This study examines the treatment of meat in Assyrian state cult of the first millennium bce. To this aim, the administrative and cultic textual evidence about offerings of whole animals, meat cuts, and meat-based culinary preparations are considered here. After an overview of the meat offerings in the ritual action of a series of Assyrian cult ceremonies, the enquiry focuses on the culinary treatment, presentation, and manipulation of the sacrificial meat; the evidence discussed reveals that the culinary treatment of the meat offered differed according to the deity and the cultic occasion.

A RECONSIDERATION of the material used for my article ‘The monosyllable in Szechuanese’1 in the light of the technique of prosodic analysis being developed in the Department of Phonetics of the School of Oriental and African Studies 2 has led me to believe that it is susceptible of a more rigorous and satisfying treatment, in which some of the apparently eccentric features take a normal place.

The various documents concerning Emperor Dāwit's embassy to the Republic of Venice in 1402 have been brought together in Carlo Conti Rossini's article of 1927 on European influence upon Ethiopian art before the coming of Jesuit missionaries in the mid sixteenth century. The purpose of this brief paper is to expand the story of Dāwit's embassy with a short document, which sheds some light upon the motives for this and subsequent Ethiopian embassies to European nations during the period before the Adalite invasions that began in 1529.

The modern Japanese tourist visiting the Topkapi Sarai may well be struck by a display of sixteenth-century samurai armour and helmet held there. It was presented, along with a sword, to the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II in 1892 by Yamada Torajirō (1866–1957), an important pioneer in the history of Turkish-Japanese relations and the subject of this paper. Yamada, who was to remain in the imperial capital for almost twenty years, was witness to the history of the Hamidian era of conservative modernism under the despotic regime of the so-called ‘Red Sultan’, and the subsequent dramatic transition to constitutionalism that came with the Young Turk revolution of 1908. He was one of only two Japanese resident in the city (possibly in the whole empire) in this period. The other was Nakamura Ejirō, owner of the first Japanese shop in Istanbul, and Yamada's friend and partner.

The development of the cerebral or retroflex series (ṭ ṭh ḍ ḍh ṇ ḷ ṣ)in Old Indo-Aryan is a complicated phenomenon to which many factors have contributed, and a full and satisfactory account of it is yet to be produced. One of the factors involved is that of spontaneous cerebralization, by which original dentals become cerebrals without the presence of any predisposing influence. This phenomenon has always been recognized to some extent but its full extent and significance have only recently come to be recognized.

In a number of recent publications it has been suggested that the existence of more than one liquid consonant in parallel distribution in certain of the Polynesian outliers may not only provide an important clue for the next attempt to ascertain the status of Polynesian languages, but incidentally suggest a solution of the problem of the routes of Polynesian migrations.

This paper is an attempt to interpret the child's learning of his mother tongue as a sociosemiotic process. What is intended here by ‘sociosemiotic’ will be largely left to emerge from the discussion; but in the most general terms it is meant to imply a synthesis of three modes of interpretation, that of language in the context of the social system, that of language as an aspect of a more general semiotic, and that of the social system itself as a semiotic system—modes of interpretation that are associated with Malinowski and Firth, with Jakobson, and with Lévi-Strauss, among others. The social system, in other words, is a system of meaning relations; and these are realized in many ways of which one, perhaps the principal one as far as the maintenance and transmission of the system is concerned, is through their encoding in language. The meaning potential of a language, its semantic system, is therefore seen as realizing a higher level system of relations, that of the social semiotic, in just the same way as it is itself realized in the lexicogrammatical and phonological systems.

‘Tone’, at least in the literature dealing with Far Eastern languages, is commonly used in several ways: for instance, in ‘the tones of the language’, or ‘Cantonese has seven tones’, reference is made to the tones as membersof a system, while in ‘such-and-such a word has tone X’ the reference is tothe assignment of an item to one of the members of the system. The differencein reference is made quite clear by the context, and no ambiguity ensues; theconcept of ‘tone’ remains precise, and difficulties arise only when no distinctionis made between ‘tone’ as used above and the realization of tones in particularenvironments. Far different is the use of expressions denoting ‘changes intone’, for which there is no agreed terminology. In diachronic work, ‘change’ usually refers to changes through time in the overall system of basic tones, and secondarily to changes in the assignment of items to members of this system, as, for instance, when it is said that in Standard Chinese, items with voicedplosive initials changed from the shăng tone to the qù tone by the Sung dynasty.

L’origine des chiffres que nous appelons “ arabes ” parce qu’ils ont été introduits en Europe par les Arabes, et de la notation arithmétique basée sur leur valeur de position avec I’emploi du symbole zéro, a donné lieu à des recherches qui ont abouti à des résultats opposés: certains auteurs ont affirmé l’origine indienne du système, tandis que d’autres ont voulu y voir une invention occidentale.

Parmi ces derniers, M. G. R. Kaye s'est fait remarquer par son hostilité contre la thèse de l’origine indienne. Il s'exprime ainsi dans son article “ Notes on Indian Mathematics: Arithmetical Notation ” (JASB., 1907, p. 487):

In choosing the subject for this short paper I am guided not solely by the fact that the archæological observations which first drew my attention to it were gathered in that field of my Central-Asian explorations with which I have fortunately been able to associate my old friend Professor Rapson as one of the earliest and most helpful of my collaborators. What invests certain curious finds among modest burial remains of the Lop desert with a special quasi-personal interest for me is the distant and puzzling relation they bear to a much discussed question of Vedic and Avestic research, that of the sacred Soma and Haoma.

It is a question which was often touched upon in his lectures by that great scholar and teacher, Professor Rudolf von Roth, during the years 1881–4, when I had the good fortune, figuratively, to sit at his feet as an eager devoted pupil. The question as to the identity of the original Soma plant and its home which he had discussed just at that time in two short papers of masterly clearness, was not to be solved then, and still remains undecided. But Roth's main contention still holds good that a solution for it could be hoped for only by the study of relevant physical facts, if possible, on the ground of early Aryan occupation.

The study of the Pahlavi poetry, so spiritedly initiated by M. Benveniste twenty years ago, seems to have come to a dead end. That certain Pahlavi texts, as the Ayādgār-ī Zarērān or the Draxt-ī Asūrīg (the Dispute of the date-palm with the goat), are poems, is conceded on all sides; but the formal problems, the problems of rhythm, metre, and rhyme, remain in the dark. It seems doubtful whether the material at hand is capable of leading us to definite conclusions. There are two main obstacles. Firstly, the notorious sloppiness of the copyists leaves too much room for conjecture; the mere addition or omission, at the editors’ discretion, of the word for “and” and the harf-i idāfet is sufficient to disturb the rhythmical balance. Secondly, as a rule we do not know the dates of composition, and therefore cannot tell how the words were pronounced by the authors; it makes a considerable difference to the metre (whatever it was) whether we put down paδak or paig, mazdayasn or mazdēsn, rōšn or rōšan, aδaκ or aig, šικanj or šκanj, giyān or gyān, yazat or yazd, awiš or ōš, druyist or drīst or drust or durust, hačaδar or azēr.

One thing is clear: a biased approach will not lead to convincing results. On the strength of the preconceived notion, carried forward from the study of the Avesta (where matters are equally dubious), that the metre is a purely syllabic one, the Pahlavi poems were made to suffer a great deal of emendation; where the usual procedure of omitting inconvenient words produced lines too short to fit into the scheme, either words were added or their pronunciation distorted.

This article examines material that points to the existence in pre-classical Imamism of views on the subject of the imam's knowledge and the related question of sources (usūl) of Imami law, which are at variance with the views attested in the classical sources. The evidence shows that al-Fadl b. Shādhān refuted the possibility of divine inspiration for the imam and maintained that the imam's religious knowledge was based entirely on transmission from the Prophet and restricted to the Quran (a complete and perfect source) and its interpretation. It also provides a strong indication that the doctrine of tahrif and the idea of a ‘complete’ ‘Alid codex had originally served to support the claim that the imams’ teachings were based entirely on the Quran. Other evidence examined here suggests that al-Fadl's views are likely to have been representative of the ‘orthodox’ (viz. the legalist and non-ghuluww) position in early Imamism.

The very hard, grey basalt stone on which this inscription is cut was discovered in 1961 by Mr. Shalom Kotzer (of the kibbutz Shā'ar ha-Golān) in shallow water off the southern shore of the Sea of Galilee, near the modern amphitheatre ofTsēmaḥ (Samakh). In 1962 it was moved from the water to the kibbutz by Mr. Kotzer and his son Moshe. A preliminary note on the inscription in Hebrew by the present writer appeared in 'Al ha-Mishmār of 11 January 1963. The inscription consists of eight readable lines insimple Kūfī script, incised on afairly smooth surface. The back of the stone is not worked.

In the Sino-Tibetan family, reflexivity is either not expressed in the verb, as in Chinese or Tibetan, or expressed by means of a “middle” marker, as in Dulong or Kiranti languages. Among the morphologically rich languages of this family, only Rgyalrong languages have distinct and unambiguous reflexive and reciprocal markers on the verb. This paper shows that the reflexive prefix in Rgyalrong languages has two possible origins. It could come from a fusion of the third person singular marker and the root meaning “self” or, alternatively, come from the free third person pronoun. Both hypotheses are compatible with our understanding of Rgyalrong historical phonology.

Zimbabwean Ndebele and Zulu might be likened, in a very broad sense, to American English and British English, in their relationship. Mzilikazi and his few followers left Zululand in 1822, and in the 1840s founded a new nation, over 1,000 km. to the north. There are certain differences in pronunciation and tone. Divergence is likely to have been bilateral: while Ndebele shows clear signs of non-Zulu influence in certain respects, Zulu on the other hand is probably not quite the same today as it was in 1822

It would seem that the genealogy given in the fragment of the text of Sīdī Aḥmad al-Bakkāy might be more authentic than the one given in the Ghallāwiyya. While the importance given to ancestresses in the text of Sīdī Aḥmad al-Bakkāy and its attempt to explain an individual's origins in terms of diversity rather than by a single patriline descending from one important ancestor certainly set it apart from later western Saharan genealogies and from Arab and Muslim genealogies in general, it is obviously a more realistic picture of origins, as a person's ancestors double with each earlier generation rather than becoming fewer. Also, the text of Sīdī Ahmad al-Bakkāy, which is older than the Ghallāwiyya, does not take the genealogies back as far as the later work which, however, is not convincing because of many apparent errors and illogicalities.

The remarkable rise of the ‘Aẓms from an inconspicuous family of landed campaigners at Ma‘arrat al-Nu‘man to a dynasty of governors that ruled in Syria for most of the eighteenth century owes its origin to the process of disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and its institutions.

Abū Ḥafṣ al-Kirmānī is known mainly from al-Ṭabarī as a rāwī for events in the caliphates of Mūsā al-Hādī and Hārūn al-Rashīd; from al-Jahshiyārī as a rāwī for an anecdote concerning al-Faḍl b. Yaḥyā al-Barmakī (and probably for other, unattributed items of information); and from the mention of him as 'Umar [b.] al-Azraq al-Kirmānī, author of a book called the Akhbār al-Barāmika wa-faḍā'iluhum (‘Historical accounts of the Barmakid family and their merits’) by Ibn ‘Asākir in his great biographical dictionary of the leading figures and scholars associated with his native city of Damascus, citing him as an authority on Khālid b. Barmak's early close connexions with the ‘Abbāsid Imāms Muḥammad b. ‘Alī b. ‘Abd Allāh b. al-'Abbās and his son Ibrāhīm.