The Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria (1250–1517 ce) was based ona military-political elite of Eurasian Steppe provenance, brought to theEastern Mediterranean as youths. In the early decades of the Sultanate, mostof these were Qipchaq Turks, but additional groups of Turks, Mongols andothers were also well represented. The impact of the Eurasian militarytradition has been long noted by scholars. However, some other aspects ofthe Inner Asian legacy have not been fully explored. In this paper I willlook at a few characteristics of this cultural heritage: names, dailylanguage, drinking habits, sports, hunting, religious rituals, and culturalawareness. The question of identity of the ruling strata of the Dawlatal-Turk/al-Atrak (“The Dynasty/State of the Turks), as the Mamluk Sultanatewas then known in Arabic, will be broached at the end of the paper.

In a memorial lecture for Charles Beckingham, David Morgan 1 evoked one of this prolific travel literature scholar's astuteobservations: “[T]he study of travel narratives, especially travelnarratives about a culture quite different from the traveller's own, can bevery revealing, not only about the culture he observed, but about theculture to which he belonged”. 2 This insight indeed undergirds my own approach to the descriptionsof cities by both insiders and outsiders. Narratives of cities, indeed ofany landscape, are but interpretative and hermeneutics texts which can besurely used to narrate the very landscape, but also as texts which may beused to understand the culture and perceptions of the narrator. Over thecourse of this paper, I examine two accounts (texts) of residents of Mamlūkprovincial cities in al-Shām. These texts will be placedunder the scrutiny of the data and the existing literature of those cities.In other words, the ‘conceptualised city’ as narrated by the sources will becompared with the ‘tangible city’. The latter we may unearth from variousother sources (mostly texts) as well as the city's built environment. Thus,this chapter examines the ways in which Mamlūk cities of al-Shām were scripted and narrated by two local‘storytellers’ and ‘image-makers’ of the city. 3 In this context, ‘storyteller’ is an umbrella term for those wholeft us with a narrated legacy of their city. I decided to call themstorytellers for the purpose of accentuating their inherent subjectivity.Informed and accurate as some of these narrators may have been, all of theirexperiences with and accounts of the urban landscape were guided by apersonal understanding and their own cultural background. Since each ofthese texts is about spatial practices and spatial arrangement (landscape)of the city, the argument can be made that they all fall under the headingof travel writing. 4 What is more, any narrative with a spatial dimension (Michel deCerteau would argue that there is no such thing as a narrative without one)is a story that organises space. Against this backdrop, the objective ofthis chapter, above and beyond presenting ‘spatial stories’ of cities ofSyria, is to demonstrate the complexity of the reading landscape andparticularly the ways landscape descriptions need always be taken assubjective, culture-based, culturally constructed, and a constantnegotiation between the traveller/story-teller/source narration, the‘actual’ built environment and the political context.

This article examines the usage and sense of hātąm ‘of beings’ and the adjective haiθiia- ‘true’, both from the present participle haṇt- ‘being’, in the Old Avestan texts. It argues that the first is a rhetorical figure that enhances the stature of its complement and does not denote any particular kind of being whether divine or mortal. haiθiia- consistently appears in contexts that may be legitimately described as eschatological. Most often it qualifies a certain type of activity that leads to or constitutes a ‘splendid’ state of existence. What truly is, the article concludes, refers to existence beyond mortal life.

I write this article in the spirit of the Persian poetic tradition, in whichan answer to an earlier work takes off from the original and charts its owncourse. I will suggest that Tamerlane's recreation of the Mongol Empire wassymbolic, and was part of his successful creation of a regional state whichwas at once Turco-Mongolian and Perso-Islamic. His experiment was continuedand elaborated by his successors, and the resulting state provided a highlyuseful model for later dynasties in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Through my long engagement with Mongols and Turks, David Morgan's influenceand aid have been a constant advantage and his friendship a recurringpleasure. Our acquaintance began in 1987 with a kind letter he sent me afterreading the manuscript for The Rise and Rule of Tamerlanefor the Cambridge University Press. Since then I have profited from hisscholarship, have used his two books to teach generations of students, andhave called on him for uncountable letters of recommendation, alwaysgenerously given. I also want to thank David for asking me to write theMongol chapter for the New Cambridge History of Islam, andthus attracting me into the Mongol period. It may seem odd to express mygratitude by writing an answer to David's article which is not entirely inagreement with his conclusions. I trust in the well-known openness of hismind and assume that he will take this in the spirit in which it is offered,as the continuation of many years of discussion.

In this book review published in the October 2015 print issue of the JRAS, and online, Viktor M. Stoll has been incorrectly listed as an Honorary Fellow of the University of Cambridge, he is currently a doctoral candidate at that university. The publisher apologises for this error.

In the aftermath of the Mongol occupations of the largest and most populoussocieties of Eurasia, greater visibility of popular religion, morewidespread vernacular language use, rising literacy, and fundamental shiftsin the structure of rulership and the relationship of state and societycould all be observed. Many historians have related these changes to abroader chronology of early modernity. This has been problematic in the caseof Iran, whose eighteenth-century passage has not been adequately exploredin recent scholarship. Our comparative review of ‘post-Mongol’ Iran andChina suggests that this period marks as meaningful a break between aschematic medieval and schematic early modern history in Iran as it does inChina. Here, we first consider both societies in the post-Mongol period asempires with secular rulerships and increasingly popular cultural trends,and look at the role of what Crossley has called “simultaneousrulership”—rulership in which the codes of legitimacy of civilisationsrecognised by the conquest authority are given distinct representation inthe rulership — in marking the transition away from religious-endorsed ruleto self-legitimating rule as a mark of comparative early modernity.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding this research as part of the project ‘Tibetan in Digital Communication’.

The present short study examines the problems encountered in the translationin England of Ottoman documents addressed from the Porte or from the NorthAfrican Regencies to the English Crown in the latter part of the seventeenthcentury. In particular it studies in some detail the translationsundertaken, and the problems faced by, the polymath scholar Thomas Hyde(1636-1702/3), Librarian of the Bodleian Library in the University of Oxfordand translator of Oriental documents to the Crown, but reference is alsomade to translations undertaken by William Seaman (1606/7-1680) and his son,and by the Rev. William Hayley (c.1657-1715).

The poet, traveller, Arabist and campaigning anti-imperialist Wilfrid Blunt,who visited Gobineau in 1871, described him in his diary as follows:“Gobineau is a man of about 55, with grey hair and moustache, dark ratherprominent eyes, sallow complexion, and tall figure with brisk almost jerkygait. In temperament he is nervous, energetic in manner, observant, butdistrait, passing rapidly from thought to thought, a good talker but a badlistener. He is a savant, novelist, poet, sculptor, archaeologist, a man oftaste, a man of the world”. 1 On December 16 1904, Marcel Proust wrote to an old friend fromschooldays, “Me voici gobinien. Je ne pense qu’à lui”. 2 That old friend was Robert Dreyfus, the brother of the Jewishofficer Alfred Dreyfus, and, together with Proust, one of the leadingcampaigners for Alfred's release from Devil's Island. (Alfred was only fullyexonerated in 1906.) Proust, of course, skilfully worked the scandals andpassions of the Dreyfus Affair into his great sequence of novels, À la recherche du temps perdu. As for Robert, he was to publishhis Souvenirs sur Marcel Proust in 1926. But he had also published anadmiring monograph entitled La vie et prophéties du Comte de Gobineau in 1909. All this may suggest that, though CountJoseph-Arthur de Gobineau (1816-82) was a racist, he may not have been aconventional one.

The friendship and enmity between Paul Wittek and Fuad Koprulu form one ofthe most interesting episodes in the development of Turcology. Thiscontribution examines the ebb and flow of that relationship as well as someof the other victims who suffered on the sidelines.