Däbrä Tabor, the capital of Begemdir and headquarters of Emperors Tewodros II and Yohannes IV, was established, according to tradition, by the remarkable Oromo, or Galla, chieftain Ras Gugsa Mersa who held sway in the province from 1798 to 1825. He was the nephew of Ali Guangul, the founder of a Muslim dynasty, which as the islamisant Spencer Trimingham asserts, ‘became nominal members of the national Church for political reasons’.

The system of iqṭā', the allotment of the resources of the state, income from land and elsewhere, to individuals to provide them with the means of serving the state, above all in military service, stands out from the pages of the chronicles as the dominant administrative institution of the Mamlūk period; the iqṭā' was the life-blood of the Mamlūk amīrs and the whole military apparatus of the state. All the vast amount of administrative work connected with the iqṭā' system, the assigning and control of, and accounting for, grants, was carried out by the Dīwān al-Jaysh, the Army Bureau. We see some of this work ‘through a glass darkly’ in the chronicles, and we have some very schematic accounts in the scribal handbooks that are available from the period. The operations of such ‘technical’ departments of state were not described by the writers of the handbooks with anything like the same detail as the operations of the Chancery (Dīwān al-Inshā'), because, despite a long tradition of discussion and comparison of their rival merits, which was one of the stock literary themes, the departments of financial and accounting functions were generally considered of lower standing and worth less attention than the Chancery, the bureau in which polite learning and literary talent were at a premium. Hence, examples of the prestigious productions of the Dīwān al-Inshā', treaties, foreign correspondence, diplomas, and decrees, were copied and preserved for their literary interest, in addition to, and sometimes before, their historical interest, and as models for aspiring ‘mandarins’ of the Chancery. There is a smaller, much smaller, amount of Chancery material that has survived in its original form in a few scattered collections of documents.

The accumulation of knowledge concerning the Semitic languages of Ethiopia has reached a stage when one may wish to venture upon a systematic comparative investigation of this linguistic group. Such an attempt is E. Hetzron's Ethiopian Semitic: studies in classification, which represents, in terms of genetic classification, the most detailed and penetrating comparative study hitherto undertaken in this field. The book is somewhat more ambitious than its subtitle would suggest; in fact it offers a fairly comprehensive exposition, well reasoned and carefully elaborated, of a new classification of the Ethiopian Semitic languages. And, as already argued a century ago, ‘in the field of cognate languages, classification is but a “modification” of the history of a language’, since ‘eo ipso the history of language turns into a genetic classification’, or, as postulated in a more recent study, ‘the establishment of valid hypotheses concerning genetic relationships among languages is a necessary preliminary to the systematic reconstruction of their historical development’. The Ethiopian language area is sometimes mentioned as especially convenient for the comparativist. Indeed, ‘the field is inexhaustible and exceptionally fascinating’, as it comprises a rich variety of languages, dialects and ‘sub-dialects’’, Semitic and non-Semitic, spoken side by side in adjacent regions and at various substrata. However, such a linguistic situation is not necessarily favourable for applying the genealogical-comparative method, especially as regards interrelations between close, and rather fragmented, dialects.

Tout récemment M. M. J. Kister, Professeur à l'Université de Jérusalem, a eu l'amabilité de se pencher sur les Maghāzī rasūl Allāh de Wahb b. Munabbih que nous avions publiées ensemble avec ‘La légende du roi David’ attribuée au même auteur. Nous tenons à le remercier ici vivement pour l'intérêt qu'il leur a porté. S'il nous est permis de prendre à cet endroit position vis-à-vis de ses observations, c'est tout simplement dans l'intention de montrer l'idée de base qui a dirigé l'édition des deux papyrus et qui a amené des divergences de point de vue inévitables, et non point de répondre à tout prix à un collègue que nous n'avons pas eu l'honneur de connaître personnellement, et pour lequel nous avons la plus haute considération.

Before he set off on his fatal Persian expedition Julian appears to have issued certain instructions about the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. Whether the initiative for this came from the Jewish community, or was from the emperor himself, is unclear, the sources being as divided on this point as they are on the exact nature of the events that brought the work to a halt. According to Ammianus Marcellinus, the one pagan account that survives,

‘… magnitudine operum gestiens propagare, ambitiosum quondam apud Hierosolymam templum, quod post multa et interneciva certamina, obsidiente Vespasiano, posteaque Tito, aegre est expugnatum, instaurare sumptibus cogitabat immodicis, negotiumque maturandum Alypio dederat Antiochensi, qui olim Britannias curaverat pro praefectis. cum itaque rei idem fortiter instaret Alypius, iuvaretque provinciae rector, metuendi globi flammarum prope fundamenta crebris assultibus erumpentes, fecere locum exustis aliquotiens operantibus inaccessum, hocque modo elemento destinatius repellente, cessavit inceptum’.

Parmi la trentaine de manuscrits ou de fragments turcs en écriture ouïgoure provenant de la célèbre grotte de Touen-houang dont je prépare l'édition, il y en a deux, sans doute du Xe siècle, écrits à coup sûr par des habitants de Khotan. Il s'agit dans un cas d'une lettre à propos d'événements survenus ‘ici à Khotan’, et, dans l'autre, d'une série de notations écrites à Cha-tcheou (Touen-houang) au dos d'un rouleau de sûtra chinois par un envoyé de ‘l'État d'Or’ (altun el), expression désignant Khotan, bien attestée dans les manuscrits khotanais de Touen-houang.

Tales of the Prophets, in prose and verse, are a well-marked genre in Arabic literature. These productions were designed for a popular audience of mixed character, not solely for the intellectual élite. Side by side with the literary manifestations of the genre, there was a long tradition of oral recitations on these themes by professional quṣṣāṣ, which range along with popular epics like the Sīrat 'Antar, etc. All these have a ‘Homeric’ quality, in that while there was a rough approximation to an ‘established’ text, no one author can be pinned down; they are the end-product of innumerable recitations over the centuries, each of which may have contributed something to them. Recorded specimens of this folk-literature are scanty, and are difficult to assess linguistically, since the Arabic script is extremely ill-adapted for recording non-literary language, and the mere attempt at recording it in writing imposes a deceptive veneer of ‘classicism’ on its appearance. A piece in verse is therefore particularly valuable, because the metrical structure reveals a good deal about how it was read.

The following study contains a translation of al-Bīrūnī's rendering into Arabic of the second chapter of Patañjali's Yogasūtra cum commentary. (On this point see our translation of al-Bīrūnī's rendering of the first chapter of Patañjali's Yogasūtra.) This translation is based on Ritter's edition of the Arabic text. Comparison has been made with the unique MS of Ritter's text: Köprülü, 1589, folios 412a–419a (written on the margins). We have also compared the text with parallel passages and expressions in al-Bīrūnī's India. In some cases the passages in India are identical, while in others they show differences. Sometimes these differences are merely stylistic. In other cases there is a doctrinal divergence.

Despite countless discussions, the date of Zoroaster remains a controversial problem. This is due to the fact that the testimony of the available sources is meagre, conflicting, and often ambiguous, for these are based on traditions which were put into writing long after the prophet is supposed to have lived, and contain both fictitious elements and the rationalizations of ancient savants. Of these traditions, the one now most widely accepted in the West is that which counts ‘258 years from Zoroaster till Alexander’. Formerly a number of distinguished scholars—among them Windischmann, Tiele, Geiger, Oldenberg, Bartholomae, Meyer, and Christensen—questioned the credibility of this tradition, arguing with cogent reasons that Zoroaster must be placed much earlier, probably at about 1000 b.c. In the second quarter of the present century, however, the late date gained credence, mainly on the ground that a precise figure transmitted by a people well known for their veracity must be based on historical facts. For a time this view almost came to prevail, primarily because outstanding authorities—such as Herzfeld, Taqizadeh, and Henning—gave it their support. But more recently, arguments in favour of an earlier date have again been advanced by a number of scholars. Yet the main difficulty remains, which is to explain, in the words of T. Burrow, ‘how this precise figure (i.e. 258) came to be adopted’. The purpose of the present article is to offer a solution to that problem, and to trace an older Iranian tradition that Zoroaster lived before 1000 b.c.

Bi-polarity is the use of the same term to denote both speaker and addressee. It is possible to distinguish broadly three types of bi-polar term in Kuwaiti Arabic (KA). The first type is characterized in form by the use of the monolexic kin-terms: /yuba/ ‘father’, /yumma/ ‘mother’, /yaddi/ ‘grandfather’, /yadda/ ‘grandmother’. The second type consists of the vocative particle /ya/ + the KA kin-term for brother /?ax/ + 2nd person pronominal suffix. The third type of KA bi-polar term consists of the joining word /wa/ ‘and’ + the personal pronoun /ana/ ‘I’ + one of the monolexic kin-terms + 2nd person pronominal suffix. In this paper a comparison is made between these three types of bi-polarity exploring the relationship between their respective forms and functions.

The considerable size of the Ādi Granth, the varied authorship of its contents, and their arrangement within the volume to suit the requirements of liturgical performance rather than those of scholarly perusal, all these may be accounted factors to be held responsible for delaying, until quite recently, its critical analysis. Certainly the delay was not warranted by the intrinsic importance of the Ādi Granth (AG), which derives primarily from its status as the living scripture of the Sikhs, secondarily from the authenticity of the transmission of its text which this status has helped to secure since its compilation by Gurū Arjan in 1604.

The question as to how many individuals in one of the religious communities of ancient and modern India at a given historical moment understood all the meanings and implications of their traditional ritual symbolism may to a considerable extent be irrelevant, but the relation between religious practice and the philosophical or theological doctrines underlying it is of outstanding interest. Whereas we are, as far as this relation between thought and practice in Vedic religion is concerned, placed in favourable circumstances because the Brāhmaṇas explaining the thought solve many problems arising from a study of the sūtras describing the ritual acts, ritual texts compiled in the Hindu period, and even those which originated in the centuries of transition, often force us to apply modified methods of investigating these connexions. A special importance attaches to those documents, which, from one point of view that is often shared by the indigenous tradition, may be regarded as late representatives of Vedism, and from another as early products of Hinduism characterized by the prominence of other gods and the appearance of other cults. Among these texts those issuing from the religious community of the Vaikhānasas, which, as a small but important group, continues to exist in the South of India, are of special interest because they embody the tradition of a society of Indian devotees which at first constituted a Vedic school belonging to the Taittirīya branch of the Black Yajurveda, and in the transitional period and the centuries after came to transform itself into a community of devout worshippers of Viṣṇu.

Italy in the late fifth century a.d. and Persia in the mid-thirteenth were lands of ancient and deeply-rooted culture. One had been at the centre of the western Roman Empire; the other had formed a significant part of the society of medieval Islam, and its traditions stretched back further still. Both lands found themselves invaded, conquered, and ruled by wandering ‘barbarians’, Ostrogoths and Mongols respectively, from beyond the then recognized frontiers of ‘civilization’.

The late Dr. Mont Follick was a Labour Member of Parliament in the first post-war House of Commons and a dedicated advocate of spelling reform. I vividly remember a vigorous parliamentary debate, initiated by Mont Follick and supported, outside the House, by Bernard Shaw, which ranged widely over the field of spelling reform. When Mont Follick died, he left a generous bequest to the University of Manchester for the endowment of a chair whose occupant would concern himself with matters of spelling improvement and rationalization. The committee appointed by the Manchester University Senate to study this offer and its academic implications had many interesting and enjoyable discussions, and we eventually emerged with a proposal, accepted by the Mont Follick trustees, for the establishment of a chair of Comparative Philology with special responsibility for studies of graphic and phonemic representation (or some such formula). After exhaustive inquiries we appointed William Haas to this chair in 1963, and his subsequent activities and publications have shown that this was a singularly felicitous choice and a wellnigh ideal appointment.

As was pointed out in the ‘Addenda’ (by A. H. Francke, assisted by W. Simon) to the 1929 reprint of Jäschke's Tibetan grammar (pp. 120–1), we observe an alternation of final vowel with final dental nasal or plosive in a number of closely related words. The examples adduced show sometimes a tripartite scheme, a final vowel in the case of verbs, a dental nasal in the case of adjectives, and a dental (voiced) plosive in the case of nouns, as e.g. dro-ba ‘to be warm’, dron-po (or -mo) ‘warm’, and drod ‘heat’. A bipartite pattern, which is in fact more frequent, has also been observed and illustrated by a few examples, such as za-ba ‘to eat’ and zan ‘food’.

There exists a considerable body of scholarly literature on the contributions of the Jesuit missionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the knowledge of geography in China. Much of this literature is centred around the world maps of Matteo Ricci. Studies have been made on the different editions of these maps, on the sources of information (both European and Chinese) that Ricci must have used, on the reception by the Chinese literati of Ricci's time of the maps and the world-view represented by them, and on the possible influence of Renaissance cartography on Chinese map-making. Writers differ on the importance and utility of these maps and their influence.

Avatāra, or the periodical incarnation of the deity, is a cardinal doctrine of the Vaiṣṇava sect of Brahmanical Hinduism. The increasing number of the avatāras is an indication of the popularity of this doctrine both among the theologians and among the devout laity. The modest list of three (Varāha, Kūrma, and Matsya) of the Brāhmaṇa literature grows into a list of 10 traditional avatāras (Matsya, Kūrma, Varāha, Nṛsiṃha, Vāmana, Paraśurāma, Rāma, Kṛṣṇa, Buddha, and Kalkin) in the Mahābhārata, and ends up in a still longer list of 22 in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa. The latter has in its inflated list quite a few ‘minor’ (aṃśa) avatāras, mostly consisting of names of great sages renowned for their austerities and learning, e.g. Nārada, Nara, Nārāyaṇa, Kapila, Dattātreya, Ṛṣabha, and Veda-Vyāsa.

In 1961, the late Reverend Antoine Mostaert (1881–1971) published a fairly long document, namely the announcement to the Mongols of the Banner Otoγ of the death of the Emperor and the Empress Dowager in the winter of 1908, and a number of regulations for the required period of official mourning (‘Annonce de la mort de l'Empereur Te-tsoung et de l'Impératrice douairière Ts'eu-hi aux Mongols de la bannière d'Otoγ (Ordos)’, in Herbert Franke (ed.), Studia Sino-Altaica: Festschrift für Erich Haenisch zum 80. Geburtstag, Wiesbaden, 1961, 140–55).

The notebooks of the late Antoine Mostaert (BSOAS, XL, 2, 1977, 338) contain two documents from Otoγ banner in Ordos, from 1907 and 1921 respectively, on the necessity of having border guards in order to prevent banditry. The letter of 1907 mentions an act of banditry committed by a group of Chinese Muslims. How frequent such crimes were around 1907, I do not know; but with regard to the ‘commission’ of 1921, the reader should know that the early 1920's were extremely turbulent years in Otoγ: as the result of a number of murders committed there, Mongols fought among themselves and at the same time had to face repeated irruptions of Chinese bandits and soldiers often more likely to behave like bandits than like upholders of the law. In a forthcoming paper, I hope to publish a number of documents relative to those murder cases and the impact they had on the daily lives of the people. In the meantime these two documents on the formation of border guards may be of some interest.

The notebooks of the late Reverend Antoine Mostaert (1881–1971) contain five documents relating to salt production in the Banner of Otoγ, South Ordos: they appear in notebook 11 (Otoγ) as NT. 46 (May 1920), Nr. 61 (October 1921), Nr. 62 (1886), Nr. 67 (no date), and Nr. 68 (1921, no month or day). These texts are in transcription, evidently copied from originals kept at the Banner administration. Although Fr. Mostaert is mentioned in one of the documents, none was addressed to him, so we cannot assume that the archives of the church of Boro-Balγasuna possessed copies of these documents, unless somebody had copied them from the originals.