The amirate of Mecca was established by sharifs of Hasanid ancestry in the middle of the fourth century a. h./tenth century a.d. The territory traditionally under its direct control included the holy city of Mecca and its immediate hinterland, the nearby hill town of Ṭā'if, and the Red Sea port of Jedda. In addition, the sharifs often exercised a tenuous hold over certain tribal areas in the Sarāt Mountains south of Ṭa'if, as well as the coastal plain south of Jedda, known as the Tihāma.

Part 1 of this paper was concerned principally with the various problems that confront any attempt to provide a satisfactory transcription of these two examples. Given the nature of the difficulties encountered, it is clear that any generalizations we might wish to derive from them can only be tentative and provisional. Nevertheless, the paucity of comparable material, which on the one hand renders the interpretative hurdles all the more difficult to surmount, on the other makes the urge to draw at least some conclusions from the material provided by ‘Abd al-Qādir al-Marāghī and Binā'ī well-nigh irresistible. Such conclusions would involve, essentially, an assessment of the extent to which their notations shed light on the musical practice of the period and provide reliable evidence for the history of composition and styles of textsetting. But in any evaluation of this nature it is essential to avoid the temptation to confuse the sources with the speculative editorial interventions that produce the versions presented in part 1 (exs. 26–8 and 30). The area about which least can be said with regard to the naqsh notated by Binā'ī is, therefore, the nature of the text-setting, while with regard to ‘Abd al-Qādir al-Marāghī's notations it is, rather, the first topic we may consider, the relationship between melody and the underlying articulation of the rhythmic cycle.

As a serious subject of scholarly investigation modern Middle Eastern history is very young. It was only 50 years ago that the subject began to be studied by historians who were adequately equipped for the work. Its subsequent rapid progress to the position of respectability which it now occupies within the discipline of history owes much to the work of a handful of scholars among whom Albert Hourani and Elie Kedourie were especially conspicuous. The deaths of these two notable historians should not pass without an acknowledgement of the debt which we owe them and an appreciation of their contribution to the happy revolution in the branch of history which they adorned.

The Nachlass of Olaf Hansen, which I was able to examine in Kiel in 1985 through the kindness of his son Lars Hansen, includes transcriptions of several Christian Sogdian texts of which neither the original manuscript nor even a photograph seems to be extant. In such cases Hansen's transcriptions attain the status of primary sources. Amongst them are four fragments belonging to two different manuscripts of the Life of Serapion, the Syriac text of which was published by Bedjan, AMS v, 263–341.

One of the places that plays a role in a number of myths and legends that survive from ancient China is the place called K'ung-sang , Hollow Mulberry. Confucius is said to have been born in a place called K'ung-sang, and Yi Yin, the man who served as chief minister to T'ang, founder of the Shang or Yin dynasty (traditional reign dates, 1766–1753 b.c.) was born in an actual hollow mulberry tree. By force of the Confucius connexion, commentaries often identify K'ung-sang as a place in the state of Lu, if not precisely Ch'ü-fu, the home town of Confucius. But K'ung-sang is located and identified in a number of ways in early texts: it is a mountain in the North or the East; it is a place that is being attacked by a demon; it is the capital of various Ti (emperors or gods); and in one source at least, it is the name of a musical instrument, a zither (se).

The small, oil-rich state of Brunei (population c. 40,000 in 1940) is situated in north-west Borneo. The ‘Abode of Peace’ became a British protectorate in 1888 and a Residential System along Malayan lines came into operation at the beginning of 1906. For most of the Second World War the country was under Japanese Military Administration, a period of three and a half years beginning in December 1941. Allied, predominantly Australian, landings took place in early June 1945 (Fahey 1992: 325–8; Monks 1992: 7–53) and the sultanate was speedily cleared of enemy forces, though not before the latter had successfully executed a scorched-earth programme. Most crucially of all, the Seria oilfield (discovered in 1929 by the Shell company) was set alight, the flames shooting ‘like giant blow-lamps’ at least thirty feet into the air. The last well fire was not extinguished until 27 September 1945 (Harper 1975: 21–4). A report in the Straits Times of 20 July 1946 gives some impression of the problems faced by the returning Western engineers:

Most of the [Seria] wells were surrounded by blazing lakes, and the oil experts had to blast their way through. Because of the intense heat it was difficult to get near enough to ‘cap’ them and so seal the fires. In some cases aircraft were used, the fire-fighters advancing through the slipstream of the propellers which blew the flames and oil back. It then became possible to get near enough to thrust forward on long steel arms heavy charges of explosives.

Among the Dunhuang Tibetan texts held by the India Office Collection of the British Library is a very large scroll, catalogued as Ch. 9.II.17, and long recognized as a compendium of Tibeto-Chinese transcriptional texts. Following the practice of Walter Simon (1958), this document is now conventionally called the ‘Long Scroll’. In earlier years several small portions of it were identified by Simon and others, but more recently Professor Tokio Takata has published a transcription of the entire text and reconstructed or identified almost all of it (Takata, 1993). Nevertheless, there remain portions of the manuscript which have not yet been restored, and these present a continuing challenge to those interested both in the Long Scroll and in Tibeto-Chinese transcriptions in general. The purpose of the present paper is to fill two such lacunae.