Among the philosophical schools of ancient China, the Nung-chia ‘School of the Tillers’ is the one of which we know least. The surviving information has been assembled by Feng Yu-lan , who identifies it as the one school which reflects the aspirations of the peasants. He finds only one recognizable spokesman, Hsü Hsing, the teacher of ‘the words of Shen-nung’ who came with his followers to settle in the small state of T‘eng , probably about 315 B.C. A disciple named Ch‘en Hsiang visited Mencius, and we have a report of the conversation from the Confucian point of view. Ch‘en Hsiang says of the Duke of T‘eng:

‘A worthy ruler feeds himself by ploughing side by side with the people, and rules while cooking his own meals. Now T‘eng on the contrary possesses granaries and treasuries, so the ruler is supporting himself by oppressing the people’.

The Genizah of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat preserved dozens of petitions addressed to the Fatimid and Ayyubid chanceries in Cairo and decrees that they issued in response. This article provides an edition, translation, and discussion of a petition housed among the Genizah documents of the Bodleian Library directed to Sitt al-Mulk, half-sister of the caliph al-Ḥākim (386–411/996–1021) and head of the Fatimid state between his death and her own in 414/1023. Geoffrey Khan had previously identified two petitions to a Fatimid princess housed in Cambridge and New York; it is likely that they, too, were addressed to Sitt al-Mulk. Such documents elucidate Sitt al-Mulk's role in government after her brother's death and provide evidence for the chronicler al-Musabbiḥī's claim that she received and responded to petitions from subjects. The article offers possible explanations as to why petitions such as this one, which concerns an Ismaili mosque, should have found their way to the Jewish community of Fustat whose members reused and preserved them. It also suggests some broader conclusions about the dispersal, survival, or disappearance of pre-Ottoman Middle Eastern archives and documents.

Scholars dealing with sources which cite the names of weights and measures of capcity used in the countries of the Near East in the Middle Ages will have recourse to the classic treatise of H. Sauvaire and the monograph of W. Hinz. Sauvaire collected his materials mainly from Oriental sources, while Hinz also included data from various European sources such as travelogues and a few Merchant Guides. A significant number of these medieval Merchant Guides, often called ‘Pratica della mercatura’ or ‘Tarifa’ by the Italians, has been preserved in European libraries and MSS collections, and others, additional to the few cited by Hinz, have been printed. There is also an abundance of revelant data concerning Levantine weights in the registers of the Venetian and Genoese customs offices of the later Middle Ages and in judicial acts referring to their activities. In theses records both the weights used in Venice and Genoa those of the Levantine emporia are accurately noted and these data are very reliable. Finally, there is much information to be gleaned from the protocols of the pleadings before the Venetian tribunal of the Guidici di petiziòn, a law court dealing with commercial litigations. These acts too contain authentic data, although those comprised in the claims of the litigants should be accepted cumgrano salis. The purpose of this paper is to present materials from these European sources which complement and, it would seem, correct those collected from the theoretical treatises of Oriental authors of the Middle Ages. Although the various Oriental weights are often confused in these souces, they do make it possible to clarify certain questions in teh field of historical metrology.

Outstanding amongst the scholastic compendia of jurisprudence produced in the fifth/eleventh century are the Muhadhdhab of the Shāfi 'ī scholar Abū Ishāq al-Shīrāzī (d. 476) and the Mabsūt of the Ḥanafī scholar Shams al-Dīn al-Sarakhsī (d. 483). These works encoded three centuries of juristic speculation while confirming and promoting the distinctive patterns of their respective law schools. Both scholars, Sarakhsī in Qarakhanid Trasoxania, and shīrāzī in Saljūq Baghdad, were involved in the politics of their day, but produced no political theory seeparate from their large-scale works of furū' which followed the traditional pattern of furū' literature, established as early as Mālik. The holistic approach to divine law was the conformity to type of Sarakhsī's and shīrāzī's works helped to ensure them the classical status they acquired in the developing law-schools, and in the curricula of madrasas. The Kitāb al-Aḥkām al-sulṭāniyya of Māwardī (d.450)was in contrast, to a great extent, innovatory in subject matter and in structure, if not in juristic methodology. The difference between writers like Sarakhsī, on the one hand, and Māwardī, on the other, is not however simply formal: it includes a nicely distinguished approach to political power. The nature of this distinction might be demonstrated under a number of discrete headings selected from furū' literature. This essay is concerned with Friday Prayer (FP), a ritual generally recognized as having in some degree a political aspect.

The Iranian economy underwent impressive growth in the value and volume of foreign trade during the nineteenth century. The combined figures for imports and exports show the widening of commercial links and economic interrelations between Iran and the rest of the world, particularly Europe. Between 1800 and 1914 total visible trade at current prices rose from £2.5million to £20 million. The implication of these figures is that in real terms visible trade increased about 12 times. The greater portion of this increase occurred during the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Through the kindness of Professor F. W. Cleaves I am in possession of an offprint of his important article ‘ The Mongolian documents in the Musée de Téhéran ’.

The first two documents are only insignificant fragments, but Document III, which consists of eight pieces and two endorsements, is nearly complete and full of personal and geographical names. It is a decree issued in the name of the last ilkhan of Persia, Abū-Said (716–36/1316–35), and bearing the date 720/1320 (according to Pelliot: September 1320).

Here is Professor Cleaves's summary of its contents:

‘ It had been reported by the šiγ Badaradin Abul Maqmad Maqmud that, although, by virtue of an edict, he had, in the place of his father the šiγ ǁamaladin, sat on the sujada of the šiγ šaqid Ibrayim and had been appointed over the qaγas-a-yin waγb-ud, his elder brother, Šamsadin Maqmad, not letting him approach, took his edicts and writs and let the foundation go to wrack and ruin.

Mrs. A.K. Fatunsin's Yoruba pottery (Lagos, 1992) is the outcome of a project funded by the Ford Foundation (grant no. 875–1066) as part of its continuing programme ‘to preserve and interpret diverse aspects of West Africa's cultural heritage’. The intention of the project as suggested to them in 1985 by this author was that it should ‘go beyond the mere collection of artefacts’. Emphasis was to be ‘placed on techniques of pottery manufacture, sources and types of raw material, methods of forming the pots, decoration and firing, as well as forms and functions including the designated names for the pots in the different parts of the Yoruba speaking area.’ Also investigated would be the uses to which the pots were put; and the organization, beliefs and customs of the potters themselves. The monograph resulting from the work would be designed to show pots ‘not just as art objects but as basic components of the entire economic, social, and religious life of the people’.

The sources of information from which the present collection of Nabataean inscriptions has been compiled are as follows:—

Site 1. About two miles north of Bīr Abu Darag, beside which is the site of a Roman enclosure:—

Wilkinson MSS. (by courtesy of the Griffith Institute, Oxford, on behalf of the owner, Mrs. Godfrey Mosley, Calke Abbey, Derby); Envel. L, a few pages of roughly pencilled field notes relating to his second 1826 journey, the written-up Journal of which is missing: Nos. 22a, 22b, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34. Pp. 11–14; Pls. I–IV.

The Islamic tradition credits the promulgation of a uniform consonantal skeleton (rasm) of the Quran to the third caliph ʿUthmān (r. 644–656). However, in recent years various scholars have espoused a conjectural dating of the Quran's codification to the time of ʿAbd al-Malik, or have at least taken the view that the Islamic scripture was open to significant revision up until c. 700 ce. The second instalment of this two-part article surveys arguments against this hypothesis. It concludes that as long as no Quranic passages with a distinct stylistic and terminological profile have been compellingly placed in a late seventh-century context, the traditional dating of the standard rasm (excepting certain orthographical features) to 650 or earlier ought to be our default view.

The story of Balai Pustaka begins in 1908, a memorable year in the history of modern Indonesia, for that was the year in which Boedi Oetomo, the first nationalist organization in Indonesia, was founded. In the same year the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies set up a Commissie voor de Volkslectuur, a Committee for Popular Literature. And even though there was no visible connexion between the founding of Boedi Oetomo and the setting up of this Committee, there certainly was an indirect link. Both the foundation of Boedi Oetomo and the need for an institution for popular literature had something to do with the expansion of modern education in the colony.

The Kiranti languages are spoken in eastern Nepal and western Sikkim. What I call Eastern Kiranti in this article includes the languages Limbu, Yakkha, Yamphe, Yamphu, Lohorung and Mewahang. Further study will probably demonstrate that other languages spoken to the east of the SĀlpĀ watershed, such as Sam, underwent the same developments described here and must also be included in Eastern Kiranti. The autonyms used by the Limbus, Yakkha, Yamphe, Yamphu and Lohorung are indicative of a close historical relationship between them. The Limbu call themselves Yakthuŋba; the Yakkha call themselves Yakkha; and the Yamphe, Yamphu and Lohorung refer to their language as Yakkhaba.

THE purpose of these notes is to suggest a new approach in the study of articulation with the aid of palatography.

The language material studied consists of words in English, Marathi, Burmese, Chinese, and Fijian uttered for the purpose by native speakers of the languages, trained to work with artificial palates.

It must constantly be borne in mind that utterances are events, not facts. The finding and the stating of the facts are the business of the phonetician. He attempts this by means of a set of correlated techniques each one of which makes its own specialized abstractions from the utterances. The findings are stated in the technical syntax and idiom of the discipline, employing categories and notations required by the conceptual framework.

Perhaps the most exotic among the many strange kings and rulers mentioned in the inscription of Paikuli is the Khagan of the Aq-Aqatärān or ‘White Khazars’. This is the meaning which the late E. Herzfeld, in his edition of that inscription, attributed to a group of words in the Middle Persian version which he read as ḥ'k'n ZY 'kka'n. As the inscription dates from the last decade of the 3rd century (probably from A.d. 293), his interpretation seems to involve a double anachronism: in the title, and in the national name.

The madrasa as an institution dedicated to the teaching of one or more of the four madhhabs, or schools, of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence, often in conjunction with the ancillary Islamic sciences, including Arabic grammar, the study of quranic exegesis (tafsīr) and Prophetic Traditions (ḥadīth) alongside more secular disciplines such as history, literature, rhetoric, mathematics and astronomy, began to proliferate in the eastern Islamic lands from the fifth century/eleventh century, although its origins are traceable as far back as the early fourth/tenth century in eastern Iran. As the religion of Islam and its accompanying civilization spread into new territories, e.g., Anatolia, sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent, the institution of the madrasa not only accompanied this diffusion but also lent it active support.

Of twenty commercial treaties concluded between the Mamluk Sultans and the Kepublic of Venice one of 913/1507 is unique in that it was negotiated not, as was traditional, by a Venetian representative in Egypt but by a Mamluk ambassador in Venice.

The only kind of speech behaviour with which the present study is directly connected is the oral naming of Chinese characters. Chinese characters have been prominent cultural objects for thousands of years. Even the sketchiest description of what they have been called by countless millions over a vast area of Asia would be a colossal task. All that is here attempted is a systematic analysis of what a certain number of selected characters were called by Mr. K. H. Hu, of Changsha.

Early modern Basra is often portrayed as the end of an Ottoman chain of command that grew successively weaker as it stretched from Istanbul to the Persian Gulf. This article complicates the picture of an imperial outpost over which the metropole was unable to impose effective control by discussing seventeenth-century Basra as the point of convergence of various regional and trans-regional spheres of influence and jurisdiction. Basra remained contested territory long after the city was supposedly incorporated into the Ottoman framework in 1546, and in its subsequent history we see multiple actors engaged in a fierce struggle over power and income. Local authorities, regional tribal forces, and outside elements—the Portuguese and the two imperial powers with claims on the region, the Ottomans and the Safavids—participated in this struggle through alliance building and mutual manipulation.

The cowry

‘Parmi tant de coquilles que le flot des mers rejette sur les plages, il n'en est pas que les homines aient recherchÉes, recueillies, portÉes plus que les cauris.’

The purpose of this study is to investigate the cowry in the Western Sudan. But it is impossible to study any aspect of cowry diffusion and use in isolation, and some understanding of the complex and fascinating global history of the shell is essential to our knowledge of its history in this area.

Tangut is the dead Tibeto-Burman language of the Buddhist empire of Xīxià, which was destroyed in 1227 by the Golden Horde of the Mongol warlord Temuüjin, more commonly known as Genghis Khan (c. 1162–1227). The Tangut empire was established in 1032 and comprised the modern Chinese provinces of Gānsù, Shānxī and Níngxià, extending from the Yellow River in the east to Kökö Nōr (Chinese: Qīnghăi Hù) in the west. The northern frontier of the Xīxià empire skirted the city of Qumul (Chinese: Hāmì), the river Edzin Gol (Chinese: Ruò Shuĭ), the Hèlán hills and the Yellow River. In the south, the empire extended down into the present-day province of Sichuān. The Xīxià capital was situated in what is now the city of Yinchuān (formerly Níngxiàfŭ) on the left bank of the Yellow River.