. But the form kīríṇā can as well be derived from kīrí and for this form a separate stem kīrín would not be necessary. But this is not true of kīríṇas. For its derivation, a stem kīrín would be necessary. The verse where the form in question occurs runs: chandaḥstúbhaḥ kubhanyáva útsam ā kīríḥo nṛtuḥ. The line refers to the dancing of the Maruts near the útsa The author of the Padapāṭha gives the Saṃhitā word as kīríṇas, and following him scholars have interpreted the form as nom. pl. of kīrín and translated it as ‘bards’ or ‘singers’. But it is also possible to analyse the Saṃhitā text kīríṇo nṛtuḥ as kīríṇā u nṛtuḥ where kīríṇā could be instr. sg. and can come from the stem kīrí. The line would then mean that the Maruts danced, and the singer of the hymn, to whom they had manifested themselves (té me … āsan dṛśí … ‘they (i.e. the Maruts) appeared to me’ 5.52.12) danced with them too. In this interpretation we are going against only the Padapāṭha.