Examines the socio-cultural history of the regions where Islam took hold between the 7th and 16th century. This two-volume work contains 700 alphabetically arranged entries, and provides a portrait of Islamic civilization. It is of use in understanding the roots of Islamic society as well to explore the culture of medieval civilization.

A History of the Georgian People (1971) begins with an account of the early history and ethnographic background of Georgia, and goes on to cover the country’s political history from 1000 to 1800 and Russian conquest. There are chapters on the social history of the country, with much interesting information on the feudal system, religion, justice and the slave trade. The final, illustrated section, discusses the art and literature of the Georgians.

The only detailed study of the diacritical and vocalization system of Syriac.

Arab painting, preserved mainly in manuscript illustrations of the 12th to 14th centuries, is here treated as an artistic corpus fully deserving of appreciation in its own terms, and not as a mere precursor to Persian painting. The book assembles papers by a distinguished list of scholars that illuminate the variety of material that survives in scientific as well as literary manuscripts. Because of the contexts in which the paintings appear, a major theoretical concern is, precisely, the relationship of painting to text. It rejects earlier scholarly habits of analysing paintings in isolation, and proposes the integration of text and image as a more satisfactory framework within which to elucidate the characteristics and functions of this impressive body of work.