The Leningrad branch of the Oriental Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. possesses a collection of nearly 150 Sogdian fragments recovered from various sites in Central Asia between 1893 and 1915. During the first three decades of this century a few texts were published by F. Rosenberg and C. Salemann. Thereafter the collection was for a long time ignored, while Russian Sogdianists turned their attention to the important archive of Sogdian documents discovered in 1933 at Mt. Mugh in Tajikistan. Everyone concerned with the languages and culture of medieval Central Asia will be deeply grateful to A. N. Ragoza, whose efforts have finally resulted in the complete publication of these interesting fragments. Her edition, reviewed here, includes texts, translations, commentary, glossary, and 69 pages of facsimiles.

The great inscription of Darius I at Bisitun has hitherto been the only Achaemenid inscription known to exist not only in the three versions carved on the rock-face—Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian—but also in an Aramaic translation on papyrus. The fragmentary scroll containing the Aramaic text was first published by Sachau in 1911. In general, the Aramaic version agrees closely with the Babylonian and is therefore comparatively easy to interpret in spite of its poor state of preservation. However, both Sachau and all later editors have been baffled by one passage in the last column of the Aramaic text. The lines preceding and following correspond, at least approximately, to §§44 and 49 of the Babylonian: ‘King Darius states: King, whoever you are, who may arise after me, protect yourself well from lies. Do not trust the man who lies … Believe what I did and tell the truth to the people. Do not conceal (it). If you do not conceal these matters, but you do tell the people, may Ahura Mazda protect you …’. The intervening lines have not been identified up to now and their meaning has remained obscure.

In JRAS, 1967, 22–5, I was able to prove that Khotanese bihīysde means ‘it increases’ and not ‘it decreases’ as had been thought earlier. In BSOAS, XXIX, 3, 1966, 616–17, I showed how bihīysde could be connected with bihīyu ‘very’ and bihīta- ‘intense’. The forms discussed there were analysed under the lemmata *bihis-, bihījs-, *bihīys-, and bihīs- in SGS 100.

Yosef Klausner may be considered a fair representative of the younger generation of Hebrew writers at the turn of the century, both in education and in his aspiration to modernize Hebrew language and literature and to bring Jewish life into harmony with culture in general. He adopted a compromise point of view between the old school of Hebrew writers represented by Ahad Ha-'Am, and the new trend in Hebrew literature championed by Berdyczewski, which was concerned with the widening of horizons.

In an article published in the early sixties, M. Bogaert shows certain groups of verbs which in Biblical Hebrew (as well as in other north-western Semitic languages) may govern verbal suffixes instead of ‘dative’prepositions. This phenomenon is called by him ‘non-accusative verbal suffixes’.

In his article ‘'et = ’el “to, towards” in Biblical Hebrew', S. Izre'el argues that the particle 'et sometimes occurs in contexts that elsewhere require the prepositions 'el ‘to, towards’ or 'im ‘with’. He concludes thatwith 'et is a preposition which in Modern Hebrew may be rendered by 'im or 'el, similar to the Hebrew preposition bƏ- which is sometimes translated into English as ‘in’ and at other times as ‘at’, according to the context.

The Old Khotanese fragment H 147 NS 115 in the collection of the India Office Library, London, was first published in transcription by Bailey in KT, v, 56. This paper contains a re-edition of the fragment, now with a translation and a commentary, and a discussion of two of the words occurring in the fragment: ha[ṃ]där-väto ‘*in the interior’ and patīśu ‘in autumn’, also including an excursus on OKh. vya and ya, 3S optative of ‘to be’.

The Christian physician Ibn al-Tilmīdh (d. 560/1165) was assisted by eminent doctors and philosophers of Baghdad in transcribing the five books of al-Qānūn fī 'l-ṭibb (Canon of medicine) by Ibn Sīnā, (d. 428/1037). Ibn al-Tilmīdh's own copy remained the definitive edition of this encyclopaedic work for centuries after his death.

The study of Muslim lexicology concerned with the Qur'ān has a short but illustrious bibliography, the highlights of which may be summed up for the purposes of the following discussion by mentioning four people: Arthur Jeffery, whose Foreign vocabulary of the Qur'ān contains a lengthy introduction concerning various classical Muslim attempts to come to grips with the Qur'ānic lexicon; Chaim Rabin, who in his Ancient West-Arabian attempts to use a text which deals with dialect words in the Qur'ān as one of Ms sources for the reconstruction of ‘pre-literary Arabic dialects’; Lothar Kopf, who, through his articles and posthumously published dissertation extracts, exposes many of the trends and pitfalls in Arabic dictionaries, most notably those features which result from the influence of the Qur'ān; and John Wansbrough, who via his Quranic studies has treated us to his analysis of some of the early texts and has provided some very cogent and persuasive arguments concerning the motivations behind the compilation of such treatises.

Māwardī said of zakāt that it was paid ṭahratan li-ahlihā ma'ūnatan li-ahl al-sahman, as a purification for the donor and a support for the recipient. It has thus a dual aspect. As a social tax it provides for the transfer of wealth from certain productive classes of society to certain poor or non-productīve classes. As a religious duty it is of essentially the same type as ṣalāt, ḥajj, etc., afarīḓa 'ala l-'ayn. Like these it is a ritual whose correct performance involves an attention to precise details of quantity (naṣāb), timing (al-ḥawl), and intention (niyya) which may be irrelevant or even inimical to the optimum fulfilment of the social aim.

In the second volume of his History of the Arabs in the Sudan, the late Sir Harold MacMichael gave summary translations of a number of genealogical works ranging in scope from simple pedigrees of individuals to elaborate treatises which purport to demonstrate the kinship of numerous tribes and clans. None of the manuscripts used by MacMichael was older than the nineteenth century, although some probably go back to seventeenth-century originals and reputedly contain even earlier material.

During its first half-century of existence, from the time of the revolution of 132/749 to the death of Hārūn al-Rashīd in 193/809, the 'Abbāsid caliphate embraced a huge area. From Ifrīqiya to the banks of the Indus and the deserts of Central Asia, governors were appointed to rule provinces, taxes were collected and armies sent to punish any who dared to rebel against the authority of the Commander of the Faithful. It is a very impressive achievement. If we seek an explanation of how this was possible from the great chroniclers of Islam, al-Ṭabarī, Ibn al-Athīr or al-Ya'qūbī, we are left with the impression that it was all very simple; the provinces were ruled by governors sent by the caliph and their authority was absolute until they were dismissed by their master. If any of the local people were so misguided as to attempt a rebellion, then units of the great Khurāsānī army, which had brought the dynasty to power, could be drafted in to chastise them. The system was, in short, an absolute military dictatorship.

Detailed information about the rhythmic organization of Indian art-music in the pre-Muslim period is provided by three Sanskrit treatises: the Nātyaśāstra attributed to Bharata (compiled before the fifth century A.D.: hereafter cited as BhNS); the Dattilam of Dattila (DD; of similar date); and the Saṅgītaratnākara of Śārṅgadeva (SSR; written between 1210 and 1247). The system of rhythm described in these texts differs in many respects from the tālasystems of modern North and South Indian music. It is therefore of the greatest interest to find, albeit in a comparatively late source (c. 1100), examples of melodies from the pre-Muslim period preserved in notation, which appear to exemplify the early Indian rhythmic system, and from which it is possible to draw conclusions about the relationship between tala and melody.

One of the major activities of the printing press established by the late Emperor Haile Selassie in the early 1920s was the printing of religious works in Geez which were provided with an accompanying Amharic translation in keeping with the then Regent's known desire that these religious texts be made accessible to the public. This tradition has been continued by the Tənsa'e zäGvba'e and Täsfa Gäbrä-sәllase presses of Addis Ababa, at least until they were nationalized in 1976. The latter press has devoted most of its output to reprinting religious works in Geez and Amharic in cheap editions intended for sale to the pious lay public. Works in Geez may or may not be provided with an accompanying Amharic translation. Sometimes the Geez original and the Amharic translation are published separately. Occasionally the Geez text appears without an Amharic translation, and very rarely the Amharic text (as is the case with the version appearing below) appears without the Geez original. This is undoubtedly owing to the fact that the original Geez text or the Amharic translation were not available to the publisher.

The introduction to the Sung shih monograph on music stresses the value of music to the ruler in the following way: ‘The second of the four mainsprings of kingly government is music, which brings the minds of the people into harmony and transforms the world.’ Music naturally played a major role in court ritual, especially in the sacrifices at the Temples of Heaven and Earth and the imperial tombs. The full complement of musicians at court in the early eleventh century was over seven hundred, and the control of music came under the Court of Imperial Sacrifices, T'ai-ch'ang-ssu, whose President had overall responsibility for all musical affairs including those to do with pitch, texts, dances and military music. One of his subordinates, the Hsüeh-lü-lang

took charge of the lü-lüwhereby Yin and Yang are brought into harmony. He arranged the positions for the musicians and dancers of the palace orchestra and the special orchestra. It was he who held the flag to indicate the beginning and end of musical sections at the great sacrifices. When he raised it the trough (chu) was thumped and the music started, and when he lowered it [the back of] the tiger (yü) was scraped and the music stopped. He was in charge of all matters of musical precedence.

In 1836 the Arabian traveller J. R. Wellsted described the Hindu community of Masqaṭ, 'Umān, as constituting ‘a body of the principal merchants’ of that port. By the 1870s the Indian merchants dominated the commercial life of Masqaṭ and had replaced the Āl Bū Sa'īd rulers of the town as the paramount economic power in 'Umān. While this community has much wider significance than their pivotal role in the commerce of Masqaṭ and 'Umān (the Indian merchants in Masqaṭ were a component of the great Indian Ocean trading network, and as Hindus and Shī'īs in a Sunnī, more properly Khārijī, country they offer potential insights into the status of minority groups in Muslim states) the focus of this study is the more specific problem of their origins, development and social and economic activities in Masqaṭ to the end of the nineteenth century.

It is a remarkable fact that of the Achehnese language, one of the most important languages of Sumatra, no grammatical description has ever appeared in print that meets minimum requirements. The only grammar extant is K. H. van Langen's Handleiding voor de beoefening der Atjehsche taal (The Hague, 1889). But notwithstanding Van Langen's laudable effort under difficult conditions, his work does not do justice to the language. There are two main objections. First, it is based on the written language. This is (or was in Van Langen's time) exclusively written in Arabic script, which clearly represents an earlier stage of the Achehnese language when certain phonemes had a different value and certain finals existed which have now been dropped. But Van Langen based even his transliteration in Latin characters on these archaic and obsolete Arabic spellings. The second objection is that the author never realized that Achehnese is an inflecting language, and treated certain personal prefixes as indicating a passive voice and a gerund instead of flexional elements of the verb. One aspect of his work is, however, still useful: the chrestomathy which forms a part of it, written in Arabic script, with a transliteration and a translation of some of the texts.

L'emploi des Psaumes en dehors de l'usage liturgique est bien attesté aussi bien dans la tradition juive que dans la tradition chrétienne. Il y a d'abord la bibliomancie à proprement parler. Comme tous les livres bibliques, les Psaumes peuvent servir à la divination. La méthode la plus courante dans la bibliomancie est celle où l'on ouvre le livre au hasard et l'on prédit l'avenir d'après le passage que le doigt touche ou bien on cherche à répondre à une question posée au préalable.

The ‘problem of myth’ for Western philosophers is a problem of interpreting the meaning of myths and explaining the phenomenon of myth making. The ‘problem of myth’ for the sinologist is one of finding any myths to interpret and explaining why there are so few—for myth-making is generally assumed to be a universal faculty of mankind. One explanation for the paucity of myth in the traditional sense of stories of the supernatural in ancient Chinese texts is the nature of Chinese religion. In China, gods, as well as ancestors and ghosts, were believed to be dead men, spirits who had lived in this world at a certain place and time and continued to need sustenance from the living and to exert influence over them. They related primarily to those who gave them ritual offerings and little thought was given to any possible interaction between them

A recent article (BSOAS, XLIII, 2, 1980, 311–28) was devoted to distinguishing the Sanskrit root mā- ‘to make, produce, create’ from mā- ‘to measure’. By this the number of homonymous roots mā- was not exhausted. A survey of the passages in the Ṛgveda in which this root is found soon makes it evident that these two meanings account for only a portion of the usages. There are many passages in which neither of these meanings applies. Most notable are those passages in which the poet asks the gods to bring riches, etc., and uses the root mā- to express this action. Examples are as follows:

nū no rayíṃ puruvīraṃ bṛhántaṃ

dásrā mímāthām ubháyeṣu asmé

‘0 you two skilful gods, bring to both of us people (poets and patrons) great wealth associated with many men.’

The existence of a totally indigenous Oromo writing system is not something that is very widely known about among Éithiopisants, and our present description of this remarkable achievement is written in the belief that the subject has never before received attention. Remarkable achievements are generally the achievements of remarkable men, and before embarking on a consideration of the writing system itself, it has seemed only appropriate to devote the first section of this paper to a short biographical sketch of the man who devised the system. At this point we are bound to acknowledge our great indebtedness to Shaykh Mahammad Rashād, a student of Shaykh Bakri Saṗalō, who not only gave us copious information about the life of his teacher, but generously provided us with copies of a number of manuscripts, among which is one (shown in Figs. 2–5) which sets out in a clear way the principles of Shaykh Bakri's orthography. Without the Amharic and Arabic explanations of this key we should have been involved in a work of decipherment, and the present study might well have proved impossible. We are likewise indebted to Dīmā Yōnīs, who took great pains on our behalf in interviewing former students and friends of Shaykh Bakri, and subsequently translated into English and typed out the information he collected.