Before the discovery of the ancient inscriptions of southern Arabia by Arnaud, Halévy, Glaser, and several other explorers, knowledge of the pre-Islamic peoples of Yemen and Ḥaḍramawt was incomplete and imprecise, and was derived from the Old Testament, the annals of Assyrian kings, and from the classical and Arab historians and geographers.

(a) Material for the present article was obtained before and during a recent period of study-leave in Cyrenaica. My particular informant, who also accompanied me during the tour, was Mr. Idris ‘Abdallah, from Gyrene, a member of the Ḥāsa tribe. The dialect illustrated may be termed the Bedouin dialect of the Jebel.

Examples are given throughout in Arabic script and follow the method used by my informant for writing his dialect. Thus presented, they are immediately intelligible to a literate Cyrenaican, who is accustomed to written colloquialisms, for example in letters, petitions, agreements, and vernacular (usually Bedouin) poems appearing in the local Press. The phonetic transcription is intended to suggest a pronunciation for the examples.

Dans une communication au Xe Congrès des Orientalistes, Margoliouth a caractérisé comme il convient la correspondance de Ḍiyâ ad-dîn ibn al-Athîr, et donné la substance d'un certain nombre des lettres officielles rédigées par cet auteur et se référant à des faits historiques notables des années 615 à 630 de l'Hégire environ. Mais Margoliouth ne connaissait qu'un manuscrit de la correspondance de Ḍiyâ ad-dîn, celui de la Bodléienne Pococke 322, qui, ainsi qu'il l'avait remarqué, ne contient de lettres que de la dernière période de la vie de l'auteur. Or il en existe d'autres. Sans parler de celui de Top-Kapu 2630, que je n'ai pu connaître, ni du court fragment de Berlin Ahlwardt 8629, un beau manuscrit, de peu postérieur au temps de l'auteur, a été acquis par la School of Oriental Studies de Londres, qui, si la plupart des lettres qu'il contient coïncident, dans un ordre différent, avec une partie de celles du ms. d'Oxford, en renferme cependant quelques autres. Surtout, il m'a été donné de voir à la Bibliothèque Nationale un recueil, écrit au XI/XVe siècle, de 215 lettres de Diyâ ad-dîn, émanant toutes, semble-t-il, des périodes de sa vie antérieures à 610 environ. Si nous remarquons qu'à peu près tous les extraits de lettres de lui-même donnés par Ḍiyâ ad-dîn dans son traité didactique sur l'art de la rédaction al-Mathalu's-sâ'iru fîadabi'l-kâtibi wa'sh-shâ'iri (éd. Bulaq 1282/1865) se retrouvent dans le recueil susdit, nous pouvons donc admettre qu'il nous donne, pour la partie de la vie de Ḍiyâ ad-dîn approximativement antérieure à celle couverte par les deux manuscrits d'Angleterre, l'état à peu près complet de la correspondance de cet auteur, ou du moins de ce qu'il en avait conservé. Malheureusement, le manuscrit en question appartient à un propriétaire privé iraqien, et il a été laissé à la Bibliothèque Nationale trop peu de temps pour qu'il m'ait été possible de lire beaucoup plus que l'intitulé des lettres. Néanmoins, comme il est difficile de savoir dans quelle mesure ce manuscrit sera jamais à la disposition des chercheurs, je pense ne pas faire œuvre inutile en indiquant, dans ces limites, l'essentiel de son contenu.

The text and translation is given below of two documents concerning the grant of an allowance in the form of a soyūrghāl. The first document, dated Ṣafar 1067 A.h. (Nov.-Dec., 1656 A.d.), concerns the redistribution of a grant dated Ramaẓān 1047 A.h. (Jan.-Feb., A.d. 1638) among the heirs of the original grantee, Mīr Ni'matullāh ‘Abd al-Wahhābī, a sayyid. The second document, dated Sha'ban 1115 (Jan.-Feb., A.d. 1704), deals with the settlement of disputes among the heirs of the original grantee concerning their respective shares. These documents illustrate the complicated problems which arose with the fragmentation of grants by inheritance.

This paper is intended to summarize the results of our observations on the phonetics of the Georgian language, gathered in some fifteen sessions of listening with our informant, Mr. A. Gugushvili. Mr. Gugushvili, who has been on the Panel of Additional Lecturers as a part-time teacher of Georgian at the School of Oriental and African Studies, was born in Kutais and describes his speech as normal educated West Georgian. He has lived in this country for the past twenty-four years as a member of the Georgian community in London, and has been engaged in the study of Georgian history and literature.

At the beginning of the Nirukta Yāska mentions the four parts of speech (noun, verb, upasarga, and nipāta), and gives definitions of the first two: verbs are chiefly concerned with being-and-becoming (bhävapradhānam ākhyātam), while nouns are chiefly concerned with existants (sattvapradhānāni nāmāni). After a brief discussion, with examples, he proceeds to give an argument against the possibility of classifying the parts of speech. This somewhat cryptic passage, which has been the subject of a considerable amount of discussion, is as follows:—

indriyanitya vacanam audumbarāyaŋa. tatra catuşvam nopapadyate, 'yugapad-utpannānā vā śabdānām itaretaropadeśa śāstrakrto yogaś ca. vyāptimattvāt tu śabdasyānīyastvāc ca śabdena sajnā-karaŋa vyavāhārārtha loke. teşä manuşyavad devatā-bhidhānam. puruşavidyānityatvāt karmasampattir mantro vede.

It has been recognized long ago that Ptolemy's topography of Cis-Gangetic India was based on trade-routes. Nearly a century ago Vivien de Saint Martin spoke of “the almost exclusive employment of itineraries of merchants and caravans indicating on each route the series of daily stations”. We may compare the lists of stations inserted in books on India of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One of the earliest examples we find in Joannes de Laet's little volume De Imperio Magni Mogolis (Leiden, 1631), p. 57. The author evidently derived his lists from the itineraries of the English merchants Richard Steel and John Crowther. The French jeweller and traveller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier has included full lists of stations along the principal trade-routes in his Indian Travels (ch. iv–xii). In the first place he deals with the two routes from Surat to Agra, all-important to European traders, the one by the Tāptī valley and Mālwā, the other by way of Aḥmadābād and Rājpūtānā. If we keep in mind that Ptolemy must have used similar lists, it will go far to explain the disconcerting fact that so many among the localities in his tables are not known from indigenous sources, either literary or epigraphical, whereas famous towns have been omitted. His tables are fundamentally lists of stages, and this must be our guiding principle in unravelling the riddle of Ptolemy's topography. The present note is an attempt to demonstrate this in some detail.

The Ming History compiled by Chang T'ing-yü and his colleagues and completed in 1736 is the first of the Standard Histories (īE Chêng Shih) to include among its tables a Ch'i Ch'ing Nien Piao or Chronological Table of the Seven High Officials. This table, which occupies two chapters of the Ming Shih (111 and 112; 12 and 13 of the section Piao), lists all the officials who successively held office as Presidents of the Six Boards (Liu Pu Shang-shu) and Censors of the Left and Eight (T so Yu Tu-yu-shih).

Thetsyr are a comparatively late development in the history of Chinese poetry and less well known in the West than the shy, of which many translations exist. It may be interesting to look at a few examples of tsyr and a few elementary rules of their composition so as to be able to distinguish them from shy and to appreciate their special qualities.

The discovery that a number of classical particles originated by the fusion of other, generally better understood, words, has already contributed a great deal to the understanding of eariy Chinese literature. The examples of such contraction which can already be taken as reasonably certain are:—

The pronunciation here described is that of Mr. Keng Vannsak, a young Cambodian born at Kompong Chhnang.

The words quoted in illustration of the text are shown both in Cambodian script and in a simplified phonetic transcription based on that of the International Phonetic Association. Where it has been considered useful, a more detailed transcription in general phonetic terms has been given in square brackets. All examples have been checked with a second Cambodian, Mr. Keo Mongkry, and where his usage differs from that of Mr. Keng, this has been noted.

Had Ihn al-Ṭiqṭaqā direct access to the Ta'rīkh-i-Jahān-Gushāy ? He twice quotes it by name and there are two other passages for which it must have been his source; but the question is whether he made use of Juvaynī's work at first hand. That he knew Persian is evident from his twice quoting Persian verses. Of these the following are also in Juvaynī:

“O king, what will come of (drinking) strong wine ?

And what will come of continual drunkenness ?

The king drunk, the world in rums and enemies before and behind— It is plain to see what will come of this! ”

These verses were, according to Ibn al-Ṭiqṭaqā, addressed to Jalāl al-Dīn Khwārazmshāh by his court poet, whereas all that Juvaynī says is that they were composed by some unspecified person à propos of Jalāl al-Dīn's conduct. But the discrepancy is not an important one, and it seems not unreasonable to suppose that Ibn al-Ṭiqṭaqā copied these verses from Juvaynī and that, in consequence, he examined the latter's work in the original.