TWO IMPORTANT LETTERS

• Published date: 31 December 2021

This article consist of two letters, the first letter is from Dr. Rahim Bakhsh Shaheen which he wrote to Dr. Lawrence . H. Barfield on May 12, 1984 regarding research in Iqbal Studies, in which he requested to provide some information while the second letter was written by Dr. Barfield in response to the above letter.

Dr. Rahim Bakhsh Shaheen was a renowned researcher and scholar of Iqbal. He has done valuable research work in the field of Iqbal Studies. He started his service from Higher Education Department, Punjab as Lecturer in Urdu. He was interested in Iqbal Studies, so he started his research in the same field. Keeping in view his interests in the field of Iqbal Studies, Allama Iqbal Open University hired his services. He served on different posts in departments of Urdu and Iqbal Studies of Allama Iqbal Open University, Islamabad. He also remained chairman of Iqbal Studies Department. He completed his Ph. D. on. His books include and “Mementoes of Iqbal”. Moreover, he wrote many research articles on Iqbal Studies that were included in different research journals.

Dr Lawrence Barfield, archaeologist and historian, was born on June 11, 1935 in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire. He is son of Nancy May Arnold, the daughter of Thomas Arnold. He studied at the universities of Cambridge, Ljubljana and Pavia and worked at the University of Bonn and the Rheinischeslandes museum before taking up a post at the University of Birmingham in 1966, where he remained until retiring as Reader in 2000. He got into archaeology while at Merchant Taylors' school, when he and Professor Martin Biddle, University of Oxford, were exempted games to excavate the Manor of the More, Cardinal Wolsey's palace, which was at the edge of the school grounds. In 1955 he went up to Magdalene College, Cambridge, to read archaeology and anthropology, resolving to specialize in prehistoric archaeology.

On graduating he began a Cambridge Ph. D on the Neolithic of northern Italy and the Balkans, spending a year at the University of Ljubljana as a British Council exchange student, and travelling all over Yugoslavia and northern Italy. He then focused on the north Italian Neolithic, and was an exchange student at the Collegio Borromeo, University of Pavia, after which he was offered a post as assistant in the Department of Vor-und Frhgeschichte in Bonn. It was while he was in Bonn that he began digging at the Rocca di Rivoli, an important Neolithic site near Verona. He stayed in Bonn for three and a half years, moving from the university to the Landesmuseum where he conducted several excavations, dating from the Bronze Age to Roman. After returning to Cambridge to finish his Ph. D, he became a lecturer at the University of Birmingham in 1966.

Dr. Lawrence Barfield was the most influential specialist on north Italian prehistory. Although his particular period was the Neolithic and Copper Ages, his interests ranged widely, and included Paleo- Indian stone tools of the Atacama desert in Chile, a fortified imperial villa in the German Rhineland and the Roman salt industry at Droitwich, Worcestershire.

Alongside his busy programs of excavation and publication in Italy, he was also active in English prehistory, particularly that of the West Midlands, with an interest in the interpretation of mounds of burnt stones, which he intriguingly proposed might be evidence of prehistoric saunas. Even on National Service he kept his hand in, digging a trench at the 1st-millennium BC city of Ezion-geber...