The aim of the editor, Walid ‘Arafat, 'to produce as complete a record as possible of the poetry ascribed to Hassān b. Thabit in the different recensions of the Dīwān and in other sources together with the scholia in the Dīwān, additional notes from other sources and editorial comments’, as stated in his preface (p. 1), has been pursued by him with praiseworthy perseverance, zeal, and dedication. Ten different manuscripts of the Dīwān have been closely examined and evaluated (introduction, pp. 10–23). The poems of the Dīwān have been accordingly divided in the following manner: poems 1–225 from the MS Ahmet III, 2534 (T) form the main part of the Dīwān; poems 226–63 from MS Ahmet III, 2584 (TA) form the second part of the Dīwān called al-Ziyādāt; the poems 264–372 are additions gathered from other sources (ziyādāt min ghayri makhtūtāt al-Dīwān). The ‘Introduction’ contains sections dealing with the life of Hassān (pp. 3–7), former editions of the Dīwān (pp. 7–10), recensions of the Dīwān and its MSS (pp. 10–23), and the authenticity of the poems (pp. 23–31). In his sharp criticism of the authenticity of a great many of the poems ascribed to Hassān, ‘Arafat often refers to his own articles, basing his conclusions on an analysis of the style and composition of these poems, the historical circumstances and developments, and the statements of early Muslim scholars.

After this he (Yohannes) gave him a crown of precious jewels and clothes of gold and horses adorned with gold and silver. His appearance was changed before all the nobles, and his face shone seven times brighter than the sun in the month of Nisan, and his clothes were white like ice. And he 6a (the king) said to him, ‘Rejoice and / be glad, my son, who have been faithful over one; I appoint you over many. Enter into the joy of your lord. As you have made me rejoice, so I will make you rejoice every day and every hour, and I will give you favour and honour before all the nobles. I will do for you all that you wish, and all that you think’. He commanded the troops and said to them, ‘All that he commands you, do; and that which he says to you, observe’.

Yenitsa, in Ottoman Turkish Yenije-i Vardar or Vardar Yenijesi, is a small town some 50 km. west of Thessaloniki. Situated at the foot of Mount Païkon, near the lake of the same name (which was drained several years ago), it was in the Ottoman period an important Turkish military and cultural centre, particularly as being the base of the ghāzīs, the ‘warriors for the Faith’, who had followed the great march-lord (uj-begi) Evrenos on his campaigns in Thrace and Macedonia. Very early, perhaps as early as 1372, Evrenos had come to Central Macedonia with his followers and settled in this place, where already there was probably a Byzantine castle. There soon grew up a township, from which Evrenos and his sons and grandsons set out on repeated raids in all directions, devastating the countryside and preparing the way for the definitive occupation of Macedonia, and later of Albania, by the ‘central’ apparatus under the command of the sultan. It is probable that the several occupations of various towns in this area, such as Veria (Turkish: Karaferye) and Thessaloniki, were the achievement of these raiders. Yenije soon had a con-siderable Turkish population, so that in 1430, after the final occupation of Thessaloniki, Murad II was able to order the deportation from there to the newly-conquered city of a thousand Turkish families without reducing Yenije's prosperity.

The publication by Professor Gérard Fussman of the trilingual Kuṣāṇa inscription at Dasht-i Nāvur in Afghanistan is a major event both for historical and linguistic studies. Appropriately termed by Paul Bernard ‘the Rosetta Stone of Afghanistan’, the find is impressive for its novelties, especially (in addition to Bactrian and Kharoṣṭhī) a well-preserved version in wholly unknown script and language. Yet unlike its namesake, it does not immediately solve all problems.

The word gotra is frequently used in the literature of Mahāyāna Buddhism to denote categories of persons classified according to their psychological, intellectual, and spiritual types. The chief types usually mentioned in this kind of classification are the Auditors making up the śrāvaka-gotra, the Individual Buddhas making up the pratyehabuddha-gotra, and the Bodhisattvas making up the bodhisattva-gotra. In the Saṃdhinirmocanasūtra these three types constitute altogether different gotras, which thus coincide with the three separate Vehicles (yāna) as recognized by the Yogācārin/Vijñaptimātratā, school. To these three some sources add the further category of the undetermined (aniyatagotra), which is made up of persons not yet definitively attached to one of the three preceding classes; and the non-gotra (agotra), that is the category made up of persons who cannot be assigned to any spiritual class. Each of the first three categories is thus comprised of persons capable of achieving a particular kind of maturity and spiritual perfection in accordance with their specific type or class, the Auditor then attaining the Awakening (bodhi) characteristic of the Śrāvaka and so on. Especially remarkable in this connexion, and somewhat anomalous as a gotra, is the non-gotra, i.e. that category of persons who seem to have been considered, at least by certain Yogācārin authorities, as spiritual ‘outcastes’ lacking the capacity for attaining spiritual perfection or Awakening of any kind; since they therefore achieve neither bodhi nor nirvāṇa, they represent the same type as the icchantikas to the extent that the latter also are considered to lack this capacity.

In the sketchy accounts which at present stand in for histories of the modern Chinese theatre, the name of Li Chien-wu appears either not at all, or in the lists of ‘these also served’. He was one of the several talented play-wrights who neither presented themselves early enough to earn honourable mention as pioneers, nor were emphatic enough to make a lasting political impression. He came of age in that lost, perhaps now futile, decade of the 1930's when so many Chinese writers discovered what to do with the art forms their predecessors had introduced and experimented with, when the native genius had absorbed and was beginning effectively to explore the wider possibilities of literature—the darker recesses of the mind, the lighter uplands of comedy—which Western works had opened to them.

In this article, some previously unrecognized facts about the way the morphology of the verb manifests relationships within clauses in Swahili are presented, in the context of current general linguistic interest in functional semantics.

In coming to talk about George Steiner's extraordinary tour de force, a work that was clearly designed to be a masterpiece and so narrowly and peculiarly falls short of that aim, I feel rather like an inverted Balaam, for unlike Balaam I came to bless and not to curse, to appreciate and not to disparage. And now I stand here, not without awe before so monumental an achievement, yet full of doubts, questions, uncertainty, even some distrust.

The following note, though drafted by A. F. L. Beeston, is essentially the result of co-operative discussion between him, A. K. Irvine, W. W. Müller, M. Rodinson, and J. Ryckmans; all of whom are now in agreement on the issue. The discussion originated from the question whether four words beginning with t- in CIH 540 (tbs2nf line 15, ts3n/ts1n lines 16 and 19, tbn line 18) are to be explained as containing a feminine relative pronoun t as a variant of the normal Sabaic form ḏt, as Praetorius suggested; or are t-prefix verb forms. In favour of the relative interpretation are the facts, firstly that in classical Arabic poetry we find a masculine ḏā contrasting with feminine tī, and the same type of alternation is widely attested in vernacular dialects, including Yemeni ones; secondly, that in all four cases there is a defined feminine antecedent (‘glmtn, k'btn, k'bt/ġyln, k'bt/mfllm—assuming, as is most probable, that the last word is a proper name). Against it was the fact that such a pronoun appeared to be attested nowhere in all Sabaic except in this text. G. M. Bauer (Yazyk yuzhnoarabiyskoy pis'mennosti, Moscow, 1966, 92) accepted the relatival interpretation, but describes it as a ‘late’ use; while M. Rodinson (‘Sur un pseudo-relatif sudarabique’, Actes du premier Congrès international de Linguistique Sémitique et Chamito-semitique, Paris, 1969, ed. by Caquot and Cohen, Paris, 1974, 290–1) and W. W. Müller (in an article for AION, 1975, sent to press before our discussions took place) were inclined to deny the existence of this relative and adopt the verbal interpretation.

The following incantation bowl from the Martin Bodmer Library, Geneva, contains an inscription in Syriac script consisting of 13 lines on the interior and one line on the exterior surface of the bowl. The inscription begins in the centre of the bowl, which contains an image of a snake with its tail in its mouth. The bowl measures 13·8 inches in diameter and 5·8 inches in height.