Mixed blessings for those born in the Year of the Rooster

Ursula Sims-WilliamsStories from the Collection 2 Comments

The Year of the Rooster begins on 28th January 2017. What better excuse could there be for writing about an early 9th century description of the animal cycle written in the Eastern Iranian language Khotanese. Descriptions of the years of the monkey, cock, dog and pig, the last four years of the 12 year animal cycle. Photo: International Dunhuang Project (British Library Or.11252/1) This document is one of a group of forty one documents presented to the then British Museum in 1930 by Frederick Williamson who was Consul-General for the …

Christmas and New Year Greetings

Ursula Sims-WilliamsStories from the Collection 1 Comment

The Ancient India and Iran Trust will be closed for Christmas and New Year from 23 December until 2 January 2017. It will re-open again on Tuesday 3rd January. We wish you all a very happy Christmas and New Year with a reproduction of this Christmas card sent to Sir Harold Bailey in 1946 by the Norwegian Indologist Sten Konow (1867-1948). Konow had worked with the Central Asian explorer Sir Aurel Stein and the Sanskritist Rudolf Hoernle to decipher the newly discovered Central Asian texts in Khotanese, work which Bailey …

Jal Amrolia’s Gift to the Library

Ursula Sims-WilliamsStories from the Collection Leave a Comment

We were sad to hear last week of the death on 12 May of Jal Amrolia, a long-standing friend of the Ancient India and Iran Trust. Jal Edulji Amrolia was born in Zanzibar on 22nd August 1929 to Tehmina and Edulji Amrolia, one of three siblings with two sisters Khurshed and Sheru. He went to boarding school in Nargol, Gujarat, and then to Technical College in Surat where he met his future wife Banoo (Armin) whom he married in 1955. He returned to Dar-es Salam and got a job in …

AIIT’s Flavour of the Month

Jo SalisburyStories from the Collection 1 Comment

When the Trust was invited by Alan Alder, one of the regular presenters on Cambridge105’s Saturday food programme Flavour, to participate in a feature on food-related books in Cambridge libraries, we thought why not. Although we are not known for our gastronomical collections, it was interesting to note how many books we discovered that were not just cookery books, but also included content on the social and cultural aspects of food in Indian, Zoroastrian and Central Asian life and history. From the collection of two of our founding Trustees, Raymond …