Showing papers in "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1996"

The Arabs and the Colossus

Abstract: In 305 B.C. Demetrius I Poliorcetes of Macedonia (r. 321–283), pursuing his ambition of reuniting the empire of Alexander, marched against the island city of Rhodes, which since the partition of 323 had been able to reassert its independence and pursue its own foreign policies. The ensuing siege, one of the most famous military campaigns of Hellenistic times, was a failure, and in 304 Demetrius was obliged to admit defeat and withdraw, leaving behind his siege train and large amounts of other military stores. The jubilant Rhodians gathered up this equipment and sold it for 300 talents, which, in gratitude for their deliverance, they used to commission a spectacular monument to the sun god Helios, the focus of a lively cult at Rhodes. The sculptor selected for the task was Chares, an artist from the town of Lindos (about 40 kilometres south of the capital) and a student of the renowned Lyssipus, who had recently erected a great bronze statue of Zeus at Tarentum in Italy.

The Dating of the Historical Buddha: A Review Article

Abstract: L'A. cherche a dater precisement l'existence du Bouddha historique. Apres avoir elabore en detail les termes de la problematique, il retrace l'histoire des recherches en la matiere. Il examine les systemes chronologiques en vigueur dans les divers pays bouddhistes. Il passe en revue les differentes hypotheses proposees jusqu'a ce jour. Avant que de conclure, l'A. s'arrete sur deux travaux plus convaincants que les autres

Succession Struggle and the Ethnic Identity of the Tang Imperial House

Abstract: L'auteur essaie de demontrer, dans cet article, a partir d'exemples et de faits concrets, qu'il existe un contraste marque entre les Tang et les autres maisons imperiales autochtones en ce qui concerne la succession et d'autres attributs politico-culturel d'une dynastie, ainsi qu'un ecart culturel notable entre la maison imperiale des Tang et la petite noblesse confuceenne contemporaine. Il leve de serieux doutes sur la caracterisation des Tang comme une dynastie autochtone ou une maison imperiale sinisee en principe et soutient que la premiere moitie de la dynastie des Tang devrait plutot etre designee comme un regime sarbo-chinois ou encore xianbeo-chinois

The Mamlūks of the Seljuks: Islam's Military Might at the Crossroads

Abstract: The study of the Mamlūks under the Seljuks is of pivotal significance, because those Mamlūks formed the essential connecting link between their predecessors in the ‘Abbāsid Caliphate and their successors in the Sultanates of the Zangids, the Ayyūbids and the Mamlūks of Egypt and Syria on the one hand, and in the Sultanate of the Ottomans on the other. They were also part of an exceptionally important stage in the ethnic transformation which those Mamlūks underwent with the progress of time.

Definitions of poverty and the rise of the Muslim urban poor

Abstract: Poverty in medieval Islam is an enormous topic It is worth considering from a historian's point of view, especially in the light of what has been accomplished by historians of Rome, Byzantium, and the medieval and modern West who have dealt with poverty and the poor But as always, the sources for Islamic history, especially for the formative early centuries, present difficulties Here I wish to make a preliminary attempt at dealing with part of this problem I shall begin by considering an event which represents a turning point in the history of the Muslim poor, or more accurately, in the way poverty and the poor have been represented in modern historical scholarship on medieval Islam Then I shall suggest a way in which this event may be set in context, and a possible strategy for handling some of the relevant sources This strategy involves the identification of different, competing ways in which the poor were defined in the first centuries of Islam

Two seventeenth-century Central Asian travellers to Mughal India

Abstract: Etude de deux recits de voyage persans du XVIIe siecle ecrits par Mutribi al-Asamm Samarqandi et Mahmud b. amir Wali, originaires d'Asie Centrale, qui mettent en lumiere la conception du monde des musulmans en Asie et les relations entre l'Asie Centrale et l'Inde moghole au XVIIe siecle

Arab attacks on Rhodes in the pre-Ottoman period

Abstract: The period of Mu'āwiya b. Sufyān, as governor over Syria and al-Jazīra under the caliph 'Uthmān from at least 25–6/646–7, and then as Umayyad caliph in Damascus 41–60/661–80, was crucial for the first impetus of Arab expansion in the eastern Mediterranean. Egypt had been conquered by 'Amr b. al-'Āṣ during 'Umar's caliphate, and the great port of Alexandria passed definitively into Arab hands by 21/642. Alexandria possessed famed dockyards, and had a Greco-Egyptian population which the Arabs were able to press into service for manning their warships operating out of the Egyptian ports and out of the harbours along the Syrian coast, such as Jaffa, Acre, Beirut and Tripoli.

Ibn al-Azraq, his Ta'rīkh Mayyāfāriqīn, and early Islam

Abstract: Scholars have known of Ibn al-Azraq and his Ta'rikh Mayyāfāriqin since at least 1882, with the publication of F. Wiistenfeld's Die Geschichtschreiber der Araber und ihre Werke, but it seems that the history received its first thorough reading in 1902, when Amedroz published a summary of the recently acquired British Museum (now British Library) manuscript. Amedroz concentrated only on the latter folios of the MS, particularly those that cover the Marwanid dynasty, and in his interest in the second half of the work he has been followed by B. A. L. Awad, who edited the section on the Marwaīnids, C. Hillenbrand, who edited and translated the 18-odd folios that concern the early Artuqids, and A. Savran, who made some brief comments on the two MSS of the history. It is of course natural that the later sections of Ibn al-Azraq's work have attracted historians' attention, since it is here that our author, who was born in 510/III6–7, and who probably died sometime during the last quarter of the sixth century, has important things to say about northern Mesopotamia in his day. For this reason his history was used by later authors;8 as Hillenbrand has noted,9 here he fills a gap in the historical record.

Marco Polo in China — or not*

Abstract: Marco Polo's book — The Travels, The Description of the World, II Milione, or whatever we prefer to call it — is unquestionably the best known of all contemporary sources on that unprecedented historical phenomenon, the Mongol Empire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. That is not to say that it is by any means the best source. As history, it cannot compare, for example, with Rashīd al-Dīn's Jāmi' al-tawārīkh, and as a European travel account (if that is what it is), it is not remotely in the same class as Friar William of Rubruck's Itinerarium. Nevertheless, while Friar William may have been completely forgotten and Chinggis Khan remembered only as someone a political reactionary can, by dint of great effort, get himself (or herself, one should hasten to add) to the right of, there are many who know at least something about Marco Polo: perhaps principally the fact that he went to China — as almost everyone has hitherto supposed that he did.

The Kāmaḍ of Rajasthan — Priests of a Forgotten Tradition

Abstract: In Rajasthan, one of the north-western states of India, whoever has heard of the Kāmaḍ (or Kāmaḍiyā) would define them as wandering minstrels or jugglers, singing hymns in praise of Bābā Rāmdeo, a famous saint from Mārwāṛ, whose footprints they worship. Most people could not say much more about this community of religious singers who, since Independence, have been listed among the “scheduled castes”. In any case, everybody seems to be aware of their connection with Rāmdeo, a famous folk deity, also popular in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, now venerated by devotees of all castes and creeds, but mostly by Hindus, as an avatār of Vishnu-Krishna.