This study is mainly based on the writings of two authors: Ibn FaḍAllāh al-‘Umarī (d. 749/1349) and al-Qalqashandī (d. 821/1418). Al-‘Umarī has in the first part of his encyclopedia Maslik al-absār fī mamālik al-amṣār a section, the fifteenth,1 dealing with the Arab tribes of his time.

I could not say much of the Mamalucs, of whom I know no author that has written in particular: neither did they deserve that any should. For they were a base sort of people, a Colluvies of slaves, the scum of all the East, who, having treacherously destroyed the Jobidae, their Masters, reigned in their stead; and bating that they finished the expulsion of the Western Christians out of the East (where they barbarously destroyed Tripoli, and Antioch, and several other Cities) they scarce did anything worthy to be recorded in History.

In September 1964 we were able, after considerable difficulty, to reach the village al-Jinainah (al-Junainah) of Wādī Jirdān (which we had already visited earlier in the year along the spectacular new road from Wādī ‘Amaqīn). In the afternoon of that day and early next morning before leaving to return to ‘Ataq we made a brief survey of the tower known as al-Muqaiyad—the subject of this article. The visit being so hurried and part of the work being carried out after dark, we were not able to record everything in quite the detail we should have wished. We are much indebted to Lt.-Col. Adrian Donaldson, D.S.O., M.B.E., the CO., and Major S. F. B. Francis, T.D., then of the 5th Battalion, Federal Regular Army, the latter escorting us to the mouth of Wādī Jirdān at ‘Ayādh, and for the generous hospitality they gave us at ‘Ataq. We acknowledge with pleasure the courtesy of Shaikh Ruwais b. Miḥsin b. Ḥasan Namārī Hilālī, Federal Councillor, who permitted us to survey the ḥuṣn and supplied us with much information on it, as also to his brother Ḥasan b. Miḥsin.

To show how great were the profits in the medieval Levant trade may seem like bringing coals to Newcastle. The accounts of the strenuous efforts made to discover the sea route to India bear witness to the Europeans’ desire to get a greater share of these riches. Anybody passing by the old palaces along the Grand Canal of Venice becomes aware of the riches accumulated in the trade of the Indian spices. However, it goes without saying that the margin of profit changed in the course of time. Certainly they were very great in the period of the Crusades, both on the Red Sea and in the Mediterranean. In a Judaeo-Arabic letter written in 1134 in Aden by Abū; Zikrī Kōhēn, one reads: ‘If you would have come this year (to Aden), there would have been no need to journey to India. Youngsters came who had never travelled before, who have no knowledge of selling and buying, and those (of them) who had a hundred earned another hundred…and if he were a Muslim—a hundred and fifty’. The riches of the Kārim merchants, who specialized in the spice trade on the Red Sea, were fabulous, if one can believe the Arabic chroniclers. Judging from the Geniza documents, one would be bound to conclude that the profits in the spice trade were much greater than in other branches of trade. But in the later Middle Ages, when it had become a wholesale trade conducted on regular lines, did it still yield returns much greater than other branches of trade and industry? And if this was indeed so, how can one explain the fact that the Levant traders succeeded in maintaining high prices for the Indian commodities destined for mass consumption?

Conventionally, the history of early and medieval India is viewed against a framework of a large number of dynasties, some local, others ‘imperial’, some ephemeral, others extending over several centuries.3 In this paper I argue that such a conceptualization is to some extent illusory, at least if a dynasty is defined as a series of genetically related rulers succeeding to a given office over time. The purpose of the paper is not to deny that many of these dynasties could have existed, or even that they did exist, but only to argue that the nature and extent of our evidence is not sufficient to permit many of the hypothesized reconstructions of them. In other words, the impression of a dynastic Indian past often has resulted from a maximum of inference based on a minimum of satisfactory data.

Several biographical notices on the seventeenth-century Egyptian chronicler Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Muḥammad Abi ‘l-Surūr b. Muḥammad b. ‘Alī al-Bakrī al-Ṣiddīqī al-Miṣrī al-Shāfi’ī al-Wārthī al-Ash’arī sibṭ Abi ‘l-Ḥasan, better known as Ibn Abi ‘l-Surūr, have been written in more than one language, but most of them contain misleading, and sometimes erroneous, statements about his birth and death dates and works. The new edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, for instance, in its brief notice ‘al-Bakrī, b. Abi ‘l-Surūr’, states that this is the ‘name of two Arab historians of the notable family of Egyptian shaykhs of the Bakriyya ṭarīḳa’, viz. (1) Muḥammad b. Abi ‘l-Surūr b. Muḥammad b. ‘Alī al-Ṣiddīḳī al-Miṣrī, d. 1028/1619; (2) Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. Abi ‘l-Surūr Shams al-Dīn Abū ‘Abdallāh, son of the above, b. c. 1005/1596, d. c. 1060/1650. While the entry ‘ al-Bakrī b. Abi ‘l-Surūr’ really refers to the first, it does not, as such, apply to the alleged second historian whose identity, supposed works, and relationship to the first have to be established. The notice, moreover, gives wrong dates and erroneously ascribes some of the works of Ibn Abi ‘l-Surūr to his supposed son.

The important series of pre-Mughal monuments in the Lodi Gardens (the former Lady Willingdon Park), set in the midst of the residential area of New Delhi, is familiar to most visitors to the city. Apart from a handsome Mughal bridge (the Āṭhpula) and some small and insignificant outbuildings, there are five main structures which lie along a south-south-west to north-north-east axis. The most southerly monument is the domed octagonal tomb thought to be of Muhammad Shāh Sayyid (r. 838–49/1435–46): and the most northerly is another domed octagonal tomb in a square fortified enclosure thought to be that of Sikandar Shāh Lōdī (r. 894–923/1489–1517).

Sacrifices of animals at the various stages in the construction of a house are already reported from the country of the Subbaihah, Daw'an, and Tarīm. Ibn al-Mujāwir even records in the Middle Ages that when a road was being built between Mafālīs and Ta'izz, about 425/1033–4 up a mountain pass (naqīl) with 360 bends (malwīy), a head of cattle (rās baqar) was slaughtered at each bend as a sacrifice (fidyah); he calls a bend f rkah.

A powerful revivalist impulse emerged in the Islamic world of the eighteenth century. Some of the leaders, like Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb or Shāh Walī Allāh in India, are well known. However, the foundations of this revivalism remain relatively obscure and personalities who inspired its leaders remain shadowy figures in history. One such person is Muḥammad Ḥayyā al-Sindī, who was a teacher of the founder of the Wahhābī movement. A closer examination of this Medinese scholar and the intellectual community of which he was a part can provide insight into the conditions which helped to inspire a prominent revivalist. Even more important, however, such analysis provides a basis for discerning some of the relationships among a number of the major eighteenth-century movements.

Au cours de l'été 1972, nous avons trouvé aux archives de Topkapl Sarayl, sous la cote E 8938, un firman addressé au qāḍī de Kilia et délivré à Constantinople le 14 Safer 914/14 juin 1508.

In recent years the question of the antiquity of gZer-mig1 has been brought to the surface by some Tibetologists, but the problem is still far from being solved.2 Neither its history nor its contents have yet been fully studied.

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.

Kemant is spoken in the districts of Kärkär and Čəlga, to the north and west of the town of Gondar in north-west Ethiopia. The type of Kemant described in this paper is that of Kärkär only, collected in Gondar itself and in and around Təkəl Dangay, a little to the north of Gondar. Kemant belongs to the Agaw group of Cushitic languages.2 The material for this paper was collected in the field during the winter of 1973–4. Several informants were used, but principally Taddäsä Zäwdu of Təkəl Dəngay and Gäbrä ∃gziabəher Alämu of Gondar. It is not possible here to give any accurate figure for the number of Kemant speakers. However, Kemant does appear to be under heavy pressure from Amharic, and all my informants were bilingual in both Amharic and Kemant.

The name of Mahāprajāpatī Gautamī naturally appears frequently in early Buddhist texts, and in the Chinese translations a number of transcriptions and translated versions of the name are well known.1 The former need not detain us: with a few variations in the characters chosen, they represent clearly either Prakritic pajāpadī, pajāpadī, or Sanskrit prajāpatī. One Middle Indian version may be singled out as showing a different development:p***e-*** ***ayuâ-dei, i.e. piyāvadī.2 We shall come back to this later.

In BSOAS, XXXIV, 3,1971, 546 I suggested the possibility that the development of Indo-European o to ā in Sanskrit, which, according to Brugmann's well-known and much contested theory, had been held to take place only in open syllables, may in fact have taken place in other environments also,. namely before consonant groups. The proposal was made in view of certain word equations quoted in connexion with the development of spontaneous cerebrals in Sanskrit, notably between Skt. κāṇḍα- ‘section between two joints, phalanx’ and bhāṇḍα-’ furniture, utensils, movable property’ on the one hand, and Gk.

The text presented below has been transcribed from a verbal account given by the Mntwana (Princess) Constance Magogo kaDinuzulu, of the Zulu Royal family. The Princess is the sister of the late Paramount Chief Solomon Maphumuzana Nkayishana, and great-aunt to the present Paramount Chief of the Zulu. Her late husband was Chief Mathole Buthelezi, and her son, Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, is at present Chief Executive Councillor of the kwaZulu Government. Princess Magogo is widely acknowledged as the greatest living authority on the subject of Zulu music. As a performer, her musical repertoire is prodigious, encompassing traditional items dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and possibly earlier. Her reply, when asked how she came to learn so much of the Zulu musical repertoire, was as follows: ‘When I was a young girl, I slept in the huts of my grandmothers, the wives of King Cetshwayo, and one could not escape hearing a great deal of our traditional music’. Besides her accomplishment as a singer, the Princess is the last remaining player of the classic Zulu instrument for song-accompaniment, the ugubhu musical bow. The present discourse, on Zulu music and its role in traditional life,, provides insight of a kind that is beyond the reach of an outside observer, since the Princess has drawn on a lifetime of personal experience. To provide relevant illustrations, she frequently broke into song during her discourse. Musical transcriptions of these songs appear at the end of the present paper, in Appendix 1. The tonality of the music is briefly discussed in Appendix 2.

AN-NAN-KUO I-YO: VIETNAMESE VOCABULARY

Achinese and the Austronesian languages spoken on the South-East Asian mainland (‘Chamic’) are known to have borrowed numerous words from Mon-Khmer and to show other effects of Mon-Khmer contact. Systematic comparison especially of their historico-phonological peculiarities makes it appear that they are closely related, irrespective of this, within Austronesian. Such a postulated relationship is at variance with the findings of lexicostatistics. It is suggested that the discrepancy results from the very high incidence of Malay loans in Achinese.

The conversion of the Znāga of the western Sahara 1 to Islam may have begun as early as the second/eighth century, but the spread of Arabic as a spoken language in the area began only with the immigration of Arabic-speaking tribes 2 in the eighth/fourteenth century, and the development of many of the conventional Arab and Muslim perspectives which now exist among most tribes of Znāga origin seems to have taken place only during the last two or three centuries.

In a recent article treating the location of ancient regions attested in early Sumero-Akkadian texts, the present writer proposed to identify the country of Meluḫḫa with a part of eastern Baluchistan in modern Pakistan (BSOAS, xxxvi, 3, 1973, 559–70). It was, however, also suggested that the name Meluḫḫa ‘may have been applied at times to regions which extended to the east of there’.1 This theory was not developed in the article because the possibility could not then be demonstrated factually.