I would like to thank the Royal Asiatic Society warmly for allowing me the privilege of giving today's lecture on Dr Otto Samson. It is both an honour and a responsibility to speak of a person whom one has never known and whom others knew so much better, and I should perhaps explain why I of all people should be standing here today.

That history may be read as literature is an aesthetic judgment, which does not deflect from the essential difference between the two modes. To paraphrase Gibbon, who above all in this context knew what he was talking about, “the end of history is truth … the end of poetry is pleasure”. History, by definition, must fail to attain its ultimate goal of recreating the past “exactly as it happened”: that such is the case, whether because of the fallibility of the human intellect, or the difficulty (but not impossibility) of constructing history in a non-linear mode, or even – that stock excuse of historians – the doubtful, maybe putatively “fictional” quality of “the sources” – does not mean, as is from time to time suggested, that the attempt should not be made, or that history and fiction are indistinguishable. Intent, in this context, is all, nor should one forget that earlier proponents of fictionalised history may on occasion prove to be somewhat uncomfortable intellectual bedfellows.

It is a strange circumstance, yet one immediately observable, that the Parsi community in India, so innovative and so energetically creative in many other respects, has failed to distinguish itself in the sphere of indigenous arts. In the acquisition of tastes and skills in European or hybrid pseudo-Persian architecture, in European-style portraiture, and in Classical music, the Parsis have been diligent, even as they long ago became eloquent masters of the English tongue. What of their arts can properly be called Zoroastrian?

The 39-year old Engelbert Kaempfer sighted the Siamese coast on 1 June 1690, and on 7 June his ship entered the river Chao Phraya, and reached the Dutch residence “Amsterdam”. Three days later he arrived in the Thai capital, Ayutthaya. Almost a month later, on 4 July, Kaempfer's boat began its journey downriver, spending some days loading goods at “Amsterdam”, and on 10 July he left Siamese territory, continuing his journey to Japan.

Calicut was the most important port in southwest India during the late fourteenth and the fifteenth century. Its rulers, the Zamorins, maintained a vast network of trading relations extending from the coast of East Africa to the Indonesian archipelago and the Far East. This is amply documented in the accounts of foreign travellers, practically all of whom passed through the Malabar ports on the lengthy voyage from west to east and back. Marco Polo, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, 'Abd al-Razzāq, to name but a few, figure most prominently in a long line of writers whose reports describe various aspects of old Colychachia, as Calicut was then called by Nicolo di Conti, an Italian traveller.

The Ming maritime expeditions organized by Cheng Ho during the reign of Emperor Yung-lo have been studied intensively by Sinologists and the historians of the eastern Indian Ocean. The scattered references in the Islamic sources to the arrival of Chinese ships at the Middle Eastern ports on the other hand have not been properly collated with the evidence from Chinese historical sources. While working on Ibn Taghrī Birdī's history of Mamlūk Egypt, I accidentally came across a passage which graphically describes the possible economic impact of the Ming voyages on the revenue of local rulers. The historian was referring to the last expedition and the arrival of ships during the reign of al-Malik al-Ashraf Barsbay.

A conspicuous feature of Ottoman history from the sixteenth century onwards, or even of fifteenth-century Mamluk Egypt, is that the mass of surviving administrative documents, well complemented by European sources, makes it possible to apply a range of economic and social concepts to illuminate their economy and society. For Persia the documents are far fewer and, even where, as in seventeenth-century Iṣfahān, the extant Safavid documents are exceptionally well complemented by European source material, doubts, often of a Marxian or Braudelian order, on the legitimacy of applying European concepts to Persian society are often entertained. In other periods the paucity of material is compounded by ethnic diversity – tribal versus settled populations; Turks versus Iranians or Iranians versus Turco-Mongols, all with deeply rooted authentic traditions – which is rarely documented, let alone explained, by the contemporary historians. It is almost as if the right kind of anthropologist could do more than the historian to exploit what material there is.

Mrs. Jacob has provided us with a translation, for the first time in English, of the most important text in classical Cambodian literature, with an introduction and critical notes and lists, which will be of great help to anyone studying the Cambodian text. The Cambodian Rāmāyaṇa was composed anonymously by at least three authors over three centuries, and is divided into two parts. The earliest writer, of the sixteenth century, accounts for about a fifth of the first part, covering the main events of the Bālakāṇḍa and Ayodhyakāṇḍa. It was continued in the seventeenth century with the story up to Rāvaṇa's assembling the remnants of his army for the final battle with Rāma: but Rāvaṇa's death, the rescue of Sītā and her trial by fire, and the triumphant return to Ayodhya, are all missing. The second part of the Cambodian Rāmāyaṇa relates those events from the Uttarakāṇḍa which deal specifically with the later history of Rāma and Sītā: her second rejection and exile, the birth of their two sons, the meeting again, and Sītā's going down into the earth. This part is believed to have been composed in the eighteenth century.