The accepted definition of poetry among most of the classical Arab prosodists is al-kalām al-mawzūn al-muqaffā ‘speech in metre and rhyme’. Unrhymedverse was thus excluded. The simplest rhyme in Arabic verse is generally, a consonant (rawiyy)between two vowels. The only exception to this rule is the rhyme of al-qaṣīda al-maqṣūra, i.e. in a poem which rhymes with alif maqṣūra, where the consonantis not important. It is obvious from the different statements of some of the critics and philosopherswho were interested in the Greek sciences, that the Arabs were aware that the Greeks had blank verse. However, they were all firm in their conviction that rhyme in Arabic poetry is as essential as metre. Fārābī (873–950) in his Kitāb al-shi'r, observed that Homer used blank verse: wa-yabīn min fi'l Awmīrūsh shā'ir al-Yūnāniyyīn annahu lā yaḥlafiẓ bi-tasāvn al-nihāyāt, while the Arabs pay more attention to rhyme than do other nations: Inna li 'I-'Arabmin al-'ināya bi-nihāyāt al-abyāt allatī fi 'l-shi'r ahihar mimmā li-kathīr minal-umam allatī 'arafnā ash'ārahā.

In the Saka language of Gostana (Khotan) three manuscripts contain a metrical version of the Buddhist avadāna of Sudhana. These texts were printed in my Khotanese Buddhist texts (1951). Two, Ch. 00266 and P 2025 (with P 4089a), are two copies of one text. The third text, P 2957, differs markedly in phrases, in additional verses, and in orthography; it is in a less developed form of the language.

The story of Sudhana is one of the most popular of the avadānas of Northern Hīnayāna Buddhism. There are two main versions of this story, one adopted by the Mahāsanghika school and the other by the mūla-Sarvāstivāda school. The former is preserved in the Mahāvastu under the title Kinnarījātaka, and a similar version of this story is found in a Chinese collection called Liu-tu-chi-ching ‘Collection [of tales to illustrate] the six pāramitās’, said to have been translated in approximately A.D. 270 (Taishō Tripiṭaka, in, no. 152, 44 f.) and accessible to us in Chavannes's Tripitạka (Cinq cents contes et apologues, no. 80). The mūla-Sarvāstivāda redaction is found in a Vinaya text of that school called the Bhaiṣajya-vastu. It was translated by I-ching and is referred to as Ken pen chouo … by Chavannes (iv, 133).

What follows, as will be apparent to the reader, was written as a review of Mr. Howard Levy's translation of the T‘ang story Yu-hsien k‘u, which, although mentioned in some Western histories of Chinese literature, has not hitherto appeared in a complete translation.

In current studies of the problem of landlorḍism in twentieth-century China there is a fundamental conflict and contradiction between the interpretations of the socio-economic historians, whose major thesis is often the inevitable process of progressive weakening and eventual decline of the control of ‘feudal’ landlords over land and peasants, and the actual conditions and facts of contemporary Chinese history, in which the decay of landlord power seems to have been far from inevitable, and where such persons as P'eng Pai and Mao Tse-tung have had to exert great revolutionary efforts to forcibly destroy the landlords' dominance.

'Amda ṣeyon was one of the most outstanding Ethiopian kings of any age and a singular figure dominating the horn of Africa in the fourteenth century. Almost alone among Ethiopian rulers he was fortunate in having his principal campaign against Adal chronicled in a manner worthy of this exploit, for, in contrast to much of the literature preserved in G∂‘∂z, 'Amda ṣeyon's chronicler j could wield his pen with dexterity and some literary panache.

One of the difficulties in the study of the verbal system of a language that is comparatively little known can be finding the appropriate past participles to go with present stems or the reverse. This difficulty faces those working with Khotanese. H. W. Bailey has only recently assigned ārsta- to ārīh- ‘to share’ and pärsta- to prïh- ‘to conceal’. Some further suggestions I make here for the first time.