The steppe which stretches between the Lower Danube and the Black Sea, from the Delta southward as far as the foothills of the Emine Dagh, and which since the middle of the 14th century has been called, after the Bulgarian prince Dobrotitsa, the Dobruja, is the homeland of a small Turkish-speaking people, the Gagauz. It is because of their religion that they appear as a distinct group among the Turks: they are Christians belonging to the Greek Orthodox Church. In the past the Gagauz may have constituted, among the various ethnic elements of the region, a group of considerable importance, especially in the southern and middle Dobruja, from Varna and Kaliakra towards Silistria on the Danube. Besides, small isolated groups of them are to be found also in the Balkans (where they are more commonly known by the name of Sorguch): in Eastern Thrace, round Hafsa, to the south-east of Adrianople, and in Macedonia, to the east and west of Salonica, round Zikhna (near Serres) and round Karaferia (Verria). In modern times the Gagauz of the Dobruja have shrunk to a feeble minority chiefly as a result of a prolonged and massive emigration into Bessarabia. To-day even this remnant is rapidly dwindling.

If Clifford Geertz's definition of religion as a culturally determined system of symbols is valid, then it can be argued that the religious ideology of pre-Confucian—Early (or Western) Zhou—China is centred around the symbols of power and communication. Heaven, sacrifice, and gift-decree are some of the categories of this religious system, the majority of them reducible to the themes of a sacred hierarchy and communicative relationship between its subjects. The crucial position in this context is occupied by the concept of .

Rifā‘ahbey, for by this name is he generally known, was born at Ṭahṭā, in the province of Girgā, in 1801. His genealogy goes back to Muḥammad al-Bāḳir b. ‘Alī Zain al-‘Ābidīn b. al-Ḥasan b. Fāṭimah, the daughter of the Prophet Muḥammad. His ancestors had been well-to-do but when Rifā‘ah was born, his parents were in great pecuniary difficulties. They were apparently affected by the confiscations by Muḥammad ‘Alī of the iltzamāt during the early part of his reign. Rifā‘ah’s father was compelled to go from one place to another in order to seek hospitality. At one time the family stayed with relations at Mansẖa’at an-Nīdah, near the town of Girgā these peregrinations, the young Riā‘ah began to memorize the Ḳor’ān under the care of his father.,

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 story of the Persian document which forms the subject of the present article is not devoid of romance. It was discovered in 1896 by the well-known Bosnian scholar Ṣafvet-beg R. Bašagić in the possession of a local noble, Nuri-beg Čengić of Ustikolina. This family is said to be immigrants in Bosnia; their forefathers must have come as officials of the Ottoman Empire, then received fiefs and settled in the country. The farmān in question being kept in the family archives, and evidently connected with the ancestors of the Čengić, points to the origin of the family from far-away Kurdistan.

A facsimile of the interesting document was published by Bašagić1 first accompanied by an article in Serbian, and then by a German translation of the latter. On the whole the work of the late Bosnian scholar quite satisfactorily served its immediate purpose, if we take into consideration the difficulties the author must have had, working as he was in a provincial town, wheTe-a knowledge of Persian was certainly no common attainment.

The K. al-farq bayn wilāyāt ahi al-islām wa bayn wilāyāt ahi al-kufr is one of the minor works attributed to the Shehu ‘Umān dan Fodio. The work is not among those mentioned by Sultan Bello in the Infāq al-maysūr, nor is it listed by Whitting or Vajda. It is listed by Kensdale, and Smith notes a MS among the De Gironcourt papers which bears an almost identical title. The writer has been assured by Malam Junaidu, Wazirin Sokoto that the work is well known to be by the Shehu ‘Umān. Malam Abubakar Gumi of the School for Arabic Studies, Kano, and a Sokoto scholar deeply versed in the Fulani Arabic literature, also confirms that the work has been known to him from his youth as that of the Shehu. Finally the author identifies himself in the preamble as ‘Umān b. Fūdī.

The dialects spoken in the Najd of Saudi Arabia have striking features which not only are unknown or unreported in other dialects but also retain some characteristics of the 'Arabiyya and of ancient dialects of the peninsula reported by the Arab grammarians. On both these counts, they are of paramount importance for synchronic, comparative and historical dialectology. Yet little is known of them and published materials remain scanty. It is the purpose of this article to describe in some detail the morphology of the verb, i.e., the stem, the subject markers and the object pronouns, and in the process, present phonological features and processes, in a dialect spoken in the North of the Najd, specifically that of Hāyil. This is an important town on the edge of the Jabal Shammar mountains just south of the Nafud, and some 350 miles to the north-west of Riyādh. Although the dialect manifests features which are typically Najdi, in the sense that investigation shows them to exist in other dialects of the Najd, it also possesses peculiarities all its own.

3.0. The nominal system

The description of the nominal system will be divided into three sections, the first, two dealing with nouns and pronouns, and the last with categories of items which are dependent upon nouns.

MY purpose is to draw attention to the rather puzzling problem laid before the student of early Ottoman history by the apparently complete incompatibility of the devshirme with the shari'a. The periodical forced levy of children from the Sultan—s Christian subjects for the recruiting of his standing army, and the forced conversion of those children to Islam must, indeed, appear—as it always did—as a flagrant disregard of the Holy Law which accords to the Christian subjects the status of dhimmi, implying personal liberty and the right to keep, and exercise freely, their religion. Only recently, making himself the voice of Muslim conscience, Professor Massignon has branded the devshirme as ‘un manquement à la Dhimmat ar-rasul’2

The first thing which strikes the student of the Arabic literature of this period is the remarkable number of works attributed to Rifā،ah, but, in reality, there is nothing new or startling about the quantity, for the eighteenth century provides us with the names of many Egyptian scholars who produced long lists of works on all the subjects in which the learned were interested and for which there was a constant demand in scholastic circles. Rifā،ah had a gift for writing which was encouraged by the exceptional circumstances in which he found himself once he had become absorbed into the military system created by Muḥammad ،Alī. What is so pleasing about Rifā،ah is the variety of his literary interests, and he must be credited with having been the principal actor in laying the foundations of the “new” literature. His verses, too, were admired by his contemporaries; as a student in the mosque of al-Azhar, he wrote an urjūzdh on tauḥīd which attracted the attention of one of his teachers, Shaikh al-Faḍḍālī, but it was never published.

It seems an odd coincidence that within the last three years there should have appeared four different studies devoted to the work of Ibn Khaldūn, considering that in the half-century following the issue of de Slane's translation of the Muqaddima, apart from von Kremer's study and a few short articles drawing the attention of a wider circle of students in various countries to its significance, it was not until 1917 that the first monograph on the subject was published by Dr. Ṭāhā Ḥusain. This work, like most of the earlier articles, dealt primarily with the sociological aspects of Ibn Khaldūn's historical theory, and the same interest predominates in all but one of the three or four articles published since 1917. Of the latest studies it may be said that, though still giving prominence to the social aspect,they cover as a whole a rather wider ground. Dr. Gaston Bouthoul, indeed, limits himself in his title to Ibn Khaldun's “Social Philosophy”, but the contents of his essay overleap these bounds, especially the first thirty pages, devoted to a very suggestive analysis of the personality and intellectual outlook of the historian. Professor Schmidt's tractate is in the nature of a survey of the field ; he assembles and examines the views of earlier writers on different aspects of Ibn Khaldun's work, but does not put forward any synthesis of his own. Lastly, the two recent German works of Drs. Kamil Ayad and Erwin Rosenthal mark a return towards the more strictly

The flourishing of Ṣūfism in al-Andalus during the first half of the sixth/twelfth century with mystics like Ibn al-‘Arīf, Ibn Barrajān (who both died in 536/1141) and Ibn Qasī(d. 546/1151) has been interpreted in different ways. For M. Asín Palacios it reflects the influence of the mystical tradition initiated by Ibn Masarra in the second half of the third/ninth century, although he himself does not fail to mention the impossibility of providing evidence for such influence. For other scholars, it was mainly due to the influence of al-Ghazālī's works and thought. D. Urvoy, for his part, has shown how in the ‘image’ of Andalusian Islam during the fifth/eleventh-seventh/thirteenth centuries presented by scholars like Ibn Bashkuwāl and Ibn al-Abbār, Ṣūfism appears to be almost non existent. The question of what religious, intellectual and sociopolitical background allowed figures like Ibn al-‘Arīf, Ibn Barrajān and Ibn QasīT to appear, is still to be answered.

The problem of how human nature is constituted, we have good reason to believe, was current before Mencius and, from the time of Shyuntzyy onward, has been one of the central problems throughout the history of Chinese philosophy. The point at issue between Mencius and Shyuntzyy has traditionally been taken to be something like this. There is a thing called human nature, which is good according to Mencius, but bad according to Shyuntzyy. The same thing cannot be both good and bad at the same time, hence at least one of the two philosophers must be wrong. That this was how most thinkers of subsequent ages understood the position can be seen from the remedies they recommended. There were two ways of reconciling the conflicting views.

This paper discusses certain aspects of an esoteric, secretly organized, religion in China called Hsien-t‘ien Ta-tao (or Hsien-t‘ien Tao) ‘The Great Way of Former Heaven’ (or ‘The Way of Former Heaven’). It is based mainly on material discovered in Singapore during 1954–5.

The name Hsien-t‘ien Tao has been recorded elsewhere as that of a Chinese ‘sect’. Evidence suggested that it might have links with several other groupings but the exact nature of connexion was obscure.

Data on the Bahing verbal agreement system were collected in the first half of the nineteenth century and in the second half of the twentieth century. The current periphrastic model of the Proto-Kiranti verb is evaluated in the light of a morphemic analysis of the Bahing conjugation. This re-assessment leads to a refinement of the model of the Proto-Kiranti verb

The importance of the Soma-plant in Vedic religion has never been underestimated. Among the rituals of the Yajurvedic texts, the soma-sacrifices are among the most elaborate and important, and are described in minute detail in the Brāhmaṇas and Śrauta-sūtras. These later texts nevertheless continue a direct tradition from the Ṛgveda, which can be seen to reflect an earlier stage in the development of the ritual, doubtless of a less rigidly formalized and probably less elaborate nature. Even so, the Ṛgveda is, so to speak, permeated by Soma. Understandably, therefore, from the early days of Vedic studies in the West, many scholars have speculated on the botanical identity of the plant in question. Numerous candidates have been nominated, the most frequently favoured being species of the genera Ephedra, Sarcostemma, Periploca, and latterly Cannabis, and even Rheum. Not a single one of these conjectures has gained general assent, and the opinion is widely held that the problem is insoluble.

The rise of political consciousness in the Arab Provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century has long been referred to as an era of rebirth or resurrection (nahḍa), and from its earliest stages this period saw a dual process of aspirations to political emancipation and creative waves of cultural regeneration. Thus George Antonius was moved to attribute the beginnings of the Arab national movement to the foundation of a modest literary society in Beirut in 1847; the two figures who dominated the intellectual life of Syria in the mid nineteenth century—Nāṣīf al-Yāzijī and Buṭrus al-Bustānī—were ded icated to the resurrection of the lost world of classical Arabic literature, to the virtual re-creation of Arabic as one of the languages of the modern world, and to preaching the virtues of education based on inter-confessional tolerance and patriotic ideals. The most distinguished area of the early history of modern Arabic literature is neo-classical poetry, whose revival of the achievements of the golden age of the ‘Abbāsids provided the foundation on which the first tentative steps towards the renewal of the great tradition were to be based. Indeed the technical excellence of the neo-classical mode was such that it dominated poetry in Egypt at least until the late 1920s, and for even longer in Iraq and the rest of the Levant.

The Iranian Empire emerged in the third century in the interstices of the Silk Road that increasingly linked the markets of the Mediterranean and the Near East with South, Central, and East Asia. The ensuing four centuries of Iranian rule corresponded with the heyday of trans-Eurasian trade, as the demand of moneyed imperial elites across the continent for one another's high-value commodities stimulated the development of long-distance networks. Despite its position at the nexus of trans-continental and trans-oceanic commerce, accounts of Iran in late antiquity relegate trade to a marginal role in its political economy. The present article seeks to foreground the contribution of trans-continental mercantile networks to the formation of Iran and to argue that its development depended as much on the political economies of its western and eastern neighbours as on internal Near Eastern factors.

The word Gāndhārī has been chosen to head this study as a term sufficiently wide in its scope to embrace the forms of the one Middle Indian dialect of the north-west of India, centred in the old Gāndhāra region, around modern Peshawar, and which we meet in most varied sources. Under this name I propose to include those inscriptions of Aśoka which are recorded at Shahbazgaṛhi and Mansehra in the Kharoṣṭhī script, the vehicle for the remains of much of this dialect: To be included also are the following sources: the Buddhist literary text, the Dharmapada found in Khotan, written likewise in Kharoṣṭhī, of which a new reading of the text available in facsimile is given in BSOAS 11. 488–512; the Kharoṣṭhī documents on wood, leather, and silk from Caḍ'ota (the Niya site) on the border of the ancient kingdom of Khotan, which represented the official language of the capital Krorayina, K 572, 512 lou-lan <ləu-lan (lou in a series with alternation of k and l) of the Shan-shan kingdom, and of one document, no. 661, dated in the reign of the Khotana maharaya rayatiraya hinajha dheva ṿijida-siṃha. With this more copious material must be grouped the scattered traces of the same Middle Indian dialect in Khotanese, Tibetan, Agnean, Kuchean, the earlier Chinese Buddhist transliterations, as, in particular, in the Dīrghāgama of the Dharmaguptaka ṡect and the remains in Sogdian, Uigur Turkish, and in Mongol (in living use), and also in Manchu texts. The modern Dardic languages Ṣiṇā, Khowar, Phalūᵛa and others represent the same type of Middle Indian. Much material in Chinese texts, for most of us hidden and inaccessible, remains to be gathered and sifted. The preliminary studies of P. Pelliot in Les noms propres dans les traductions chinoises du Milindapañha (JA 1914. 2. 379–419), of Fr. Weller in his paper Über den Aufbau des Pāṭikasuttanta (Asia Major 5. 1928), and of E. Waldschmidt in his Bruchstücke buddhistischer Sūtras aus dem zentralasiatischen Sanskritkanon I, 1932, have hardly realized the importance of this North-Western Prakrit.

It is well known that during the course of their histories a number of Indo-European languages, all of them members of the Indo-Iranian branch of the family, developed an ergative construction. Thus, in certain tenses of the verb, their grammars came to treat in forlly identical manner the subject of an intransitive verb and the logical object of a transitive verb, the agent (or logical subject) of this latter being given a different morphological marker. Now although ergativity has been studied in a wide variety of languages as a synchronic phenomenon, the opportunities for examining it from a diachronic point of view are in the great majority of cases severely limited by lack of historical documentation. The Indo-Iranian languages, however, form a notable exception. These, thanks to the availability of texts from closely related languages covering a time-span of some three millennia, provide us with a chance to observe both the development of the construction and its subsequent decline. The present paper will do no more than attempt to trace a part of this process, namely the way in which the ergative construction has disappeared from a certain area of western Iranian. It bases its arguments upon the assumption that the geographical continuum of the Kurdish dialects, whose grammars exhibit the whole range of possibilities from fully ergative systems in the north to fully accusative systems in the south, reflects the successive stages of a diachronic process. This being granted, it should be possible by ordering the synchronic patterns of representative dialects from the northern, the central and the southern regions, to arrive at a picture of the historical sequence of events which has led to the loss of ergativity in the southern dialects and to isolate the mechanisms involved in their resultant restructuring. The wider problems of precisely how the construction arose historically and of why within the Indo-European family it appears to be confined to Indo-Iranian will not be dealt with here.