The port of Cambay in Gujarat was formerly one of the premier ports of western India and home to a rich and vibrant tradition of Islamic architecture and artistic patronage. This article presents a previously unpublished structure from Cambay, the Kothī gateway. Though commonly believed to have been constructed as part of the English factory at Cambay, the article demonstrates through stylistic analysis that the Kothī gateway in fact predates the factory by several centuries and is a neglected Tughluq structure, probably dating to the 1330s A.D.. The article also suggests that the gateway is in fact a rare, if not unique, surviving example of the secular architecture of fourteenth-century Cambay so praised by contemporary travellers. The Kothī gateway therefore represents a valuable addition to our list of known Islamic structures at the port of Cambay, and takes its place among the growing number of Tughluq structures identified in India. The article also provides an opportunity to publish a number of other structures, architectural fragments and carvings from Cambay that relate to the present gateway.

Ancient Greek and Roman conventional consolations of mourners are not reflected in Buddhist texts. Reason should modify grief, but the Buddha's ‘consolation’ of Visākhā by blaming her ‘affection’ is crude. Kisā Gotamī was consoled by the Buddha's asking her to get mustard seed from homes where no son, etc., had died, a technique employed by Democritus of Abderaj by Demonax, and in the Alexander Romance. The maxim of the Lame and the Blind figures in Indian philosophy, known to Buddhists. It appears in first-century Greek epigrams, and later Jewish texts a propos of resurrection. Movements of detail from West to East and vice versa are thus illustrated. Therefore the evangelists' and Buddhists' ideas could have been exchanged, despite pertinacious denials.

The 1990s bore witness to significant advances in the study of Chinese migration history. This paper explores ways in which these new insights into population and migration patterns in the lower Yangtze watershed throw light on the history of dialects currently assigned to the Jiāng-Huái family by the Language atlas of China. It is found that the lexical corpora of many of these dialects were laid down as the result of two migration waves, one during the late Táng period and the other after the fall of the Northern Sòng. Material from the first of these waves is now found in bái or colloquial pronunciations of certain syllables. Material from the second wave constitutes the primary lexical component of these dialects and also contributes those wén or literary readings which pair directly with the colloquial pronunciations in each dialect. Interaction with several contiguous dialect groups is also noted. In particular, interlocking or commensurate wén/bái correspondences with dialects of the Northern Wú group are discussed and exemplified.

This article examines the meanings and etymologies of several problematic Sogdian lexemes.I am very much obliged to Dr. J. Cheung (Leiden), Professor V. Livšic (St. Petersburg), P. Lurje (St. Petersburg), Professor M. Schwartz (Berkeley) and Professor N. Sims-Williams (London) who took pains to read the first drafts of this article and made valuable remarks, to Dr. B. Williams (Berkeley) who was very helpful in the matter of everything Chinese, to M. Ellsworth (Berkeley), A. Kassian (Moscow) and A. Kozák (Berkeley) who corrected my style. Final decisions are, of course, my own and none of those listed above are responsible for my errors. I am also grateful to the Houtan foundation (www.houtan.org) for its generous financial support, without which the completion of this article would hardly have been possible.

This article offers a brief introduction to the Ethiopic grammatical tradition. It engages in a discussion of selected terms used in the Ethiopic national grammars in the light of reference to and comparison with the Arabic and Copto-Arabic grammars of the late middle ages. Modern linguistic tools are used to analyse the linguistic ramifications of certain grammatical terminologies.

Although the presence of Nestorian Christianity in China under the Tang dynasty is a familiar enough matter to students of religion, many scholars in Chinese studies were until very recently reluctant to undertake substantial research into this topic, for the very good reason that they had been expecting the appearance of posthumous work on one of our main sources for this episode by Paul Pelliot (1878–1945), who was probably the greatest Asianist of the twentieth century. In 1984 Pelliot's translation of the source in question, the ‘Nestorian stele of Xian’, originally erected in 781 but first rediscovered in the seventeenth century, was actually published as part of a posthumous publication by another scholar, J. Dauvillier, who had been concerned primarily with the Syriac portions of the stele inscription. Since, however, Dauvillier's volume did not include any of Pelliot's copious notes to his translation, sinological scholarship was not substantially advanced by the appearance of this monograph.