European contemporaries regarded Ras Alula, Emperor Yohannes's general, as one of the most prominent leaders of Ethiopia in the crucial period of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This was a period in which the country was struggling to remain independent during the ‘scramble for Africa’. The Ras was referred to as ‘the best native general and strategist that Africa has perhaps produced in modern times’, and ‘undoubtedly’ the ‘greatest leader that Abyssinia has produced since the death of the Emperor Theodore in 1868’. His Italian adversaries thought in 1885 that ‘Ras Alula is the most serious, the most influential, and the strongest personality in today's Abyssinia. The word of Alula is heard with enthusiasm and confidence by the King’. A Sudanese Mahdist historian wrote that ‘Ras Allulā was one of the famous and brave men in war, very experienced in the tactics of battles. He was a bone in the throat of the British, Italian, and Turkish [Egyptian] empires’. A British soldier and diplomat was of the opinion that ‘the Abyssinian generalissimo’ was ‘apparently the moving spirit of that country’.

Books dealing with the recent history of Ethiopia such as Greenfield's Ethiopia, a new political history, or Del Boca's The Ethiopian war, 1935–1941, state that a few works in Amharic have been written about this period. Though the number is not considerable, many books have been written on this subject, most of them by survivors of this conflict. Since they represent primary sources for the Ethiopian point of view, they are of great value, but there are several factors which complicate their utilization.

The following is an attempt to relate the distribution of linguistic variants in the spoken Arabic of southern Iraq and Khūzistān to certain geographical areas on the one hand and to certain demographically isolatable groups on the other. These factors correlate in certain cases with political regions of earlier times. The geographical areas are relatable to communication patterns of preautomobile times and to some extent group around the main waterways of the area, the Tigris, Euphrates, Shaṭṭ al-'Arab, and Kārūn. The demographic groupings involved in particular what may be referred to as degree of sedentari-zation and also degree of contact with the nomad populations in the desert to the west of the Euphrates. It is true that in some cases the social and regional groupings were coextensive; however, the distinction between the two is maintained in the treatment because the linguistic features correlating with demographic groups could be shown to have similar demographic relevance in other areas of Mesopotamia, while the features regarded as primarily of regional relevance were relevant only to the area under investigation.

Linguists who are interested in Arabic are familiar with the fact that in spoken Arabic certain syllables stand out to the ear more than others; these syllables have been variously referred to as stressed or prominent syllables. The phenomenon of prominence has been treated by a number of linguists who have regarded it mainly as a characteristic of the word. But it has to be viewed as a characteristic of the one-word piece or pieces of a more complex structure with more than one prominent syllable.

The history of the Zaydiyya and the growth of Zaydī thought, law, and doctrine have become increasingly well known as a result of studies by R. Strothmann, E. Griffini, C. van Arendonk, W. Madelung, and others. As Madelung has convincingly shown in his book on al-Qāsim b. Ibrāhīm, Zaydī doctrine, which initially differed appreciably from that of the Mu'tazila on many issues, eventually adopted all of the principal tenets of Mu'tazilism. At the same time, the various Zaydī branches retained the essential Shī'ī belief in an Imām descended from ‘Alī and Fāṭima. Yet the Zaydī doctrine of the imāmate differs from the doctrine of Imāmī (or Twelver) Shī'ism in some important respects: the Zaydī Imām is not infallible, sinless, and omniscient, and, according to the Batrī Zaydīs, he need not even always be the most excellent person of his generation. Most Zaydīs maintained instead that the Imām had to prove his leadership by fighting for the faith (jihād). The Imāmī claim that all the Imāms had been personally designated by God and His Prophet was restricted by the Zaydīs to ‘Alī, al-Ḥasan, and al-Ḥusayn.

During the first season of excavations in 1971 at the Islamic site of Ghubayrā, in Kirmān province, a complete and richly decorated bronze bowl came to light. It was found on the Citadel Central Mound in a room designated room 1A. Because of the finds recovered from here such as Saljūq white pottery, a small lustre-painted bowl, a minā'ī sherd, and some glass vessels—this room was commonly called by the excavators the ‘Seljūq room’. The excavation of this room, together with its ground-plan and elevation, has already been reported, and the bronze bowl has also been illustrated. As only a few complete Islamic metal objects have been discovered in scholarly excavations, this piece from Ghubayrā deserves a separate study.

This paper attempts to deal with a short passage found at the end of the third chapter of the Huai Nan tzu book, a compendium of learning assembled in about 120 B.c. under the patronage of the prince Liu An I first became interested in it after reading the tantalizing reference in Needham (SCC, III, 224). (It occurs to me that the preceding sentence or some variant of it is likely to occur in learned journals with a high frequency for the next 50 years at least.) My first efforts to understand the original text led me to the conclusion that it was unique in a number of ways and had points of interest that did not fully appear in the version of Maspero, 1929, 348 ff. Professors A. C. Graham and D. C. Lau both gave very generously of their time in discussions of my first draft. Professor Graham raised the question of possible Mohist influences and brought to my notice a commentary by the Ch'ing scholar Ch'ien T'ang , Huai Nan tzu t'ien wen hsün pu chu c. 1788. I did not feel able to follow Ch'ien in all he wrote, but was relieved to find that we reached the same general conclusions about what the text was saying, although Ch'ien seems to miss much that is important. While there are still some obscurities of language in what appears to be a rather corrupt text, I offer the version given here with a fair degree of conviction that it does not substantially misrepresent the intentions of the unknown author. Any errors that I have obstinately retained despite the helpful advice given to me throughout the time I was engaged on this work are, of course, my responsibility alone.

While working in the Algemeen Rijksarchief, The Hague, in 1973, this writer had his attention drawn by Dr. G. V. Smith to an envelope in Koloniaal Archief 982 (Overgekomen Brieven en Papieren 1620) which apparently contained several early Javanese letters. Upon investigation these proved to be original correspondence between the dignitaries of Bantěn and the Dutch under Jan Pietersz. Coen after the Dutch conquest of Batavia in 1619. They are written not in Javanese but in Malay, five of the letters employing Javanese script and one Arabic script. The letters are of interest as evidence of the Bantěn opinion of the Dutch (although the reader would be wrong to accept the innocent tone of the letters at face value) and as early examples of pasar Malay, the lingua franca of maritime South-East Asia.

The Sāsanavaṃsa ‘History of the religion’, a Pali work written in Burma in 1861, has long been recognized as an important source for the study of Theravāda Buddhism. It is essentially a chronicle of famous monks which seeks to trace the lineal succession of orthodox theras from the Buddha's immediate disciple Upāli to the heads of the saṅgha at Mandalay in the author's own lifetime. As early as 1882 Louis de Zoysa in his Catalogue of Pali, Sinhalese, and Sanskrit manuscripts in the temple libraries of Ceylon referred to the Sāsanavaṃsa as a work containing ‘very interesting information on the religious history of … Burma and Ceylon’. In 1892 the Russian Orientalist Ivan Pavlovitch Minaev drew upon the Sāsanavaṃsa for his Recherches sur le bouddhisme, in which he quoted fairly extensively from the Pali text. H. Kern in 1896 classed it along with the better-known Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa as ‘highly important for the ecclesiastical history of Ceylon’, and the treatise also gained mention in the researches of such leading Buddhist scholars as E. Hardy, Wilhelm Geiger, and G. P. Malalasekera.

In spite of over 14 years of activity—most of which was of a military nature—hardly any Taiping military despatches have survived or, if they have, they remain to be discovered. The only copy of this rare example, published here for the first time, is in the Public Record Office (series 682, No. 275/A3). It was amongst the documents found in the office of the Governor-General of Kwangtung and Kwangsi, on the occasion of the British capture and occupation of Canton in 1858. There is no means of knowing how accurately it was copied; on the other hand, there is no reason to question its authenticity or accuracy.

Very little reference to clan-praises is to be found in general works on African oral literature or in the documentation dealing specifically with literature from southern Africa. By contrast, considerable attention has been paid to panegyric forms of praise-poetry applying to individual human beings (or to an individual animal or object) among the Southern Bantu peoples. Lestrade, writing in 1933, reported that clan-praises were widely employed in southern Africa, and he briefly outlined their nature and function. Yet virtually no detailed work on clan-praises has so far been published except in the case of the Shona, with a recent series of illuminating articles by Fortune and Hodza. Among the Shona, clan-praises appear to be of greater importance than individual praises. For other Southern Bantu peoples, on the other hand, one might easily gain the impression that clan-praises were non-existent, owing to the overwhelming concentration upon individual praise-poetry in the existing documentation. Returning to Lestrade's article of 1933, however, one finds the noteworthy observation that clan-praises are in fact heard more frequently than individual praises: ‘Clan praise-names are used … on all occasions calling for a certain amount of formality and special politeness of address: at a meeting of a council of tribesmen, in some solemn family conclave, when strangers address each other ceremoniously, clan praise-names are heard. Individual praise-names, together with praise-verses and praise-poems, however, are heard somewhat more rarely: it is only on the occasion of some festival or other ceremonial event, calling for some display of oratory, that these latter are heard’. Nevertheless, despite this observation, it appears that Lestrade himself, and a great number of other scholars too, have paid no further attention to clan-praises. Clearly, the reason for this lies in the great wealth of individual praise-poetry, relating to kings, chiefs, great warriors, and statesmen, that exists among peoples such as the Zulu, Xhosa, Swazi, Sotho, and Tswana, and the fact that this genre is regarded as being their most highly developed form of oral literature. Yet, since clan-praises are more commonly encountered, according to Lestrade, why have they been totally neglected ? The reason would appear to be that Lestrade, Bryant and many other scholars seem to have dismissed them as amounting to no more than short, single ‘praisenames’, which do not attain the stature of ‘praise-verses’ or ‘praise-poems’. Since the short clan-praises constitute a distinctive genre of oral poetic imagery, the matter deserves reappraisal.