Sīr Banī Yās is an island in the Western Region of Abu Dhabi, off the coast from Jabal Dhanna (Zanna) (fig. 1). Much of the landscape of the island has been entirely changed in recent years through earthmoving and landfill although the pre-modern terrain still exists in a few areas. There has also been widespread tree planting, and vast areas of Ṣīr Banī Yas are fenced to protect the plantations from gazelle, great herds of which roam free on the island. Nevertheless, limited areas with significant archaeological remains survived the plantation and the associated trenching.

The madrasa as an institution dedicated to the teaching of one or more of the four madhhabs, or schools, of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence, often in conjunction with the ancillary Islamic sciences, including Arabic grammar, the study of quranic exegesis (tafsīr) and Prophetic Traditions (ḥadīth) alongside more secular disciplines such as history, literature, rhetoric, mathematics and astronomy, began to proliferate in the eastern Islamic lands from the fifth century/eleventh century, although its origins are traceable as far back as the early fourth/tenth century in eastern Iran. As the religion of Islam and its accompanying civilization spread into new territories, e.g., Anatolia, sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent, the institution of the madrasa not only accompanied this diffusion but also lent it active support.

In stratified societies, accumulated material goods—be they made of metal, stone, cloth, bone, or even foodstuffs—represent the wealth and privilege of the élite within a social hierarchy. Anthropologists have shown that goods symbolic of wealth generally fall between two absolutes: alienable goods (items not tied to social membership and produced for giving, trading, or selling), and inalienable goods (items tied to social membership and imbued with a sense of the sacred history of the owner; relics found or crafted specifically to be treasured and saved). (See Weiner, 1982; Appadurai, 1986: ‘Introduction’.) The value of these objects is a measure of the power of the owner over the acquisition and distribution of desired goods. The objects in turn represent the cycles of production and exchange that provide them with a social value (Webb, 1974: 351–82). This is particularly evident in redistributive economies, such as the Native American societies of the North-West Pacific and South Pacific island communities, or certain highland South-East Asian societies where goods are collected by Big Men or chiefs and redistributed at ritual occasions. Gift-giving, often performed in association with ritual feasts involving lineage representatives, both living and dead, is a feature many of these complex societies share with ancient China.

The role of some form of breathing meditation in most of the world's great mystical traditions has long been known, but few have seen much evidence for this in early Taoism. By ‘early Taoism’ I mean the formative stages of the tradition, from its mysterious origins to the completion of the Huai-nan-Tzu (139 B.C.). Perhaps scholars have seen so little evidence of meditative practice in early Taoism because they have tended to focus almost exclusively on its famous foundational works, Lao-Tzu and Chuang-Tzu and have, furthermore, tended to treat them as works of abstract philosophy. In my research I have been particularly interested in the experiential basis of the philosophy found in the Lao-Tzu and the Chuang-Tzu and in a variety of other related texts that have hitherto been generally overlooked as sources for early Taoism. In order to clarify the context for the present investigation of meditative stages, I would like to present briefly the most relevant hypotheses from this research:

Twenty years ago hardly any legal texts from the Middle Mekong region were known. Now more than a 150 legal manuscripts have been borrowed from monastery book-chests, cleaned and microfilmed. Only one of these discoveries has been translated into a non-Thai language, but that is a substantial and important text. Aroonrut Wichienkeeo's and Gehan Wijeyewardene's Laws of King Mangrai translates a manuscript from ‘The Elephant Supported Temple’ in Nan which Richard Davis arranged to be copied. Reviewing it in these pages I suggested that the MS has jumbled together four distinct works in two broad categories. The bulk of the text consists of rules about family, theft and compensation drawn from works called Worldly law and the law of Dhamma (§1–49) and Mangrai's Dhammathat (§50–76). The rest of the MS deals with legal precedents rather than rules and can be divided into a collection of judgement tales (title unknown) (§77–87) and The traditions of King Mahosot (§88–106). There are corruptions, lacunae and interpolations throughout, but the earlier sections can at least be checked against other recensions of Northern Thai law. That is not possible for the last 20 sections: there is nothing in the surviving literature remotely similar to The traditions of King Mahosot. In this paper I attempt to reconstruct the original intentions of its author on contextual grounds: knowing what we do about Middle Mekong legal culture, what is the most plausible reconstruction of this damaged, but fascinating, work? My main aim will have been met if I can make the text more accessible to legal and political historians.

A new text edition usually stimulates further publications and evaluations of similar texts. This situation particularly applies to J. Naveh and S. Shaked, Magic spells and formulae (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993), since much new material has come to light in recent years. The present article consists of additional texts which have special relevance to the above mentioned volume (see my review of Naveh-Shaked in this issue). Two magic bowls which appeared at Sotheby's (London) in 1985 were copied by me and sent to Naveh and Shaked for study and publication. One bowl in Jewish Aramaic script (Text A) was also copied by the present writer, but the bowl was not easily legible, and Naveh and Shaked chose not to include it within the corpus of bowls, because neither the photographs nor the hand copy were sufficiently reliable. Since the present owner and location of the bowl is unknown, I have included my hand copy of the bowl here, with an attempt to read as much as is reasonably legible, in the hope that eventually the bowl will reappear and corrections to these readings can be made, through collation of the original. A second bowl, in Syriac script, was edited by Naveh and Shaked (Bowl 17), but since they chose not to publish the hand copy of the bowl, it is given below (as Text B).

The Kushan god μοζδοοανο is attested on a group of rare coins of Kanishka I, where he is depicted as a bearded male bearing a trident in his right hand and riding a two-headed horse. It has been universally assumed that the name μοζδοοανο is connected in some way with that of Ahura Mazda, the supreme deity of the Zoroastrian religion, the second element of the Bactrian form being generally interpreted as an epithet meaning ‘victorious’.

N. Sims-Williams's proposed identification of a Bactrian god μοζδοοανο as deriving from Ir. *miždvah, Vd. mī1E0D;dhvás could shed light on the role of this word as an epithet of Rudra and Siva in India. The identification would seem in turn to derive support from the extent to which in India the epithet has been appropriated by Vedic Rudra. It is even possible to identify a stratum of Sanskrit literature that shares the Bactrian conception of Mīḍhvān as a supreme god.