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’.

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’.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

Cette description se fonde sur des observations faites en plusieurs points du Territoire français des Afars et des Issas (Goda, Mabla, ‘Àlta, Gamàrri notamment), de 1973 à 1975, et sur le témoignage d'informateurs originaires, pour certains, de l'Àwsa. Ceux-ci nous ont permis d'acquérir la certitude qu'un même dialecte était parlé dans la zone comprise entre le delta lacustre de l'Awash (Kalo) et le golfe de Tadjoura. Il semble aussi que l'afar méridional s'étende en amont même de Ba'àdu et jusqu'au piémont éthiopien, (Dòk'a, Dawwe et Awra); d'autre part, il est attesté au nord, à Baylūl, mouillage au delà duquel commence l'afar septentrional. Si nous n'avons pu encore enquêter personnellement dans ces régions, la classification proposée par Mahafly nous paraît toutefois approximative. Il est hasardeux d'isoler l'Awsa des régions côtières. De nombreux faits historiques (comme en témoignent les traditions orales) et sociologiques fournissent la preuve du contraire. Les tribus ‘asayammàra établies au nord et à l'ouest du Territoire français atteignent le Kalo au cours de leurs migrations saisonnières. Les Debne de la plaine du Gōba'ad, en transhumant par Anḍaḍkàlu au sud du lac Abḥe, touchent le pays gal'êla qui, au début de ce siècle, s'étendait à la majeure partie du Gōba'ad. De plus, les famines, les affaires de sang ont souvent été jusqu'à un passé récent à l'origine de l'exode de tout ou partie d'un groupe tribal. Les guerres pour la conquête de la vallée de l'Awash ont également opéré des bouleversements démographiques importants. Le déplacement vers l'ouest des Mōdayto ou des Badoyta-m mēla en est une illustration. On pourrait aussi mentionner les relations commerciales, occasions d'une dissémination de plusieurs tribus spécialisées dans les opérations de transit, tels les Ḥasōba que l'on retrouve tout au long d'une piste caravanière allant de Bāte à Ambabbo, près de Tadjoura.

In a recent issue of the Bulletin, Mr. Sims-Williams argued that in the Sogdian ‘Ancient letters’ the ideogram usually read 'R, found in the address formula, is to be read 'D. Mr. Sims-Williams's arguments were based on palaeographic and on inner Sogdian linguistic considerations. At first glance the Aramaist might be reluctant to accept this reading for the ideogram since in the address formula of letters in the Arsham correspondence, both the material published by G. R. Driver and that found earlier at Elephantine, and in later texts such as the Bar Kokhba letters, the standard form before the addressee is 'L ‘to’. The purpose of this note is to show that there is ample evidence for the interchange of 'D and 'L in both Aramaic and Hebrew to make the use of 'D for the more usual 'L in a branch of the Achaemenian chancery plausible and the use of 'D in the ‘Ancient letters’ probable.