This article proposes that *Magas, capital city of the North Caucasian Kingdom of Alania, can be identified with the gorodishche (hillfort) of Il'ichevsk, in Krasnodar Krai in the modern Russian Federation. The Kingdom of Alania was the most powerful polity in the North Caucasus in the tenth and eleventh centuries; however, the location of its capital has never been satisfactorily established. This article reviews the evidence of written sources on *Magas – notably Masʿūdī, Juvayni, Rashid al-Din, and the Yuan-Shi – and identifies four criteria which can be used to identify the site of *Magas. These are its occupation between the tenth and thirteenth centuries; the influence of the Alan kings over it; its massive fortifications; and its capture by the Mongols in 1239–40. All of these features can be identified at Il'ichevsk, in contrast to previously proposed sites of *Magas.

Several works focusing on the complex figure of Solomon appeared between 1450 and 1580, each offering variations on the themes of empire-building, sedentarization, sacral kingship, and technological change.The Dürr-i Meknun, written around the time of the conquest of Constantinople, uses Solomon to illustrate the risks of urbanization, imperial hubris and potential tyranny. The second, the Süleyman-name by the technically inclined author Uzun Firdevsi, portrays Solomon in the image of Sultan Bayezid II. The prophet, using his bureaucratic capacities, enacts Ottoman dreams of control over the eastern Mediterranean. Finally, the accounts given of the deeds of Sultan Süleyman, notably the reconstruction of the Temple Mount and the construction of the Süleymaniye complex in Istanbul, show the Solomonic myth consciously enacted by the state itself. These sources trace a trajectory whereby anxieties surrounding the transformations of early modernity are expressed and worked through by means of the vocabulary of a prophetological sacred history.

This paper* examines how Zoroastrians designate themselves (internal/self-designations), and how they are designated by others (external designations). Focusing on the term Gabr/Gavr as the external denotation for Zoroastrians and the term Gabrī/Gavrūnī as the designation for their language, it argues that these terms, once common in Western scholarship as well as among non-Zoroastrian Iranians, have become obsolete due to their pejorative undertones. However, they have recently been revived by some scholars, who justify such use with reference to the alleged etymology of Gabr as meaning “man” and by the fact that even some Zoroastrians use Gavr/Gavrūn and Gavrī/Gavrūnī as an internal designation for themselves and their language. This paper critically examines these views and argues that neither the etymology nor the internal self-designation justifies the use of these terms and proposes the term Zoroastrian Darī as the more appropriate designation of the language of the Zoroastrians of Iran.

This paper provides the first detailed analysis of the models for classing nouns found in the early Pali exegetical texts traditionally assigned to the fifth-century monk-scholar Buddhaghosa. It identifies three fourfold models and argues that: (a) each model has a distinctive distribution; (b) the original occurrence in each model serves a specific purpose, which can be identified through studying the relation between these original occurrences and their respective context; (c) Buddhaghosa did not invent these models but repurposed pre-existing models to fit specific exegetical needs; (d) Buddhaghosa's reuse of these inherited models is consistent with his view expressed elsewhere that Pali is a sacred, perfect language; and (e) in developing these models, the unknown authors combined influences from the Pali canon and Sanskrit grammatical sources. Finally, I briefly consider whether studying the models sheds new light on the early history of Pali grammar.

The aim of this short paper is to examine the morphological categories of direction and direct-inverse marking in Northwestern Rma/Qiang (< Trans-Himalayan/Sino-Tibetan). Based on evidence from published sources (LaPolla and Huang 2003; H. Sūn 1981; Liú 1998, 1999; Sun and Evans 2013), it is argued that the verbal systems of some northern varieties are more characteristic of hierarchical alignment than previously recognized.