Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī concluded his celebrated Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī with a string of aphorisms purporting to be ‘a chapter from the utterances of Plato of profit to the generality of men: namely, the testament that he gave to his pupil Aristotle’. In his recent admirable translation, Professor G. M. Wickens comments that ‘the aphorisms in this Section are of course not necessarily regarded as coming from one Platonic corpus: even Ṭūsī uses the term mansūb, with its suggestion of doubt. They will be recognized to have many parallels and resemblances over a wide area of time and space, but their Muslim clothing is worn with an air of comfortable familiarity’. In point of fact, as will be demonstrated in this paper, the entire section is a reasonably close translation of a section occurring in the so-called al-Ḥihmat al-khālida of Ibn Miskawaih.

This essay takes for granted articles in the Encyclopaedia of Islam and papers by D. B. Macdonald and W. E. Calverley but a brief summary may be allowed. Nafs and rūh were used loosely to mean almost anything connected with life, but acquired new meanings as the years went by. Men differed about the nature and activity of all three constituents of man. ‘Soul’ is almost the equivalent of nafs in its precise sense though it may be hard at times to decide if ‘self’ is not more appropriate. It is easier to admit the existence of soul than to define it for it has neither genus nor proprium; any definition is imperfect and any description inadequate. It is part of the world soul as intellect is part of the world intellect, it is part of the spirit of God, torn off by the instrumentality of intellect, it is simple, incorruptible, and unchangeable. Many were the suggestions; it is a compound of constituents (rukn), union of elements('unsur), a self-moving accident, hot spirit, a nature in perpetual motion. It is a living substance(jawhar) but is not in the body in the same way as rūh is. Another idea is close to a Jewish view that all souls are one and are made different by the influences of the spheres and stars through or by which they pass on their journey to earth. The threefold division of soul into vegetal, animal, and rational was known and may have something to do with the religious division into the soul at rest in faith, the censorious soul, and the lusting soul. Instead of censorious the meaning ‘changeable’ is also given.8 A variant is that a believer has three souls while a hypocrite and an unbeliever have each one.

This article is an attempt to assemble and reassess the evidence relating to the problems of land tenure in the Middle Assyrian period, and to show that all ‘private’ land was normally held as a concession from the crown in return for the performance of ilku obligations. The subjects are treated in five main sections:

1: ilku and military service (pp. 496–502)

2: the Middle Assyrian laws, tablet A, § 45 (pp. 502–8)

3: allocation of tenures by the crown (pp. 508–12).

4: evidence from the land sale documents (pp. 512–17)

5: conclusions (pp. 517–19)

This fourth article brings us to the end of a preliminary survey of the main chapter (six-sevenths by length of what survives) of Das chwaresmische Sprach-material einer Handschrift der ‘Muqaddimat al-adab’von Zamaxsari, as it is presented in the edition of Johannes Benzing. Notice is no longer taken of the underpointed spellings of words which have been met frequently before, of the type b'rwzd for p-, ǰrm for č-, etc., and in the first instance only the more debatable transliterations of the Xw. glosses are discussed. We take up the tale at Muq., 439, Benzing's p. 316.

The development of the cerebral or retroflex series (ṭ ṭh ḍ ḍh ṇ ḷ ṣ)in Old Indo-Aryan is a complicated phenomenon to which many factors have contributed, and a full and satisfactory account of it is yet to be produced. One of the factors involved is that of spontaneous cerebralization, by which original dentals become cerebrals without the presence of any predisposing influence. This phenomenon has always been recognized to some extent but its full extent and significance have only recently come to be recognized.

Li Ho (791–817), one of the most original of Chinese poets, and a key influence in the development of late T'ang poetry, has attracted increasing attention in recent years. It is therefore a pleasure to welcome the appearance of a full-scale study by such a well-equipped scholar as Dr. J. D. Frodsham. His qualifications for the task are quite exceptional; already well known for his work on pre-T'ang poets, he uses the Japanese as well as the Chinese authorities, loves poetry for its own sake, and is familiar with Western literature and literary criticism. It is refreshing to read a book on a Chinese poet which instead of repeating the traditional judgements approaches his work from an independent and modern angle and with post-Empsonian critical tools. Substantial selections from Li Ho's poems have appeared in English before (a fact which Frodsham nowhere mentions), in Robert Payne's White pony, the Poems of solitude of Jerome Ch'en and Michael Bullock, and my own Poems of the late T'ang. But the present collection covers, with detailed annotation, all the 243 poems attributed to Li Ho, in versions which convey the floridity and satirical liveliness of the lighter pieces more effectively than the sombre power of the major poems. Since the Chinese text is notoriously difficult reading, even specialists in T'ang poetry will find their way about in the collected poems more comfortably with Frodsham's assistance. It is symptomatic of the special fascination of Li Ho for Western readers that a poet unrepresented in the ‘300 T'ang poems’ should be one of the first to be honoured by complete translation into English.

In 1853, Heinrich Barth visited Timbuktu, and ‘was so successful as to have an opportunity of pursuing a complete history of the Kingdom of Songhay. … These annals, according to the universal statement of the learned people of Negroland, were written by a distinguished person of the name of Ahmed Baba’. With this chronicle at his disposal, Barth was able, for the first time, to present a meaningful outline of the history of the Songhay empire. Circumstances prevented Barth bringing back a complete copy of the manuscript. In the 1890's, however, following the French occupation, three manuscripts of that chronicle reached Paris, to be edited by 0. Houdas and E. Benoist, translated by Houdas, and published in 1898–1900. Houdas proved that this chronicle, Ta'rīkh al-Sūdān, had been written not by Ahmad Bābā; but by another scholar of Timbuktu, ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Sa'dī, born in 1596. The chronicle ends in 1655, which may be taken as the date of its completion.