In the early 1990s, excavations were launched at the Southeast Necropolis in the Syrian city of Palmyra. They revealed two underground tombs, tomb C and F, which have provided insight into funerary architecture and decoration during the 2^nd century AD.

Sri Lanka was a popular stopover for merchants on their journeys between East and West. From the first centuries AD onwards, the island established constant and peaceful cultural, religious and economic relations with the Chinese Empire, and it was described in various accounts by Chinese travellers. In the fifteenth century, the political relations between Sri Lanka and China deteriorated temporarily due to a clash between the king of the island and the Chinese traveller Cheng Ho.

The first researcher of the Manichaean texts kept in the Asiatic Museum was it director (from 1890 to 1916) Academician Carl Germanovich Salemann (1849–1916). From the beginning of the 20th century up to his demise, he studied the Manichaean texts from Eastern Turkestan in the Middle Iranian languages: Middle Persian, Parthian and Sogdian. The collection of the Asiatic Museum (IOM RAS) included a considerable number of fragments of Manichaean texts in those languages, as well as in Chinese and Uighur...

In the early centuries A.D., miniature Buddhist sculpture from Gandhara became wide spread on the territory of Eastern Turkestan and Middle Asia. This is supported by the finds of archaeological expeditions, as well as by numerous research publications. Samples of Gandharan miniature sculpture carved of stone and ivory were found in Khotan by the 1900–01 expedition of Aurel Stein. One of the first research publications on the subject was S. F Oldenburg’s article dedicated to Gandharan art relics found in Khotan. The majority of works described by S.

In 1896 the Russian Geographic Society handed over to the Asiatic Museum (IOM RAS) a sack of shreds of ancient manuscripts collected in Turfan oasis by the 1893–95 expedition of V. I. Roborovsky and P. K. Kozlov. The manuscript fragments from a Buddhist cave monastery near Toyuq-Mazar and from the ruins of Idiqutshari were initially sorted out by A. O. Ivanovsky and S. F. Oldenburg; afterwards, in December 1897, they were examined by V. V. Radloff, who picked out four Old Uighur fragments from the collection.

In 1960 the participants in the International Congress of Orientalists in Moscow were offered an excursion to Leningrad. During the trip, two Sinologists (one of them from a western country, the other from the East) visited the Leningrad Branch of the Institute of the Peoples of Asia of the USSR Academy of Sciences (now the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences) and discovered for themselves the collection of manuscripts from Dunhuang, of which nearly nothing had been previously known abroad.

The Tangut Collection of the IOM RAS originated from the dead city called Khara-Khoto by the Mongols, Heishuicheng by the Chinese and Ejina by the Tanguts themselves. The ruins of Khara-Khoto are located at a distance of about 40 km from the aimag (district) Ejina of the Autonomous Province of Inner Mongolia in the People’s Republic of China.

The Arabic language spread all over the former Islamic State from the Atlantic Ocean to the banks of the Indus. The advent of Islam, therefore, marked a crucial stage in the history of the Arabic language. Contacts between the Arabic world and modern Europe in the 18^th/19^th century left major imprints on the Arabic language and converted classical Arabic into modern Arabic. Also Arabic grammar and lexicography went through different stages of development in the last centuries. 

Korean musical tradition has historically been influenced by cultures from all over Asia. Whilst China, as Korea’s immediate neighbour, played a particularly dominant role in early medieval musical forms, many types of foreign music were actively encouraged in Korea throughout the first millennium AD. Buddhist chant (pomp’ae) spread from India, whilst the traverse flute and the five-stringed lute can be traced back to northern Central Asia, to what is now Mongolia and Kazakhstan.

The countries of southeast Asia have a closely interrelated cultural history, shaped by the passage of cultures and religions that accompanied the historic trade routes. Caught between the economic demands of the Roman and Chinese Empires, the countries of Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos came to be increasingly exposed to new cultures from both east and west, which were to have a longlasting effect on their artistic traditions. Buddhism spread east from India and left a clear legacy in the art and architecture of these societies.