Compared with the heyday under the Fāṭimids, the position of the non-Muslims, or dhimmīs, in the late Mamlūk period was bleak. Victims of the general demographic and economic decline, objects of considerable hostility on the part of Muslim theologians, and targets of frequent persecution, the Jews and Christians of Egypt found life more difficult and more oppressive in the fifteenth than in the eleventh or twelfth century. For the Jews, hard times were reflected both in tensions with the surrounding Muslim society and in the depressed condition of community life.

One of the less prominent episodes associated with the conquest of Mecca in the year 8 is an encounter between the Arabian Prophet and a Persian cheese. A tradition quoted by Bayhaqī (d. 458) from Abū Dāwūd al-Ṭayālisī (d. 203) tells the story as follows: ‘When the Apostle of God conquered Mecca, he saw a cheese. He asked what it was; they told him that it was a foodstuff made in Persia (arḍ al-'Ajam). The Apostle of God responded: “Take a knife to it, invoke the name of God, and eat”.’ Similar encounters take place in Ṭā'if in the same year, in Tabūk in the following year, and at places and times unknown.

The term ‘Object Marker’ is used to refer to analytic particles or prepositions which signal the direct object status of a nominal. These are attested in a variety of forms in Semitic languages. For instance: 'eṯ, which is used in Hebrew and in the language of the Moabite stone, 'yt, which is attested in Phoenician and also in early Aramaic (e.g. Zakir inscription 5; Sefire I B/32, III/11, III/13; Aššur Ostracon 6). wt, which is found with a 3rd person pronominal suffix in the Old Aramaic Hadad inscription 28. yt, frequently employed in the Aramaic Targums (generally in slavish imitation of Hebrew 'eṯ) and also in other Western Aramaic dialects, e.g. Nabataean, Palmyrene, and Galilean Aramaic; in Christian Palestinian Aramaic it occurs regularly before pronominal suffixes but not before full nouns. It is only sporadically found in the Eastern Aramaic dialects, e.g. in early Syriac (about 12 times in the Peshitta, once in the ‘Hymn of the Soul’) and in Biblical Aramaic (once— Dn 3/12). l-, used in many dialects of Aramaic as an Object Marker, also occasionally in the Hebrew of the Priestly Source (e.g. Num. 32: 15) and quite frequently in Late Biblical Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew. Akkadian ana, sometimes employed as an Object Marker in the later periods of the language, viz. Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Late Babylonian, also sporadically in other periods, e.g. Middle Assyrian. In the South Semitic area may be listed Arabic 'iyyā and Gə'əz kiyya, both of which are used only with pronominal suffixes; Gə'əz lā-; the suffix particle -n in Amharic and Gafat, and the prefix particles n- in Tigrinya and nä- or yä- in Soddo.

The re-establishment of the 'Abbāsid caliphate in Cairo after its overthrow on the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in 656'1258 was, as is well known, accomplished by the Mamlūk sultan, al-Ẓāhir Baybars, who installed successively two refugee 'Abbāsids as caliphs in his capital. What is perhaps not always realized is that the two pretenders did not appear in turn and out of the blue at the beginning of Baybars's reign, and that the sultan's reasons for installing the first, al-Mustanṣir, were not identical with his reasons for installing the second, al-Ḥākim. In certain respects the official account by Baybars's court biographer, Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn 'Abd al-Ẓāhir, needs to be supplemented and corrected.

The purpose of the present article is to examine the available data on Bedouin dialects in Israel and to attempt to classify them with a view to placing them in the larger framework of Bedouin dialects in the region as a whole. Section I below presents a geographical-demographical review of Bedouin groups in Israel as background information to support the linguistic material. The linguistic discussion which follows is based mainly on material from the following sources: for the Negev dialects, Bergsträsser's Sprachatlas (1915), Bauer (1913), Blanc (1970), and Piamenta (1979); for the Rashāida dialect in the Judean Desert, Katz (1980); for North Israeli Bedouin dialects, Rosenhouse (1980, 1982); for Bedouin dialects outside Israel, in Jordan, Syria and Northern Najd, Cantineau (1936–7), Cleveland (1963), Palva (1976, 1980), Abboud (1964), and Ingham (1982).

In the following, I will analyse a lost text from the Shang shu the ‘Ancient documents ’. The story recorded in this text that of an ominous portent—seven years of drought which occurred at the beginning of the Shang Dynasty, of a divination in which human sacrifice was demanded of the Shang founder Tang, and of the ritual in which he offered himself as a sacrifice to the Lord on High. I will argue that this text provides a conceptual link between the role of the king in Shang times as a medium between the spirits above and the earth below and the Zhou theory of the king as the recipient of a changing mandate of Heaven.