Lahore symposium booklet now available

Munizha Ahmad-Cooke News 2 Comments

We are pleased to make available the summaries of talks given at the symposium The History of Lahore and the Preservation of its Historic Buildings, held in Cambridge in October 2017 and organised by AIIT trustee Sir Nicholas Barrington and Dr Abdul Majid Sheikh. The booklet provides informal summaries of the talks as drafted by the speakers themselves, together with pictures of the main monuments discussed. It is planned that an academic volume of the proceedings will be published by the British Association for South Asian Studies, probably in 2020. …

Studies in the Chronology of the Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan

Ursula Sims-Williams Book Notes Leave a Comment

On Friday 25 May we celebrated the publication of Studies in the Chronology of the Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan by our Chairman Nicholas Sims-Williams and François de Blois. Following the presentation of the book, Joe Cribb, AIIT trustee and former Keeper of Coins and Medals at the British Museum, gave an exciting lecture ‘Constructing Kushan chronology: Bactria and Gandhara 1st-4th century AD’. More than 150 documents in Bactrian, the chief administrative language of pre-Islamic Afghanistan, have come to light during the last twenty-five years. These documents include letters, legal …

Plantatio memorialis

Munizha Ahmad-Cooke News 1 Comment

Written by James Cormick. By now the Muntjac deer that regularly forage in our garden will have noticed a new and potentially delicious addition to their larder. It is a young tree, with beautiful pinnate leaves, recently planted (on Friday 18 May 2018) in the south-eastern corner of the lawn. And although the Muntjac is not a native species, the tree will almost certainly jog its ancestral memory, for the tree is a Rowan (Sorbus aucuparia) and is as widely spread in China, the deer’s original home, as it is …

Among the archives: the seal of Ernst Stein

Ursula Sims-Williams Stories from the Collection Leave a Comment

One of the more surprising items in Sir Harold Bailey’s collection at the AIIT is a small sealstone made of a dark bluish green bloodstone, streaked with red specks (as its name suggests!). This was given to Sir Harold by Jeanette Mirsky (1903-1987), author of the biography of the Central Asian explorer and archaeologist Sir Marc Aurel Stein (1862-1943). Perhaps Jeanette Mirsky visited Sir Harold while she was researching her book Sir Aurel Stein, archaeological explorer (Chicago & London, 1977), for in March 1982 he received a belated birthday present, …

Call for Papers: Annual Allchin Symposium on South Asian Archaeology

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The Annual Allchin Symposium on South Asian Archaeology was established to commemorate the work of Raymond and Bridget Allchin, and the outstanding contribution they made to the development of South Asian Studies in the United Kingdom. The UK is currently home to the largest community of scholars working on South Asia outside of South Asia itself. Yet, until recently, there has been no regular forum to meet, exchange ideas and share research. The Annual Allchin Symposium provides an opportunity to bring together UK-based scholars working in South Asian Archaeology, and …