Aramaic possesses, besides the ordinary (active) participles, certain additional forms of a similar meaning, mainly appearing in substantival use and commonly called nomina agentis. As far as the so-called derived stems of the verb are concerned, these nomina agentis are formed from the participle of each verbal stem through the addition of the ending-ān. In the basic stem of the verb, the ordinary participle of which has the form qātil (qātel), the nomen agentis appears as qātōl.

Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī concluded his celebrated Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī with a string of aphorisms purporting to be ‘a chapter from the utterances of Plato of profit to the generality of men: namely, the testament that he gave to his pupil Aristotle’. In his recent admirable translation, Professor G. M. Wickens comments that ‘the aphorisms in this Section are of course not necessarily regarded as coming from one Platonic corpus: even Ṭūsī uses the term mansūb, with its suggestion of doubt. They will be recognized to have many parallels and resemblances over a wide area of time and space, but their Muslim clothing is worn with an air of comfortable familiarity’. In point of fact, as will be demonstrated in this paper, the entire section is a reasonably close translation of a section occurring in the so-called al-Ḥihmat al-khālida of Ibn Miskawaih.

The Persian land reform, both in its successes and failures, has lessons for other developing countries, not least Ethiopia. There are many similarities between the two countries. But there are also differences. Both are monarchies, and in both the head of state plays a key role in the government of the country. The Ethiopians and the Persians are both an ancient and proud people. Ethiopia and Iran are both enormous countries with a low population density. Both are characterized by immense variety, climatically, physically, in the different peoples which inhabit the country, and in their social structure. Both have frontier provinces with a population the same on both sides of the border. In both control by the central government of the outlying areas is fairly recent. Their land tenure systems have some resemblances, but that of Ethiopia is much more complex. Farming in both until recent times was mainly subsistence farming. Both have, on the whole, a robust and hard-working peasantry. Both have a large semi-nomadic population as well as a settled population. In both the vast majority of the population derive their livelihood from the land. Both have problems of soil erosion. Drought is common to both. But Ethiopia is much more favourably situated than Iran in these two respects: it has a much higher rainfall over most of the country and, on the whole, better soil conditions. But here perhaps the similarities end.

This essay takes for granted articles in the Encyclopaedia of Islam and papers by D. B. Macdonald and W. E. Calverley but a brief summary may be allowed. Nafs and rūh were used loosely to mean almost anything connected with life, but acquired new meanings as the years went by. Men differed about the nature and activity of all three constituents of man. ‘Soul’ is almost the equivalent of nafs in its precise sense though it may be hard at times to decide if ‘self’ is not more appropriate. It is easier to admit the existence of soul than to define it for it has neither genus nor proprium; any definition is imperfect and any description inadequate. It is part of the world soul as intellect is part of the world intellect, it is part of the spirit of God, torn off by the instrumentality of intellect, it is simple, incorruptible, and unchangeable. Many were the suggestions; it is a compound of constituents (rukn), union of elements('unsur), a self-moving accident, hot spirit, a nature in perpetual motion. It is a living substance(jawhar) but is not in the body in the same way as rūh is. Another idea is close to a Jewish view that all souls are one and are made different by the influences of the spheres and stars through or by which they pass on their journey to earth. The threefold division of soul into vegetal, animal, and rational was known and may have something to do with the religious division into the soul at rest in faith, the censorious soul, and the lusting soul. Instead of censorious the meaning ‘changeable’ is also given.8 A variant is that a believer has three souls while a hypocrite and an unbeliever have each one.

Eugen Mittwoch, the distinguished orientalist, died in London in 1942 at the age of 66. His writings, particularly in the field of Ethiopian languages, have retained their value and importance even at a time when much progress has been made in this branch of studies.

There is no need to explain what I mean by “Biblical Hebrew” (BH): I refer, of course, to the language of the major part of the Old Testament (OT) which is written in a Canaanite tongue clearly distinguished from the few chapters in Daniel and Ezra which are composed, or at any rate extant, in Aramaic. While we have no knowledge of the precise nature of the language spoken by the Hebrew immigrants into Canaan, it is likely that from a linguistic point of view the OT owes more to the vanquished Canaanites than to the conquering Hebrews. The latter are called 'iḇrīm already in the Patriarchal narratives (Gen. xiv, 13, xl, 15, etc.), but their language ('iḇrīṯ) is never as such mentioned in the OT. This may, of course, be owing to one of those purely fortuitous circumstances in the transmission of the ancient Hebrew vocabulary with which this paper is in part concerned. Whether yәhūḏīṯ ‘Jewish’ (2 Kings xviii, 26, Isa. xxxvi, 11, etc.), śәṗaṯ kәna'an ‘the language of Canaaan’ (Isa. xix, 18), and 'iḇrīṯ ‘Hebrew’ (first attested in the prologue to Ben Sira) are wholly identical is—as I have endeavoured to show elsewhere—not fully established.

This article is an attempt to assemble and reassess the evidence relating to the problems of land tenure in the Middle Assyrian period, and to show that all ‘private’ land was normally held as a concession from the crown in return for the performance of ilku obligations. The subjects are treated in five main sections:

1: ilku and military service (pp. 496–502)

2: the Middle Assyrian laws, tablet A, § 45 (pp. 502–8)

3: allocation of tenures by the crown (pp. 508–12).

4: evidence from the land sale documents (pp. 512–17)

5: conclusions (pp. 517–19)

Hebrew grammarians use the terms tō'ar, tō'ar haššem, and šēm hattō'ar to translate the Arabic

The following is an account of the spoken Arabic of Mecca. The present work does not attempt a comprehensive description but is confined to the phonology of the syllable and the morphology of the verb and affixes; such a study is perhaps the most economical way of showing the character of the dialect and its relation to other dialects. My thanks are due to Mr. M. H. Bakalla, a post-graduate student of this school and a native of Mecca, for his constant help in the preparation of this article.

This fourth article brings us to the end of a preliminary survey of the main chapter (six-sevenths by length of what survives) of Das chwaresmische Sprach-material einer Handschrift der ‘Muqaddimat al-adab’von Zamaxsari, as it is presented in the edition of Johannes Benzing. Notice is no longer taken of the underpointed spellings of words which have been met frequently before, of the type b'rwzd for p-, ǰrm for č-, etc., and in the first instance only the more debatable transliterations of the Xw. glosses are discussed. We take up the tale at Muq., 439, Benzing's p. 316.

One of the several branches of Islamic law in which practice diverged most sharply from theory was the law of commerce. The divergence is especially striking in two respects: regular imposition of taxes regarded by the shariī‘a as illegal, and reliance upon written documents as legal proof of transactions for which juridical theory demanded only oral evidence of witnesses. A third problematical aspect of commercial law was the juridical status of the non-Muslim merchant in Dār al-Islām. Matters pertaining thereto were loosely subsumed by the jurists under the term amān, associated specifically with the law of war, and defined by recourse to as much precedent as could be gleaned from the Qur'ān and from the example of the Prophet and of the earliest Muslim communities. The consequences of this procedure have posed several historical problems upon which it is hoped the present paper will throw some light.

One of the outstanding examples of the degeneration of the Ottoman administration in Palestine in the eighteenth century was the situation in the military field. Army units were stationed permanently in those towns which were important to the Ottoman régime. The locations had been determined in the very early stages of the Ottoman conquest, but the same criteria were still being applied in the eighteenth century, without being re-examined. This does not mean that the system was entirely inflexible: army units were brought to man those new strongholds (Haifa, Jaffa) which the supreme authorities decided to establish in order to strengthen the security network. But it appears, as these examples show, that this was done mainly in the coastal towns. It was there that the Ottoman régime felt itself to be exposed to the greatest danger, since it was, in one way or another, threatened by the uncertain whims of the Christian pirates. It should be noted that from the objective point of view their fears were greatly exaggerated, if not unfounded, in the eighteenth century, since the pirates did not even try to expand their activities beyond the harassment of merchant ships sailing along the coast. But according to the Weltanschauung of the Ottoman rulers this constituted a grave threat to the Muslim state. When the construction of these strongholds was ordered an additional reason for their establishment was given: the need to prevent Bedouin attacks. There was a certain amount of truth in this story but, again, it should be regarded in correct perspective: the Sublime Porte recognized the need to curb the Bedouin raids which constituted an acute problem in the eighteenth century. But if this had been the main reason it would have been necessary to establish new strongholds, or strengthen existing ones, in inland regions and on the border of the desert rather than in Haifa or Jaffa. This was not done since the Bedouin were, after all, Muslims, and according to the concepts of the Ottoman régime, could not seriously threaten the existence of the empire, at least not to the same extent as the Christian infidels. In retrospect we see that the damage which the Bedouin wrought to the Ottoman state in this period was undoubtedly greater than that caused by the Christian pirates; but, as has been stated, this was not recognized at the time.

The development of the cerebral or retroflex series (ṭ ṭh ḍ ḍh ṇ ḷ ṣ)in Old Indo-Aryan is a complicated phenomenon to which many factors have contributed, and a full and satisfactory account of it is yet to be produced. One of the factors involved is that of spontaneous cerebralization, by which original dentals become cerebrals without the presence of any predisposing influence. This phenomenon has always been recognized to some extent but its full extent and significance have only recently come to be recognized.

In the first part of this study ‘framing’ bāj have been considered in connexion with religious rituals celebrated in the fire-temples, and with acts for achieving or maintaining ritual purity, mostly by pāw-mahal priests. Here it is proposed to consider such bāj as are needed and used in daily life.

Li Ho (791–817), one of the most original of Chinese poets, and a key influence in the development of late T'ang poetry, has attracted increasing attention in recent years. It is therefore a pleasure to welcome the appearance of a full-scale study by such a well-equipped scholar as Dr. J. D. Frodsham. His qualifications for the task are quite exceptional; already well known for his work on pre-T'ang poets, he uses the Japanese as well as the Chinese authorities, loves poetry for its own sake, and is familiar with Western literature and literary criticism. It is refreshing to read a book on a Chinese poet which instead of repeating the traditional judgements approaches his work from an independent and modern angle and with post-Empsonian critical tools. Substantial selections from Li Ho's poems have appeared in English before (a fact which Frodsham nowhere mentions), in Robert Payne's White pony, the Poems of solitude of Jerome Ch'en and Michael Bullock, and my own Poems of the late T'ang. But the present collection covers, with detailed annotation, all the 243 poems attributed to Li Ho, in versions which convey the floridity and satirical liveliness of the lighter pieces more effectively than the sombre power of the major poems. Since the Chinese text is notoriously difficult reading, even specialists in T'ang poetry will find their way about in the collected poems more comfortably with Frodsham's assistance. It is symptomatic of the special fascination of Li Ho for Western readers that a poet unrepresented in the ‘300 T'ang poems’ should be one of the first to be honoured by complete translation into English.

In two previous articles, pp. 60–218 of Johannes Benzing's edition of Das chwaresmische Sprachmaterial einer Handschrift der ‘Muqaddimat al-adab’ von Zamaxśarī have been subjected to a close scrutiny. Benzing's work, a combined cornucopia and Pandora's box, holds the seeds of a number of tares which it is my endeavour to remove, before they nourish, from among the good seed of the certain or possible items of Khwarezmian glossary to be reaped from the Muq. The ultimate publication of a full glossary will provide the opportunity to grade the whole harvest, but meanwhile it seems useful to provide a commentary on the existing publication.

The word bāj (older wāj) has been an important part of Zoroastrian religious vocabulary from at least Sasanian times; and the act of ‘taking the bāj ‘is so general and significant that in a Jewish-Persian text the Zoroastrians are distinguished thereby from those of other faiths: gabragān abā bāj-stānš ān ‘the Zoroastrians with their taking the bāj ‘.1 Down the centuries the word has acquired additional meanings; but the range of its usages in older times was already so wide that E. W. West, working on the Pahlavi texts, applied for an interpretation of them to Tehmuras D. Anklesaria. This Anklesaria admirably provided, in a letter which he himself subsequently published among the appendixes to the Gujarati translation of the first part of the Dādestdn ī dīnīg, made by him in collaboration with S. D. Bharucha.2 This was the pioneer treatment of the term.

As a preliminary, merely, to the long task of compiling a dictionary of ‘Islamic’ Khwarezmian, it is my purpose here to scotch as many as possible of the ghost-words and misunderstandings which mar the otherwise useful publication Das chwaresmischeSprachmaterial einer Handschrift der ‘Muqaddimat al-adab’ von Zamaxšarī, by J. Benzing. A beginning has been made, dealing with more than 150 such errors in the first 70 pp. of the chapter ‘Verbs’ (Benzing, 60–129 = his ‘Zm’, better Muq., 73–199). I continue here in the same vein, i.e. by dealing only with debatable entries in the ensuing pages (130–218 = Muq., 199–344).

In 1853, Heinrich Barth visited Timbuktu, and ‘was so successful as to have an opportunity of pursuing a complete history of the Kingdom of Songhay. … These annals, according to the universal statement of the learned people of Negroland, were written by a distinguished person of the name of Ahmed Baba’. With this chronicle at his disposal, Barth was able, for the first time, to present a meaningful outline of the history of the Songhay empire. Circumstances prevented Barth bringing back a complete copy of the manuscript. In the 1890's, however, following the French occupation, three manuscripts of that chronicle reached Paris, to be edited by 0. Houdas and E. Benoist, translated by Houdas, and published in 1898–1900. Houdas proved that this chronicle, Ta'rīkh al-Sūdān, had been written not by Ahmad Bābā; but by another scholar of Timbuktu, ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Sa'dī, born in 1596. The chronicle ends in 1655, which may be taken as the date of its completion.