In a recent brief survey in Biblische Notizen Pardee has defended the concept of an ‘epistolary perfect’ in Hebrew letters. In that survey he examined each of the usages of a ‘perfect’ verbal form (i.e. ‘suffix conjugation’ or qātat) in the extant corpus of Hebrew letters most of them extra-Biblical. Those forms which described completed acts prior to the writing of the letter were separated off from those which described aspects of the epistolary acts themselves such as ‘writing’ ‘sending’ and ‘commanding’ and the latter were termed ‘epistolary perfects’. In the present study we wish to examine the epistolary conventions observed in Ugaritic and in Akkadian. As in Pardee's previous study Ugaritic ‘perfect’ (qtt) forms and Akkadian preterite (iprus) and perfect (iptaras) forms will be examined in order to determine the conventions governing their usage in letters.

In has long been known that the chronological scheme commonly transmitted by the early Arabic sources for events of the latter half of the sixth century A.D. poses a number of major problems. These are sufficiently important to raise serious doubts about the reliability of the traditional chronological framework for the last years of the Jāhilīya in general. A key problem is that of the date for 'Ām al-fīl, the ‘Year of the Elephant’, so called after the expedition of Abraha into the Hijāz in that year. The early Arabic literary tradition does not specifically date this event: it simply maintains, first, that Muammad was born in the Year of the Elephant, and second, that he was summoned to act as God's Prophet at the age of forty. Considered together, the many reports to this effect imply―based on the prevailing view that the mab'ath is to be dated to approximately A.D. 610―that both the expedition of Abraha and the birth of Muhammad occurred in about A.D. 570.

Although the discovering of a complete Palestinian Targum in the Codex Vatican Neofiti 1 (N) erroneously marked in the spine as ‘ Targum Onkelos ’ was not of archaeological but merely archival nature, it was an event of major importance in Aramaic studies. Its announcement by the discoverer, Alejandro Diez Macho, a former student of P. E. Kahle, in Estudios Biblicos, 16, 1956, 446 ff., and Sefarad, 17, 1957, 119 ff., and especially the impressive voluminous publication by the same scholar, Neophyti 1 Targum Palestinense MS de la Biblioteca Vaticana (Madrid-Barcelona, I, Genesis, 1968; II, Exodo, 1970; III, Levitico 1971; IV, Numeros, 1974; v, Deuteronomio, 1978), provided with detailed scholarly introductions to each volume as well as translations of the edited text into Spanish (by the editor), French (by R. Le Déaut) and English (by M. McNamara and M. Maher), aroused great and justified enthusiasm among scholars. Meanwhile, a facsimile edition in 140 copies was published by Makor in Jerusalem (1970), which helped to clear up certain problems in Macho's edition (esp. the omission of the Hebrew lemmata at the beginning of each verse and errors obliterated by the copyists) deplored by David M. Golomb in his recently published thesis, A grammar of Targum Neofiti (p. 1 f.).

The period of the crusades of Theobald of Navarre and Richard of Cornwall is a critical one in the history of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. As a result of truces made by the crusaders with neighbouring Muslim princes the kingdom came to embrace, albeit briefly, an area more extensive than it had covered at any time since the losses inflicted by Saladin following his victory at Hattīn in 1187. And yet this triumph was but the prelude to an engagement at La Forbie (al-Harbiyya) in October 1244, which was as grave a catastrophe as Hattīn and from which the kingdom never recovered. Here the Frankish army was decimated by the Egyptians and their Khwarizmian allies, a new and brutal element in the politics of southern Syria; and most of the newly regained territory was lost within the next three years. In this paper I propose to examine the events of the years 1239–44 with a view to re-evaluating the military and diplomatic achievements of the crusades and to placing the disaster at La Forbie more securely in context.

The first comprehensive survey of Geniza documents about the trade on the route to India was published by me in Speculum, A Journal of the American Medieval Academy, 29, 181–97, in April 1954. At that time I was able to give a report about 130 Geniza papers related in one way or another to the India trade. Soon after the article was published, a distinguished institution offered me the opportunity to publish the material in full. I accepted with enthusiasm and set feverishly to work. But slowly it dawned upon me that one should not try to solve problems by sagacity at a time when new sources that could provide factual answers to those problems might lurk around the corner

It is now a century since the publication of Reinisch’s Chamirsprache, which has remained irtually the only source of information we have on this Agaw lanhuage to date. As a result of his acquaintance with a native speaker from Soqota(Säk’wät ’a), whist working in Massawa on his study of Bilin, the northernmost agaw language, Reinisch was able to collect enough information to mproduce a reasonable descripiton of the language. He himself neer had the opporunity to work on chamir in its home environment and was forced to curtail his studies of the language when his informant was obliged to leave Massawa. After the publication of Die Chamirsprache in 1884, no new information on the language until Conti Rossini’s brief description of Khamta was published in 1904, twenty years later. The dialect he recorded is material, though scanty, contains a number of very interesting features, both phonemis and morphological: for example, he cites the only known instance of prefix conjugating erds in Agaw outside Awngi, the southernmost and most divergent mermber of the group. Unfortunately his morphological description is all too cursory and does not permit a proper analysis of this highly idiosyncratic dialect. It may well be that Conti Rossini’s Khamta should be regarded as a separate language from Reinisch’ Chamie, or the Khamtanga dialect presented here. I shall have occasion to return briefly to this question below.

The elders of North-East Africa have long been renowned for their powers of memory on which their compatriots relied for genealogical lineages, rights of ownership, Procedures of law, marrige customs and the like. Literate of otherwise, they all for the most part imparted their accumulated knowledge by word of mouth. Unlike the griots of West Africa, however, quite a few made use of written documents, at least in the form of notes. These documents are different from and independent of the royal and ecclesiastical records which are well known to scholars. These are private papers intended for personal use and as such contain valuable, Uncensored, historical information. I realized how ubiquitous the practice was during my research travels in the various regions of the Ethiopian Empire during the years 1965–75. Whenever such an informant failed to recall a particular name, date of fact during an interview, of doubted the accuracy of the sequence of his narrative, he would quickly pull out his mnemonic aid from a box under his bed or would call for a family member to hand him the desired item. The mnemonic aid often consisted of scribbled scraps of paper, letters, Photographs, invitation cards to weddings of com memorative feasts. Some possessed thin school notebooks comprising sketches in Amareña, Tegreña of Arabic, sufficient to prompt the memory to produce a fluent narrative. The contents of such a notebook, and indeed a typical one of its kind, consitute the boby of the present article.

Of maimonides' (1135–1204) prinicpal philosophical work Dalā al-Hāirīn (More Nevuxim) four autograph fragments are known, each from a different Geniza collection:

The first discovery was made at the beginning of the century by H. Hirschfeld, Who identified two unjoined leaves in the Geniza collection of the University Library, Cambridge, and Published them, with photographs, in JQR, xv, 1902–3, 677–81 under the title: ‘The Arabic portion of the Cairo Geniza at Cambridgem IV. Two autograph fragments of Maimonides’ Dalālat al Ḥārin, These leaves cover Book I, chs. 64–65 and Book II, Chs.32–33

A folktale current among the inhabitants of Dayr al-Asad, a little village in Western Galiee on the Acre-Safad road, repors that in the early sixteenth century a Ṣufī shaykh named al-Asad was once travelling towards Safad, when he came upon some inhabitants of cha Christian village of al-Bi‘na, which then contained a monastery (dayr) and a Crusader church, and was insulted by them; moreover, while he was praying by the village spring, a lion (asad) appeared and devoured his donkey. Nething daunted, the shaykh put his saddle on the lion's back, mounted and galloped eastward until he suddenly found himself face to face with the Sulṭān Selīm I (or according to others, Süleymān ‘Qānūnī’), The sulṭān, to indemnify him for the insults of the Christians and in recognition of his courage and resourcefulness, permitted him to settle at Dayr al-Bi‘na. Some say that th shaykh returned to the village on the lion’s back after the sulṭān had expelled the Chrisians. Thereupon, so the story continues, Christian Dayr al-Bi‘na became Muslim Dayr al-Asad. The Christian Population established established a new settlement, called al-Bi‘na, about half a kilmetre south of Dayr al-Asad. There is today at al-Bi‘na a smal Christian minority, which in the opinion of the people of Dayr al-Asad originates from Dayr al-Bi‘na.

The simplest, irreducible part of the verb is the root, which carries the lexical information, and to which are suffixed markers of person, tense, mood, etc. Most verb roots end in a consonant, the commonest shapes being CVC- and CVCC-, but also VC- and VCC-: qal- ‘see’, wäš- ‘hear’, arq- ‘know’, abz- ‘finish’, mars'- ‘choose’, ward- ‘play’, aq- ‘be’, is'- ‘curse’, and so on. Dissyllabic roots are extremely rare in the material and almost all appear to be loans from Ethiopian Semitic: wływär- ‘throw’, färaq- ‘be wide’, mikwir- ‘try’, addin- ‘hunt’, tinfis- ‘breathe’; dissyllabic Agaw roots are is'aq- ‘send’, iqa- (also shortened to qa-)‘wash’. In addition there is a comparatively small number of roots with the shape CV-: xwa/t- ‘eat’, fi- ‘go out’, gwi- ‘get up, rise’, bi- ‘lack’, yi- ‘say’, and so on.

The existence of a tradition of bow-playing is recorded in some of the earlies written accounts of the Zulu people. Captain Gardiner in 1836 (pp. 104—5 and p1. 1) notes the presence of a gourd-resonated musical bow. It is not, however, clear which of the two Zulu gourd-resonated bows Gardiner encountered. He provides an illustration of a simple bow with undivided string and gourd resonator attached near the centre of the stave but does not note its name. the instrument would seem to be a cross between the Zulu ugubhu, a simple bow with undivided string, but with the gourd resonator attached near the lower end of the stave, and the Zulu umakhweyana, a simple bow with the gourd resonator attached near the centre of the stave, but in which the string is divided by means of a loop which is secured within the centrally-located resonator. Angas (1849:p. 111 and p1. 25) also seems to have confused the two instruments. Plate 25 is an illustration of a young man playing what appears to be the ugubhu (although the gourd resonator is situated higher up the stave than is usual), but the drawing in the text (p. 111) in explanation of plate 25 shows a young man playing the umakhweyana. Thus, while the ugubhu is generally regarded as the older and more authentically Zulu of the two instuments (the umakhweyana being thought to have been borrowed from the Tsonga of Mozambique around the turn of the nineteenth century), it is apparent that, from at least the time of the first documentation of the Zulu, both instruments were in current usage.

The name Tahkā is today remembered by archaeologists only as the provenance of the famous Gandhāra statue of Kuvera in the Lahore Museum (fig. 1:Lahore 3/G101). Little is now known concerning the site itself, its precise location, or whether any architecural remains are still visible on the ground. Yet a hundred years age, the area around Tahkāl contained the most prominent Gandhāra ruins in the immediate neighbourhood of Peshawar, attracting the attention of all interested visitors who came to the city. It is moreover possible to construct a clear picture of the remains from their contemporary descriptions and from the forgotten archaeological record of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, the recent rediscovery of Punjab Public works Department reports of the 1870s, printed in the Punjab Government Gazette, provides many details concerning the precise nature of two of the three major Buddhist structures in this area.

It is about three-quarters of a century since the maryannu (maryanni) of Mitanni and its dependencies, appearing in Hittite and Egyptian records of the second millennium B.C., were first discussed in connexion with the IndoIranians. In 1910 H. Winckler interpreted the word as a title belonging to Aryan infiltrators from the north, who had come to form an aristocracy among the Hurrians; and he recorded the suggestion by F. C. Andreas connecting it with Vedic márya ‘ young man, man, hero ’. Subsequently W. F. Albright presented a carefully documented case for considering the maryannu to be primarily ‘chariot-warriors’, arguing that from about 1700 to 1200 B.C. ‘chariots played the same role in warfare that cavalry did later, and the chariot-warriors occupied the same social position that was held by the⃛ feudal knights of the Middle Ages’. He further pointed out, with regard to Vedic márya, that a semantic development from ‘young man’ to ‘warrior’ is widely attested. Thereafter R. T. O'Callaghan adduced yet more evidence from Egyptian and cuneiform sources to confirm that ‘from the mid-fifteenth century to the midtwelfth century B.C., and from the Mitanni kingdom down through Palestine beyond Ascalon, the term maryannu is to be understood primarily as a noble who is a chariot-warrior’. The area was one where Indo-Aryan names occur at about the same period; and in the fourteenth-century Kikkuli treatise from Boghaz-köy, on the training of chariot-horses, Indo-Aryan technical terms appear. There were solid grounds therefore for thinking that Indo-Aryans, bringing with them horses from the Asian steppes, had played a leading part in developing chariotry in the Near East at that time, and that it was this which enabled a group of them to become locally dominant there.

Burushaski consists of two dialects spoken respectively in the Hunza and Nagir valleys (the dialect most usually called Burushaski; henceforward Bu.) and the Yasin valley (Wershikwar, henceforward Wk.) in the Northern Areas of Pakistani Kashmir. Although the language is genetically an isolate, it contains a considerable number of loans from the unrelated languages with which it is in contact, chiefly Indo-European (IE) Shina, Khowar and Dumaki, and Tibeto-Burman (TB) Balti. The chief sources for Burushaski have no difficulty in identifying loans from the former, but TB ones have by and large escaped notice or been disregarded. It is only Lorimer who deals with this question at any length, and even he relegates the data to an appendix in his dictionary because, he says (III, pp. vii-viii), of his limited knowledge of Tibetan. Therefore, the bulk of this article will discuss all the identifiable instances of TB loans in Burushaski in one particular area of vocabulary, namely, kin terms, as well as the possibility that the standard TB honorific prefix, a–, often attached to TB kin terms for elder kin, is present at least in Bu., in both loans and native material. Also discussed are a number of more problematic cases, as well as some that can only be understood as instances of common borrowing by both Burushaski and TB from IE. Finally, I list for convenience the undoubted IE loans among Burushaski kin terms, which will demand much less discussion in view of their identification already in Lorimer and Berger. The whole is intended as a preliminary to a further, somewhat longer, article I wish to publish discussing the whole Burushaski kinship terminology from a more semantic and anthropological point of view.

In this paper, I Would like to present a tentative analysis of cliti doubling in some African and creole languages. Consider, first, the case of Yoruba. Whenever a subject is cleft in Yoruba, a resumptive pronoun must be inserte in the position originally occupied by the cleft element. Clefting the subject of 3(a)yields 3 (b)or3(c).

On 6 December 1966, with Muhammad al-'Ubaydī, son of the naqīb of Shākir, as Leader of my escort, I went to Sūdah in Arhab, a Black lava Mountain, the place belonging to 'Iyāl al-Sihaym. We had passed by Jabal al-Riyām and Sirwā. The tomb of Sālih was on the north side, a domed building This tomb had, or used to have, 'ushūr, tithes paid to it. In the houses which were on the south side there was only one man, the rest ofthe villagers being women. The men were away at the war or perhaps employed in San‘ā’. Water was short here and I believe (though this is not in my notes) brought from quite some distance. Sūdah had the Look of a hungry place. Yet in the area there was much driwing on the rocks, some quite recent, including a Hebrew graffito which too had the appearance of being recently made, and it seems that Jews used at one time to Live here.

It has long been observed by Cushiticists that the prefix conjugation in various Semitic languages represents one of the major arguments for treating this language group as belonging to the Semitohamitic (Erythraic, Afroasiatic) language phylum. From Semitic and Berber we are acquainted with (at least) two different prefix conjugations, a short one and a long one. THe long from is found in Berber and in several Semitic languages, although there is no general agreement about this. With this in mind, we should be surprised if we could not find so-called long imperfect forms in Cushitic as well. A strong candidate would be the Beja present which nasalizes the second radical, which is lengthened in other languages. In this context, however, I should like, not to discuss the problem bearing on the verbal forms of North Cushitic, but rather to draw the attention of the compartive Semitohamiticist to some East Cushitic languages for which new material is now available. ITt seems convenient to limit this discussion to the Rendille and Boni languages which have recently become knownthrough the work of Bernd Heine (1975–76, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1982) and Hans-Jürgen Sasse (1979, 1980a, 1980b).

The subject of this communication is a letter in Thai (Siamese), dated the equivalent of 1777, to Francis Light who occupied the island of Penang as agent of the East India Company in 1786 and became its first Superintendent. Light had been a trader on the coast since about 1771 where he was particularly concerned with Kedah and with the island of Thalang (Salang)usually known to Europeans as Junk Ceylon. His sphere of activity extended westward to the ports of the Coromandel coast and to Bengal and eastward as for as Bangkok. At the date in question thecapital of Siam was at Thonburi on the west bank of the Chao Phya river before its transfer to its present site on the east bank in 1782. The whole area had long been konwn as Bankok or Bankok to foreign traders