In, and since, the nineteenth century a more than passing interest inPashto verse, both literary and popular, has been shown in Europe, as thefollowing titles (not to mention a number of chrestomathies) testify:

The second volume of A. Sachs and H. Hunger, Astronomical diaries and related texts from Babylonia (Vienna, 1989) extends from the years 261–165 B.C., and includes further information on Babylonian astronomy, weather patterns, market prices, and historical events during these years, and as such are an invaluable source for Hellenistic history. Of particular historical interest is a group of tablets from Babylon and Sippar which are duplicate reports from 16/17 August–10/11 December, 169 B.C. In addition to the usual astronomical and meteorological data, this report includes brief accounts of contemporary events which potentially alter the historical picture of the reign of Antiochus IV. Although the passage has been known for a long time, and previously cited by Pinches, Eddy, and van der Spek, the new edition by Sachs and Hunger gives the opportunity to reopen the discussion.

In 1946 the School of Oriental and African Studies is celebrating the bicentenary of the birth of Sir William Jones: in 1948 University College, London, will celebrate that of Jeremy Bentham. In this there is something more than an accidental approximation of dates. All subsequent scientific English thinking about law is traceable to these two men. The English School of Analytical Jurisprudence; the great tide of law reform which swept through nineteenth-century England; the codification (the word is his own coinage) of law not only in England and India but in many different parts of the world: these things admittedly sprang from the genius of Jeremy Bentham. Sir William Jones's influence was smaller in volume, though almost as widely diffused. He had neither the apostolic fervour of reform nor the overflowing vitality which carried Bentham on with undiminished vigour to eighty-four years: he died before reaching his forty-seventh birthday. But his influence was, none the less, considerable. The first of our Orientalists who was also a lawyer, Colebrooke, Sutherland, Wynch, and other Sanskritists, the Macnaghtens and the Baillies followed in his footsteps. In particular Colebrooke, greatest of them all, and Ian Baillie came directly under his influence. But it is equally true, though less generally recognized, that he is the forerunner of the other great English school of legal philosophy, the historical and comparative school, and that the work of Sir Henry Maine and his successors might have lacked some of its most distinctive elements if Jones's translation had not rendered the Institutes of Manu available to Maine when he was writing Ancient Law. Indeed, Maine's whole career might have been different; for just as his known interest in Oriental legal systems led to Jones's appointment as a judge of the Supreme Court of Calcutta, so it was the interest in Indian ideas evinced in Ancient Law which led to Maine's appointment as law member of the Governor-General's Council, and so to all his later work on similar topics.

The connection of Ait with Geography is obvious, but in the case of Persia the problem is somewhat different from that presented by other countries.

For example, the most immediate influence of the natural environment on the landscape painters is hardly of any importance in Persia, where the miniaturists present their heroes in purely imaginary surroundings, now of radiant sunny spaces, now of fantastic rocks reminding one of coral reefs.

The Shāhsevan tribes of Azarbayjan were involved in various important events during the Constitutional period. In spring 1908, border incidents in Shāhsevan territory, between tribesmen and Russian frontier guards, provided the Russians with a pretext for military intervention in Azarbayjan on a scale which hastened the fall of the Constitutionalist government in Tehran. During the winter of 1908–9, there were some Shāhsevan among the reactionary forces which besieged Tabrīz. In late 1909 most of the Shāhsevan chiefs joined a Union of tribes of eastern Azarbayjan, which proclaimed opposition to the Constitution and the intention of marching on Tehran and restoring the deposed Muḥammad 'Alī Shāh. They plunde ed Ardabīl, receiving wide coverage in the European press, but were soon subdued by Nationalist forces during that winter and spring 1910. Subsequently the Shāhsevan were regarded as dangerous potential support for muḥammad 'Ali, while the main activity of their warriors was resistance to the occupying Russian forces.

My attention was first focused on the relation of the labial F (P) to the aspirated dental mute when I was translating Ibn Ishaq's Biography of the Prophet Muhammad.There I came across the following statement made by his editor, Ibn Hisham, who died in the year of the Hijra 218, i.e. A.D. 834: ‘ The Arabs say taḥannuth and taḥannuf, meaning the Ḥanafī religion. They change the TH into F as, for example, when they say jadath and jadaf when they mean a grave.’ Though the word that gave rise to the editor's comment does not belong to the TH-F class the principle that TH and F interchange is sound and unassailable. The indefatigable Brockelmann noted this important observation and gave a list of early Arabian authorities for the usage, together with a number of references to dialects in which it existed, or still exists to-day, from which it is clear that the phenomenon is to be met with all over Arabia and in North Africa. Landberg had drawn attention to its prevalence in Hadramaut and ‘Umān, and had often met with it in al-Shahr and Dathīna.

MAYYĀFĀRIQĪN, a small town situated on one of the left tributaries of the Tigrīs, at 70 km. to the north-east of Āmid (Diyārbakr), owed its importance to its situation on a short road connecting Armenia (Mush) with Upper Mesopotamia. It is probable that the ancient capital of Armenia, Tigranocerta, built by Tigran II circa 80 B.C., stood in the immediate neighbourhood of MAYYĀFĀRIQĪN.

In Islamic times Mayyāfāriqīn had a historian, Ahmad b. Yusuf b. ‘All ibn al-Azraq al-Fāriql, who wrote shortly after 572/1176. The only two copies of this curious work belong to the British Museum. The detailed description of the work and the first systematic presentation of its contents belong to that accurate British historian H. F. Amedroz, who has so considerably increased our knowledge of the medieval Arabic sources for the Near East. Numerous passages from Ibn al-Azraq are quoted by Amedroz in the footnotes of his edition of Ibn al-Qalanisi (1908). In more recent years M. Canard has published six passages of the history of Mayyāfārīqīn relative to Sayf al-daula and Claude Cahen has summed up its rich information on the early Artuqids.

These preparatory works will greatly help the future editor of the Mayyāfārīqīn chronicle. His task will not be easy, for the two versions are defective and divergent, and the best plan will be to print them in parallel columns. The script of Or. 6310 is very cursive and devoid of dots; that of Or. 5803 is defaced towards the end. The scribes were negligent even in geographical and personal names. The grammar of the author (or of his copyists) is lax and may occupy the attention of some student of vulgar Arabic in Upper Mesopotamia.

The examination and cataloguing of Mongol manuscripts and prints in European libraries in recent years has brought to light a considerable number of books whose subject matter is the occurrence and treatment of sickness by magical means, and the magical ceremonies to be performed after a person's death in order to counteract the prolongation of the evil influences which were responsible for the occurrence.

The majority of the Sanskrit Buddhist manuscripts from the northern part of the Tarim Basin in present-day Xinjiang (China) were found in an area where the local languages Tocharian A and B were spoken. In this article, the interplay of Sanskrit, the religious language, and Tocharian, the popular language, is investigated based on the example of the relationship between the Sanskrit Udānavarga and the Tocharian B Udānastotra. To this end, a reconstruction of the text of the introduction to the Udānastotra is attempted, which forms the transition from the Udānavarga to the Udānastotra proper. It is argued that this Tocharian B text was found in otherwise Sanskrit manuscripts, which suggests that speakers of Tocharian preferred certain doctrinal texts in Sanskrit.

The collapse of the authority of the Saddozai rulers of Afghanistan in the early years of the nineteenth century left their empire divided into a number of separate states. By 1838 the only states still under Afghan rule were those of Herat, Qandahar, and Kabul. At that time fear that Russia had gained a preponderant influence in Persia which would be extended to Afghanistan caused the British authorities in India and England to decide to remove Dost Muḥammad Khān, the ruler of Kabul, and his brothers, who ruled in Qandahar, and to restore Shāh Shujā' al-Mulk, the deposed Saddozai monarch, to the government of those territories.

The existence of a Chinese-Vietnamese vocabulary (i-yü) of the sixteenth century was first brought to the attention of Western scholars by E. Denison Ross in 1908, p. 692, in his discussion of the R. G. Morrison Collection manuscript entitled Ko-huo i-yü, then in the library of University College, London, and now held in the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies.

The role of language and linguistic-philological studies in the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century received much attention. The aim of this article is to focus on the language factor in Zionism and the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language in the Yishuv between 1904 and 1914. Founded in 1904, the Hebrew Language Council was expected to enhance the process of revival and, from the very beginning, an unmistakably nationalist attitude to its subject matter marked the Council's agenda. However, the authority of the Council to make binding decisions on linguistic matters was contested by a number of other Zionist institutions, a development which ruined the prestige and effectiveness of the Council. The controversy resulted less from a turf war or quarrels over scarce resources than a deeper question of which institution represented the “true” Hebraic spirit. The World Zionist Organization's decision to de-align from cultural matters, including the revival of Hebrew, worsened the conditions under which the Council operated. From a comparative perspective, thus, the Hebrew case provides an unusual case of linguistic nationalism, which should be of interest to students of both nationalism and sociolinguistics.

Arabs have always had a particular taste for brief, concise and witty idioms and proverbs. Whereas an idiom is a ‘transition point’, a necessary introduction to the forthcoming discussion, a proverb is, instead, the climax of that event, the most important domain for the display and evaluation of verbal art. The view is occasionally expressed that proverbs are in fact a dead trait in the modern world. This view is due, at least in part, to the mistaken assumption that only illiterates use proverbs. It is doubtful whether increased literacy and education have seriously affected the quality and quantity of proverbial speech, at least in Arabic culture. Arabs' gatherings, formal and informal, are marked by highly formalized relationships. A formalized relationship gives rise to highly predictable and normalized language such as idioms and proverbs.

The work of the late Pierre Hadot has transformed our understanding of the practice of philosophy, especially in the pre-modern world. This article interrogates how we approach the study of later Islamic philosophy, especially the thought of the Safavid sage Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (d. 1635), and considers whether the method proposed by Hadot is applicable to this intellectual tradition. While there is much to be gained from the application of a cognate hermeneutics of the text, I also suggest that we still do not know enough about the actual practice of philosophy, of philosophical communities in the Safavid period, to consider whether it constitutes a real intellectual and structural continuity with the late antique Neoplatonic past. Nevertheless, the paradigm of approaching philosophy as a way of life propounded by Hadot does seem to be the best way of making sense of philosophy in Safavid Iran.

This article is a sequel to some previously published work, during the preparation of which I was fortunate enough to have the benefit of many discussions with Wilfred Whiteley. While one cannot assume that the results as presented here would meet with his approval, it is certain that the subject stirred his interest; I hope therefore it will not be considered too unlikely a candidate for the honour of inclusion in his memorial volume

In this paper, I argue that the Semitic kinship terms *ʔab-‘father’, *ʔaḫ- ‘brother’, and *ḥam- ‘father-in-law’ originally ended in a w, which left traces in several of their forms. In the singular, the w contracted with the case vowels leaving a distinctive pattern of short and long vowels in the unbound, bound, and suffixal forms. In the plural, the w was retained in several languages due to the insertion of an a-vowel between the final two root consonants, a common Afro-Asiatic pluralization strategy: *ʔabw- > *ʔabaw. I further suggest that the West Semitic plural morpheme -aw was derived by analogy with the plurals *ʔabaw and *ʔaḫaw, and is not, as commonly suggested, an inherited Semitic or Afro-Asiatic plural marker.

While sound glosses from the Six Dynasties and early Tang provide direct evidence for morphological alternations in Archaic Chinese, studies on the syntax of this language generally disregard these data. This neglect is due in part to perceived unreliability of these sound glosses. In this paper, I first argue that the arguments against their reliability do not stand scrutiny, and that they are not a simple philological curiosity, but have the potential to enrich studies on Archaic Chinese syntax, and plead for more collaboration between syntacticians and historical phonologists.

In the 1994 season of the excavations in Ramla, archaeologist Don Glick, digging on behalf of Israel Antiquities Authority, exposed in a field on the eastern part of the city, some 600 m. to the south east of Birkat al-ՙAnaziyya, a complex of water installations consisting of two small basins or troughs (one 1.00 × 1.50 m. and the other 0.50 × 0.62 m.), and water canals and pipes. One of the canals was covered with a slab of marble, with an Arabic inscription, in a secondary usage. In the course of fitting the stone to its new purpose, it was cut and a few lines from the top and bottom of the inscription were lost. From the contents of the inscription, as we shall soon see, it can be learnt that the field and the water installations continued to be in use, long after the inscription ceased to serve its purpose, for it was utilized in the repairs of the water installations in the field at some later date.

The Ma-wang-tui texts of Lao-tzu have seemingly confirmed two points long held to be true by many scholars: (1) that the text from an early date, if not right from the outset, was divided into two parts; and (2) that—while it is not claimed that the Ma-wang-tui texts represent the original text—it was not originally divided into chapters. This latter conclusion is open to debate since, although there are neither chapter numbers nor names in the Ma-wang-tui texts, there are punctuation dots (·) in part II of text A, often placed at the beginning of one of our present chapters. However, absence of punctuation elsewhere, and the failure of what there is to completely coincide with present chapter divisions, would seem to indicate at least that the present eighty-one chapter divisions—thirty-seven in part I and forty-four in part II—were not yet (c. 180 B.C.) uniformly observed.