Like many other religions, Zoroastrianism frequently restructured its priestly organization during its long history, largely because of the environmental changes to which it was exposed. A major shift in status – from being the state religion in the Sasanian Empire to holding only a minor position in the early Islamic period – challenged the Zoroastrian hierarchy of authority. The Abbasid state provided Zoroastrianism with an opportunity to initiate a new office, which was called hu-dēnān pēšōbāy “Leader of the Zoroastrians”. This article is the first to deal with this office in detail and scrutinizes the concept of leadership (pēšōbāyīh) in Sasanian and Abbasid Zoroastrianism. It sheds some light on the priestly structure of Zoroastrianism in this period and investigates the position of the office within the overall religious organization. It re-examines, moreover, evidence for the officiating Zoroastrian theologians in this office at the Abbasid court in Baghdad. Finally, it searches for the parallels between this office and that of the East-Syrian catholicos and the Jewish exilarch.

This article presents an examination of the parallelism between the Mishnah and Tosefta in one discourse unit – the halakhic give-and-take conversation. It aims to show that a description of discourse units found in both compilations can contribute to the discussion of the relationship between the two compilations and the status of the Tosefta in regard to Mishnah. In the examined corpus of halakhic give-and-take conversations from the Mishnah and Tosefta from three orders, for only 16 conversations in the Tosefta (14%) was there found a parallel conversation in the Mishnah, and in most cases the parallels are not identical. The structural and linguistic comparison between these 16 parallel conversations showed that the conversations in the Tosefta contain more exchanges as well as more complete exchanges, and that the language in the Tosefta seems less redacted and earlier compared with the language in the parallel conversations in the Mishnah.

The famous Moroccan traveller Muḥammad b. Baṭṭūṭa, who left Tangier in 1325, claims to have made a journey that took him across most of the then Islamicate world. The country in which he recounts having stayed the longest was India, where he says he remained from 1333 to 1341/1342, mostly in the Islamic Sultanate of Delhi. A long section of his Riḥla is dedicated to the sub-continent and modern historians of this region ascribe to it an important documentary value, although it has been argued that Ibn Baṭṭūṭa may have borrowed – not to imply copied – information from other sources in other parts of the work. As concerns India, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa speaks of two epidemics and one deadly disease that occurred in 1334–5 and 1344. Some scholars have referred to them as cholera, while others have suggested it was the plague – thus supporting the hypothesis that the medieval plague pandemic had struck India before reaching the Middle East. How did this confusion arise? What exactly does Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's Riḥla relate? Do Indo-Persian sources confirm these epidemics? Do they and/or Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's Riḥla allow us to discount the presence of the Medieval Plague in India, or rather do they assert it?

In order to answer these questions, this paper analyses the information on the Indian epidemics in Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's Riḥla and compares the text with its translations in the principal European languages and with Indo-Persian chronicles. These analyses reveal something of a lexical muddle which, in my opinion, has contributed to some errors and misunderstandings regarding the diseases in question. But another question arises: is it possible to read the information provided by Ibn Baṭṭūṭa and the Indian chronicles in a consilient way, that is, taking into account not only the analysis of written documents, but also the recent and current findings in genetics of plague, and in particular on the Black Death? Finally, an attempt is made to answer a question that has to be asked, particularly in light of the criticism often levelled at Ibn Baṭṭūṭa. Considering that in one of these events he claims to have witnessed the epidemic, is there any reason to suppose that he did not? Regarding the other two events that he did not claim to witness firsthand, is there any cause to doubt his claims?

This paper examines a pattern in Sanskrit literature, labelled for convenience the “eropolitical compound”. This is a formula whereby a male protagonist's claiming of a feminine figure is made instrumental to, or tied indissociably with, a political victory or reclamation of control over a public domain. This paper first reviews a number of examples of the motif in well-known works of drama, poetry, and eulogistic inscriptions largely of the fourth–seventh centuries ce, setting these against the particular historical and social contexts in which they occur. In a second step, the motif is identified at work in other genre and historic contexts of Sanskrit tradition, suggesting thereby that the figure also requires treatment at a broader level of analysis. The paper's third and final step is to adopt from Simone de Beauvoir the constructs of immanence, transcendence, and the woman as Other, in order to argue that the eropolitical compound is indeed a kind of formula or persisting theme that cuts across multiple historic and genre contexts, and that it should be seen as a normative construct reflecting and enacting a common strategy of patriarchal cultures.

This paper reviews the evidence and arguments for reconstructing a person–number agreement paradigm for the Proto-Trans-Himalayan (=Sino-Tibetan) verb, and assesses the counter-arguments which have been presented in the literature. We demonstrate the cognacy of verb agreement paradigms across the family, and show that there is no plausible subclassification of the family which would place all the attesting languages in a single branch of the family, and no case for a “Rung” branch. The agreement systems of Jinghpaw and Northern Naga and the archaic postverbal paradigms of South Central/Kuki-Chin are demonstrably cognate to those of Rgyalrongic and Kiranti, and these languages have no common ancestor more recent than PTH.

The paper surveys the distribution of the titles bcan po and khri in historical and non-historical documents of the Tibetan Empire. Their patterns of usage suggest the existence of strict rules that governed the bestowal of the titles within the royal family. In the second part of the paper a new chronology of succession to the throne in the Tibetan imperial dynasty is put forward, based not only on Tibetan imperial documents and post-imperial historiographical works but also on Chinese written sources.

With a view to the necessities as well as the possible problems of a document-based administration, this paper approaches the area of conflict between standardization and flexibility in the production of administrative documents in ancient China. Recently published sources from the imperial Qin period (221–207 bce) have provided the opportunity to compare administrative documents excavated at Liye with standards regulating their production. With the help of two case studies, the paper explores to what extent official document standards were implemented in everyday practice or purposefully neglected in ancient Qianling county. It also discusses which standards were followed more closely than others, and what might be the reasons behind this. Shedding light on the large grey zone between faithful adherence and complete neglect, the paper suggests that officials chose a pragmatic way influenced by both economic considerations informed by the local circumstances and the requirements imposed by the central government.