 Rwy'n defnyddio. Rwy'n Paul Webblyd, ym ysgrifennu Cyffredinol, a wedi gweld i sicrhau i mi wrth i chi'n gweithio. Yn amlwg, mae'r rhagleniaid a chanol erioed i'n gweithio, mae'n ffordd a'i'n gweithio rydyn ni'n i gyd, ond mae'n gweithio, ac mae'n gweithio i'r gweithio, ac mae'r profiad yng Nghymru, Andrew Huxley, a'r ysgrifennu i'r gweithio i'r brifysgau. Felly, ddod yn gweithio ddim yn cael ei ddau. Mae'n gweithredu ar gyfer mettio'r ddweud o'r unrhyw yng Nghymru, a mae'n rhaid i chi'n gweithredu yma ar gyfer y dyfodol, cyfnodd y byddur ar y cwrs. Rhaid i'r sèryd ar gyfer Allgrull yng Nghymru yma ar gyfer allan. Rhaid i'r sèryd a'r cyfrifau a'r llygodd, rhaid i'r llygodd o'r llygodd o'r llygodd o'r llygodd. Rhaid i'r llygodd, rhaid i'r llygodd o'r llygodd o'r llygodd, Sometimes speakers are nervous, but Andrew assures me that he's got nerves of steel and he's not nervous at all. It's a celebration, it's an enjoyable intellectual event. Just to make sure that it's an enjoyable event, do need to ask you, do some simple housekeeping. Do turn off your mobile phones, I'm just going to do that as well. People who attend these things often will know that I'm a dear. Right, that's right. And if there is a fire alarm, it means there is a fire. So you can see where the fire exits are, so don't sit around thinking that's an unusual time to be having fire practice. Get up and leave promptly, we're not expecting anything to happen. Now I'm very pleased to be here this evening for this inaugural lecture. This is the fourth one of 2013 and the seventh of the 2012-13 series. I'm really looking forward to it because the title is so intriguing. I have no idea what Professor Huxley is going to talk about, so I've been looking forward to it, so it's great tonight. Now Dr Andrew Turton will introduce Professor Huxley tonight. He's a active anthropologist, a collector of art. He was at SOAS for many years during his time. He was chair of the anthropology department. He was also chair of the Centre of South Asian Studies. He lived for many years in Thailand conducting extensive research projects, especially in the north. I have to say Andrew, it's very good to welcome you back to SOAS. We met last year and it was good to talk to you then. It's very good of you to come this evening, thank you very much indeed. Dr Michael Willis from the British Museum, which he joined in 1994, will deliver the vote of thanks. He currently has curatorial charge of the early South Asian Himalayan collections from the late centuries BCE to the 14th century CE. He conducts research on these collections. He makes them available through publication display, study access and so on. Again, Michael, we're very grateful to you for your contribution to this evening. A very important part of the event. When we've finished, you'll be invited upstairs to a reception in the Brunei Suite. So that's the running order for the evening. Now to introduce Professor Huxley, I'm going to pass over to Dr Turb. Over to you. Dr, it is an honour to introduce Professor Andrew Huxley. Professor Andrew Huxley is a comparative lawyer, a legal historian and a barrister. He was a student at Oxford of David Dauber, regious professor of Roman and Judaic Law, who is known for his critical studies of texts and traditions. This places Huxley securely in an 800-year-old lineage of humanist law, of which I know he's proud and rightly so. He taught law at Oxford before being called to the bar. His pupil master in chambers in the Middle Temple was Michael Mansfield QC, the radical defence lawyer who was also influential in Huxley's professional development. Andrew Huxley learnt his trade in the principal courts of the land, such as the Old Bailey and the Middle Sex sessions. Mansfield is famous as a brilliant cross-examiner. Tonight we have a chance to hear Professor Huxley cross-examining the documentary witnesses in the case of Huxley versus Rhys David. After Oxford and London he was tempted, as I think he would put it, back into teaching at the University of the West Indies in Barbados. Part of this involved teaching the French law of contract to Francophone students of the West Indies. In 1984 he accepted a post at SOAS as Lecture in Law with reference to Southeast Asia. Professors Tony Allott and Robert Taylor were members of his interview panel and we know now that they made a very wise decision. Professor Huxley's transition to Southeast Asia studies was a hard task. He arrived with only a general knowledge of Asia and Buddhism. He had to fulfil his job description of acquiring a competence in the Burmese language. In this he had the help first of Anna Allott and then John O'Kell in the Burmese language and literature section. He is an inspiring teacher of equity, comparative law and taught and other things. He intends to publish soon a benchmark textbook on equity. He is well known for his humour and ease of manner with students, not to mention his normally rather more relaxed dress style. When Andrew invited me to introduce him today and hold his towel so to say, he referred kindly to the nurturing role I had played in his early years. I did no way expected such an attribution. His main nurturer was of course Professor Tony Allott, who will ask his no longer with us, but is remembered with great affection and respect. I was a close door tenant as it were of Andrew on the fifth floor. At a crucial time in his career at SOAS, I was chair of the Southeast Asia Research Centre and Head of Anthropology. I introduced him to colleagues and helped him feel at home. I supported him when others occasionally doubted his chances of making a success of this bold redirection of his research interests and becoming an expert in Burmese law. I encouraged him to write seminar papers. I read many of his publications in draft and I read them with increasing fascination. I liked his style. A favourite text of mine is his piece on Thomas Hobbes and Sir Francis Bacon. This has an unexpected resonance with Burmese law and history via John Fernable's well-known essay on the colonial state in Burma, which he named Leviathan. Anyhow, Huxley revisited an obscure unpublished text by Bacon and proved beyond doubt Bacon's influence on Hobbes. This also demonstrated Huxley's own flair for uncovering and examining evidence. The anthropology of law and the anthropology of contemporary Burmese legal practice were among his early interests. I had researched customary laws and dispute settlement in northern Thailand, a close neighbour in the region of what Andrew informally calls Pali land. This gave us some common interests. His work soon turned in a more historical and critical direction following his awareness that the colonial order had more or less completely destroyed pre-colonial Burmese Buddhist legal culture. This became the driving motif of his work. His wide-ranging and erudite publications are chiefly in the fields of Burmese legal history and the colonial history of British Burma, of pre-colonial Asian texts and of Buddhist ethics. His ever-growing collection of published articles has created for him an extensive international reputation, especially in North America, Germany and countries of south and eastern Asia. Professor Huxley has contributed greatly to the credit and distinction of SOAS as a global centre of scholarship and learning and of cross-disciplinary and comparative studies. Professor Huxley has a great enthusiasm for his work that is marked by a challenging and forensic style that's at the same time sprightly and entertaining. Tonight we shall enjoy some of the fruits of this. It is a great pleasure for me to present my learning friend, Andrew Huxley. Well, thank you, Andrew, and good evening, everybody. Here are the alats. Here's Anna, who taught me Burmese, and Tony, the professor in the School of Law, who appointed me. There I was, as you've heard, a somewhat unlikely appointment to SOAS. My expertise has been in Roman law, French law, comparative trust law in the Caribbean. And, as you've heard, it was something of a challenge to move towards Buddhism and Burma. They presented me with a particular research challenge that's been keeping me going for 29 years. Tony had picked up on an old colonial joke, a kind of thing that the old Burma hens used to say to each other. They call it Burmese Buddhist law because it's not Burmese, it's not Buddhist, and it's not law. This was the colonial version of Burmese legal history. The idea really was that Burmese law was unimportant, not worth studying. The general idea behind the colonial approach was that Burmese law had been unfit for purpose, and that was the reason that the British had moved in in 1885 and invaded Mandalay, put an end to the pre-colonial culture, the royal family of Burma, and simultaneously put an end to their legal system. As in all countries in the 1940s and 1950s, when independence arrived, there was a reaction against the colonial knowledge. In Burma, it was set off by a gentleman you've just heard referenced to, John Sydenham Fernival, J.S. Fernival, the great researcher on Burma, great socialist, and a man who in the early 1940s taught his students at Rangun University to see if they couldn't begin to appreciate what the virtues of pre-colonial Burmese law had been. The lecture he gave to his students has never been published. We have it in our archives here in Soares, and I would be very pleased if one day we can publish John Fernival's thoughts on Burmese law. His students in the 1940s responded to what he said. After independence in 1948, there was a standard post-colonial movement a movement of his students to re-examine what the so-called truths of the colonial period and to rethink them. That similar changes like that had taken place in Malaya, India, or wherever the British Empire had done its thing and packed up. But unfortunately in Burma, the great days of the post-colonial movement lasted only for about nine or ten years. Repression hit Burma early in the 1960s, and after 1962, it was not good for your health to discuss issues of law or legal history. So this post-colonial law movement peated out all too soon. And I think it's a mark of Tony Allott's genius that he saw the possibilities of resurrecting a movement that had been snuffed out too early. So I'm grateful to Tony Allott for giving me the chance to pick up once more the baton that John Sidenham Fernival had picked up in the 1940s that his students had followed through in the 1950s, but which had then come to a sudden hot. This is the colonial truth. Burmese law, they said, isn't Burmese because it's derived from Indian Sanskrit sources? It isn't Buddhist, they said, because these Indian sources are steeped in Hindu religious ideas. And anyway, it's not proper law because until 200 years ago, they said Burma was just a tribal society that relied entirely on oral custom. Well, I've kept plugging on at these issues over the years. Roughly speaking, John Fernival and his Burmese students had got it right. The postcolonial critique of Burmese law was right. And in a number of articles I've tried to point that out. It's one thing to talk about the unconscious bias of the 19th century scholars. But it's quite a different thing to discover that these 19th century scholars were consciously dishonest. Two of these exponents of the old colonial version of Burmese legal history proved to be wrongans. We've got a bad case of forgery in relation to alwa fura. We've got a similar kind of charge against Enforchhammer, although perhaps not as drastically bad as what fura did. So it seemed appropriate for me to check out the third member of the triumvirate, Rhys Davids. The other two were conscious wrongdoers in their research on Burma. Let's take a closer look then at Rhys Davids. We'll run through very quickly through his biography. The son of a nonconformist minister. His mother died when he was ten years old. He struggled. His father was a nice guy, loved by his parishioners. But an impractical man and there was never enough money in the David's family. Certainly not for Rhys Davids to get educated. He had to go off to Baltic Germany in order to learn enough Sanskrit that he could take the exams for the Indian civil service. He didn't have the money to study in Breslau University. So he had to support himself by teaching English as a foreign language to the North Germans of Breslau. As you see, he gets a job in Ceylon and at the age of thirty, suffers a gross misfortune. The extent to which he bought this misfortune on himself is dealt with by an excellent book by a Sri Lankan scholar. Again a book we've got in Sarah's Library and I urge you to read that and discover the truth that happened in 1873. He was dismissed for misconduct. There were suggestions of speculation. Suggestions that he'd taken money that didn't belong to him. But as far as I can see, those charges of speculation weren't proven. He did some bad stuff but it wasn't fraudulent stuff as far as I can see. So I've colour coded what happens next. He has two big choices before him when he's at the age of thirty, he has to build a new career. In green is his career as barrister. He gets called to the bar, he takes pupilage, he takes work at Three Brick Court Temple doing fairly low level work. Colour coded below there in blue is what Chris Davids was able to do as a buddologist. It's pretty evident from what he managed to achieve in the 1870s that David's heart was in buddology rather than law. He published his bestseller, his SPCK book on Buddhism, which sold vastly and continued selling and keeping him in royalties up well into the 20th century. Between 1878 and 1881 he managed to translate 800 pages of Pali text into English. That's his selections from the vineyard. Another 300 pages of Pali text on the Jataka, the birth stories of the Buddha. He also, during that time, wrote and delivered the hibbet lectures on the origin and growth of Buddhism. That made a big splash at the time because he was applying Darwinian ideas of evolution to the study of religion. By the way, his feeling at the time was that Buddhism had proved to be an evolutionary failure. Buddhism had a bright past, he said. It has a degraded present and it has very little future as a religion. By 1881 he's pretty much dedicated himself to buddology. He continues to do a tiny bit of work at the bar but most of his energies in the 1880s are in the direction of buddology. At 1881 he starts the Pali text society. Many such funding societies were set up in the 19th century all but one of them disappeared instantly. The Pali text society is the one of these societies which still thrives. In fact, if you want to know anything about Pali Buddhism you go to the Pali text society to find it out. The crucial event, as far as I'm concerned, is in 1887 when he is appointed secretary to the Royal Asiatic Society. That's the start of the Royal Asiatic Society years. Almost 20 years during which Rhys Davids is at the absolute centre of imperial studies of India and Buddhism. The trouble is from Rhys Davids' point of view that this was half-time post and half-pay post. The poor man constantly had to apply for other jobs with which he could supplement his wages. He applied unsuccessfully for a job at London University. He applied unsuccessfully to the indoor office for a job. And until he could make some money to supplement what he got from the Asiatic, the Royal Asiatic Society, then he would not have enough money to get married. And he'd already got a girlfriend by 1893. And Foley, blue stocking, economist, graduate of London University, herself, somebody interested in Sanskrit and Pali as a way of discovering more about Buddhism. Now we're going to see how Davids acquired enough money to get married but before we do that we're going to eavesdrop on the courtship between Rhys and Caroline. As you can see, it's a courtship that has a distinctly Germanic tone to it. And it seems that it's Richard Wagner who's giving them the kind of language which they're able to discuss their deeper emotions. Strangely enough, it's William Gladstone, the Prime Minister, who acts as their matchmaker. Gladstone awarded a civil list pension of £200 per year for life to Rhys Davids. And that meant that the couple were able to get married. Now generally speaking, pensions are given to people who are considerably older than Rhys Davids and generally speaking they get a lot less than £200 per year. Putting it bluntly, these pensions are supposed to go to people who are old enough to pop off before they are too much of a drain on the assets of the state. So questions were asked in Parliament about this appointment. Would the pension have been given to Rhys Davids had the recipient not been a strong political partisan? asked George Bartley. I should explain. Rhys Davids, as well as a bedologist, as well as a barrister, is highly active in liberal politics. Generally, he spent each morning at the National Liberal Club networking, had lunch and then moved to the Royal Asiatic Society to network with his orientalists for the afternoon. The parliamentary question goes on to describe David's pension as one of the grossest political jobs that has been perpetrated for many years. And the polymol gazette, which has spared to be the voice of club land, made links between the Professor Rhys Davids record in Ceylon and the pension awarded to him in 1894. Do note those inverted commas round the word record. It's a nice bit of character assassination by punctuation. The implication, I think, is that the Professor had a criminal record from his time in Ceylon, which was absolutely not the case. Well, let's move to India. In 1898, there is an extraordinary archaeological discovery just in British India, just south of the border with Nepal, at a place called the Peprawa Stupa. And it's the local landowner, the local indigo planter, William Pepe, who is in charge of the dig and makes the discovery. Rhys Davids became intimately involved with this particular discovery. You could, in a sense, talk about David's as being the impresario of the Peprawa discovery. He published it in the journal that he edited, the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. He plugged it to the popular press. He even travelled to India to inspect the Peprawa site himself, and then he came back and published a book about his visit. So Peprawa and the discoveries there were a large part of David's life between 1898 and 1905. One of the reliquary urns that was discovered at Peprawa bore this short inscription in Brahmi letters. People are still debating precisely what the inscription means, but they're sure of two things. According to the inscription, the contents of the urn are relics of the Buddha. And the second thing we're sure of, the person who enshrined these relics was called Sukhiti Sakya. And presumably he was also the bloke who built the brick stupa up on top of the reliquary deposit. Now people got excited about the name Sakya because it's the surname of the Buddha. Before he got enlightened, he was called Gautama Sakya. And so the idea that went around was that this was, that this deposit of relics was connected with the Buddha's own family. And there's a scriptural angle to things as well. The Suttag of the Great Decease is one of the most popular Buddhist suttas. It's a story of the last year of the Buddha's life. How he works his way north from the Ganges. He gives Dharma talks in villages. He meets up with monks and gives them good advice. And how eventually he suffers from food poisoning and dies. There's a delay of several weeks before the cremation takes place. Then there's a further delay because there's a big dispute about what to do with the ashes from the Buddha's cremation. The Suttag of the Great Decease tells us that eight kings were ready to go to war with each other over the relics. Happily, an arbitrator turned up, the Brahmin, Dona, who was able to divide the relics up into eight portions and give a portion to each of the kings. One of those kings was a king of the Sakyas, the Buddha's own family. And the British being archaeological romantics tried to make a connection between what the scriptures said and what they were digging up from their archaeological digs. Viscoy Elgin himself said, the fragments of bone ash here may be the actual share of the relics taken by the Sakyas of Kapilavatu at the time of the Buddha's cremation. If so, of course, they would be astonishingly sacred relics. They would be more authentic than any other relics hitherto found. Therefore, the Viscoy offered these relics to the last remaining Buddhist king in the world, King Chulalongkorn of Siam, with the proviso that the king of Siam distribute these relics between the Buddhist faithful around the world. King Chulalongkorn received this offer from the Viscoy, but he spent quite a long time mullig it over. And it seems that King Chulalongkorn heard some information which made him doubt the entire genuwness of the find at Pipprara. Now there were a couple of clouds on the horizon which the king of Siam could easily have picked up himself. Here's a Reuters telegram dated Vienna, April 1898, a telegram which was sent to English language press right around the world. It refers to a Professor Buller whose importance here is that he was the first European to publicise the relics found at Pipprara. And here's a Reuters telegram saying that Buller's death in early April is now rumoured to be either a suicide or a crime. Likewise, another problem that went out of private gossip into the public press concerned Dr Thurra. Thurra being the first person to be told of the discovery at Pipprara and the first person to send details of it to European scholars. So again, here's something in the press published in Singapore and therefore I think quite possible that the king of Siam was informed of what stories were being told in the Singapore press. What they're saying here is that Thurra's resignation from the archaeological department was due to the fact that he had been involved in forging relics and sending them to Burma. King Chulalongkorn eventually received the Pipprara relics from the Government of India and then distributed it a year and a bit later to the Buddhist faithful. Meanwhile, enter Lord Cersen. In January 1899, Lord Cersen took over as Viscoy and the first thing he did was to try and get to the bottom of the Pipprara matter. He dispatched a Thurri archaeologist, Lawrence Waddle, and sent him up to Nepal to try and find out the truth of the discoverers there. The Thurri archaeologist reported back saying that everything that had been discovered in Nepal itself was very dodgy indeed, but the Thurri archaeologist said nothing about Pipprara, which had been discovered a matter of yards on the Indian side of the border with Nepal. Having discovered this, Cersen summoned Rhys Davids to come to Calcutta for discussions with him. We know one thing that they discussed and we have to surmise what else was discussed between Davids and Cersen. Certainly the thing they did discuss was the idea of a collaboration between the Government of India and the Royal Asiatic Society on a series of books that would be called the Indian Text series. The idea was that the Government of India would supply the funding and the Royal Asiatic Society would supply the editorial skills, the scholarship. Presumably they also talked about what kind of publicity strategy to apply to the Pipprara finds. I mean there was a difficulty. People were talking, people were criticising these finds. Should they wait, not publish anything, wait and see what the French and Russian archaeologists who were less constrained in the British were going to say about the Pipprara finds or should they flood the market with official publications about Pipprara. After meeting Cersen, Davids went up to Pipprara, met Vincent Smith and Pepe, the two of the people involved in the discovery, and then the two of them, Davids and Pepe, returned to London, gave a lecture illustrated by Lantern Slides at the Royal Asiatic Society and that generated a whole bunch more publicity in the mid 1900. I've quoted indirectly from the big account in the Daily Chronicle, which is interesting because it seems to give the impression that Rhys Davids was a co-owner of the discovery. He and Pepe returned to this country with details of their recent important and interesting discoveries. Cersen hadn't been fully informed of what had gone on, archaeologically during 1898, until after he'd allowed the presentation of the Pipprara relics to the King of Siam to go ahead. Once that had happened, Cersen was stymied. If he discovered later that Pipprara was a fake, it would now be too late to publicise that fact without losing vast amounts of face before the King of Siam. So inexorably, Cersen, who had started off as a seeker of truth in relation to Pipprara, turned into a participant in the cover-up of what happened. But he did hold off on publishing any official document on Pipprara for four whole years, not until the very end of 1904 did Cersen take this critical step. Here's Cersen's letter to the Indian office suggesting a new volume to be published by the Indian text series, specifically on Brahmi inscriptions, which in effect means the Pipprara urn inscription, the most recently discovered Brahmi inscription. Before December 1904, the Indian text series had already become a matter of controversy. Here's our hero, yet another Edwardian man with a moustache, John Faithful Fleet. John Fleet was another Indian civil servant. He spent three years as the official government epigrafer in India. Then they decided that he was being paid too much for a mere job as epigraphy and put back onto his normal duties. Fleet retired to London in 1897 and subsequently became a pillar of the Royal Asiatic Society. But he very quickly found when he was back in London that most of the decisions of the Royal Asiatic Society were being taken by their secretary, Chris Davids. I know this because Fleet's personal library became the cornerstone of Soa's library. A lot of the volumes we have on India in Soa's library are John Fleet's old copies. I can, as it were, look over John Fleet's shoulders and look at the marginalia that John Fleet was writing. Whenever something crops up in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society where David's is doing something suspicious, then John Fleet faithfully records it in his neat pencil writing in the margin. By the middle of 1904, Fleet was getting very cross indeed with Chris Davids. As we can see from the minutes of the Council of the Royal Asiatic Society, this is their meeting of June 1904. Fleet tables two motions. One of them is so controversial that it's not recorded in the minutes. The other one has to be withdrawn and rephrased before it can be written down in the minutes. Here's the rephrased version. Let's see if we can deconstruct what Fleet's motion is actually all about. It's about the Indian text series. The implication of the motion is that Chris Davids has grabbed too much power over the Indian text series and that the Council is trying to grab power back from David's to itself, because what they're doing is ordering that the Secretary be controlled by a series of ad hoc expert committees. That meeting in June 1904 turns out to be the start of a ding dong fight within the Royal Asiatic Society, between two factions, essentially between John Fleet's faction and Chris Davids' faction. By December, the Royal Asiatic Society has ground to a complete halt on the issue. There's a crucial subcommittee in relation to the Indian text series. It splits three to three, therefore can't make any decision, and there are some very sad letters between the President of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Permanent Undersecretary at the Indian Office, both of whom are avoiding making any decision. They're trying to pass the parcel to each other and each of them is refusing to take responsibility for anything to do with the Indian text series. You'll be wondering what my sources are for this battle. In December, John Fleet had proposed that every scrap of correspondence in relation to the Indian text series should be published and distributed to members of the society. That's this volume up at the top, the correspondence between the Indian Office and the Royal Asiatic Society. I've looked for copies of this in London libraries, but I haven't been able to find them. Luckily, a copy is in a Californian University Library and there's good folks at Google digitised this volume and the whole thing can be seen at openlibrary.org. Now that published online set of archives takes the story up to the first week in January. If we want to find out the rest of the story following on from January 1905, then we need to look at the Brahmi inscriptions file down at the bottom here. I had a fair amount of difficulty getting hold of this file, this Brahmi inscriptions file because it's not mentioned in any of the Indian Office catalogs. What I was able to do finally was to backtrack from a reference in the Royal Asiatic Archives into the Indian Office archives. The person who taught me how to do this backtracking trick was Dr Richard Bingle, formerly of the British Library, and I'm very grateful to him for his help. Likewise, I'm grateful to Dr Antonia Moon, the present curator of the Indian Office records for locating the file from the information that I was able to give her and giving it a catalogue number which then made it available for scholars to consult. Here's the reaction from the Indian Office to the letter that Cursan wrote suggesting a volume on Brahmi inscriptions. It's written by the Indian Office librarian and it's written to the keeper of the Indian Office records back then, that's A. N. Wallaston. Essentially what they're saying is, yep, Cursan's idea for a volume on Brahmi inscriptions is a good idea, but suggesting that the Asiatic be kept out of the loop. Let's not tell the Royal Asiatic Society about this proposal. What we do know, however, from other correspondence in the file is that although the Asiatic Society were kept out of the loop, Rhys Davids was informed about it at the earliest possible stage. So with these India Text series, they've been launched in 1900 as a partnership between the Government of India and the Royal Asiatic Society, but by now, with this letter in February 1905, it's become a very personal partnership between Lord Cursan on the one hand and Rhys Davids on the other hand. Wallaston and Thomas, the Indian Office librarian, sit on their information hoping that the Royal Asiatic Society will thawr out in relation to the India Text series and a year later in May 1906 they come clean, they send a letter to Miss Hughes, the Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, making the first mention of this Brahmi volume. She replies urgently and in something of a panic, tell me what is really intended. The committee is soon sitting. And that's the ad hoc subcommittee to consider the question of a compilation of Brahmi inscriptions on which sit these three luminaries. John Fleet. George Greerson, he's another old India hand and the guy associated with the Linguistic Survey of India. And Moses Gaster, who's a London rabbi who is the most influential Zionist in political circles in the Edwardian period. Here's the conclusion of the subcommittee. There is nobody apparently in the whole of the world who can be entrusted with producing a volume on Brahmi inscriptions. Fleet writes a short memorandum in which he explains his reasons why nobody is capable of doing this job. And that memorandum is the document that I was trying to find and eventually was able to find thanks to Richard Bingle and Antelio Moon. The memorandum to accompany the committee's report. Fleet gives a whole bunch of reasons why it's not possible to bring out such a volume at present. But the thing that he keeps harping on, the point he continuously makes, is that we don't yet have sufficiently trustworthy mechanical reproductions of the Brahmi inscriptions. Many of the published reproductions he says are notoriously untrustworthy. And then he has a pop at the Indian archaeologists whose job it is to take proper purely mechanical copies of the inscriptions they find, but who insist on touching up, improving their versions of the inscriptions. Well, let's have a look at what he means by notoriously untrustworthy. Down at the bottom, we've got this nice circle. And this is the entirely mechanical reproduction that John Fleet insisted that the Indian Archaeology Survey should take. It's a crucial document, this particular mechanical reproduction. It's the only entirely mechanical reproduction of the proper inscription that's ever been made, to my knowledge. And unfortunately, people simply don't know about it. Again, to my knowledge, this is the first time that it's ever been shown in public. So that, at the bottom, is what the Pipraro urn inscription actually looks like. Now, if you want to see a untrustworthy reproduction of the Pipraro inscription, look up at the top. It's published by Chris Davids, the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. It's an article written by Vincent Smith. And Vincent Smith's version of the inscription shows it as being divided into two pretty much equal halves. A line one and a line two, he shows that one of the words is split between line one and continues on line two. And of course, that's plainly wrong. Plainly, there's no division, equal division between lines one and line two. And one has to ask how Smith was capable of making that kind of mistake. According to the correspondence in relation to the Pipraro discovery that's recently been made public, Smith and Pepe, and the urn itself all spent the night of the 29th January 1898 under the same roof at Birdpoor Plantation House. Now surely Smith, the amateur archaeologist, could not have spent the night in the same house as the urn without taking a look at it. And surely if he'd held that inscribed lid of the urn in his own hands, he couldn't possibly subsequently have made the mistake of thinking it was divided into two lines. So it seems to me that we know that Smith was there on the night of the 29th of January, but the assumption must now be that the inscription itself was not there on the 29th of January. And once you pull on that particular loose thread, then the whole yarn about Pipraro unravels. Now how can I persuade you that when Fleet talks about the untrustworthiness of Brahmi inscriptions, he's talking about Pipraro in particular rather than Brahmi inscriptions in general. Well I do that by pointing at these three articles up in the top right hand corner. These are three articles, all of them about the Pipraro urn inscription, all of them written by John Fleet and all of them published by John Fleet as editor of the journal. His memorandum was written between article two and article three. And by the time he writes, he's finished writing the memorandum and starts writing his third article. He is in a very bad temper indeed. His third article, Fleet's third article is an ad hominem attack on Rhys Davids. Fleet is so angry that he won't refer to Rhys Davids by his proper name. He merely refers to another writer in this journal. And what Fleet is doing here is taking a pop at an article that David's wrote in 1901. An article in which Fleet offered a very blustery defence of the Pipraro urn said, Rhys Davids, the hypothesis of forgery is in this case simply unthinkable. Fleet's response in 1906 JRAS is that David's article is biased. David's by no means told us all that there is to be learned and it's not exactly accurate even as far as it goes. Of course what I've been able to do in these 40 minutes is not to prove that the Pipraro relic deposits are a forgery. There's a whole lot more expertise than I have which has to be brought in relation to matters of script, vocabulary, orthography, the ancient sources from which the modern text was composed. But I hope what I've shown today is that Fleet, the greatest epigrafer of the Edwardian age had doubts about the validity of the Pipraro urn inscription. And that, as far as I'm concerned, sets up a case to answer. It's about time that the experts got together and pooled their view on Pipraro. If it's not good enough for John Fleet in 1907 it probably shouldn't be good for us in 2013. Now let's get back to Chris David's biography to his life story. How does Chris David's react to this sudden diminution in his powers? For 18 years Chris David's had operated in club land with one foot in Parliament, the other foot in the India office. And then suddenly because of the scandals of 1905 Chris David's is cast away by empire. The poor man has to move to South West Manchester to, as it were, live out his exile. Now obviously he's not going to be happy. And his unhappiness in early 1907 takes the form of an illness. He has to go and see specialists in Harley Street. They take some fluid from his lungs and stick the fluid into a giddy pig. Was he suffering from insumption? Was he possessed by a demon? I asked that question because late one evening while he's staying in London waiting to get the results of the giddy pig tests he wrote a letter to his wife, Carolyn, who was at home in Ashton upon Mersey Cheshire. Fascinating letter. Evidently Chris David's has spent the evening at some kind of seance. He calls it the Delphian Oracle and apparently it involves a man and some hidden priestess. In fact maybe there wasn't even a priestess. David says I don't believe in the priestess. I think all the wisdom was that he is whoever this he is and he goes on. The mystery is beyond my fuddled brain. Well Chris David's handwriting is pretty crummy. I spent about three weeks going through the Chris David's archives and I have suffered from his handwriting but I've never seen his handwriting as bad as it is in this particular letter. If we're looking for why his brain should be fuddled I think we have to look at the handwriting and really it's a kind of spot the narcotic. Looking at those two lines which sort of dribble down towards the right my guess would be that he'd eaten a lump of hash or maybe been given a little bit of Lordenham to take. But as to what he's saying here he's saying that the priestess has informed him that there's a concealed demon that David's is suffering from. Its name is Abyses. It's so old as even perhaps to be Abysseological. So plainly David's knows his demonology. He can tell the difference between one kind of demon and another. And happily this the person who's running the seance in 21 Cavendish square knows how to exorcise the demon that David's is suffering from. Perhaps with John an ancient remedy. Well let's all hope we can get some John one of these days. So Rich David's a scholar possessed by demons. Thanks for listening. Andrew thank you for what is certainly the best inaugural lecture I've heard in my life. So often we extract from the study of the Edwardian and Victorian period the material we want without looking at its context and we've been informed that context for that period is just as important as it is for the ancient period where we're constantly trying to recover the context. Now I'm sure you have many questions you would like to ask Andrew but I'm here to make sure that you don't. All that my sole role is to ask you to once again thank Andrew for a very excellent lecture and to as a director has assured me there is upstairs John on offer so thank you very much