For the hisory of religions the rise of Marduk, city god of Babylon, is one of the most striking phenomena known from ancient Mesopotamia. From being an utterly insignificant god in third-millennium Sumer, he had risen to be head of the Babylonian pantheon by the first millennium. The Münster thesis of Walter Sommerfeld, written under W. von Soden, is the first book-length treatment of this topic. As the subtitle indicates, it is largely restricted to the second millennium, the significant period because the rise took place within it. In fact third millennium evidence is dealt with briefly, but the first millennium is omitted. This is unfortunate because most of the religious literature dealing with Marduk is known from first-millennium copies only, though much of it was presumably composed during the second. In view of this uncertainty most of the religious texts about Marduk cannot be used within precise chronological frameworks.

The aim of this article is to present a new edition, translation and commentary of the treaty concluded in 1387 between the Ottoman ruler Murād I (1362–1389) and the Comune of Genoa. As the only known extant fourteenth-century treaty between the Ottomans and a western city state, the treaty is of considerable importance for early Ottoman history, a period for which contemporary Turkish sources are scant.

‘Standard Chinese’ is here offered as a translation of Gwoyeu and is defined, for the purpose of this paper, as ‘polite Peking speech’, i.e. the language spoken by a youngish man, born and brought up in Peking, when he avoids any features which he himself would describe as tuuhuah or local—i.e. Peking—dialect. The grammatical features described are based exclusively on the speech system of Mr. James Liou, and may therefore include personal idiosyncrasies which other Gwoyeu speakers would not recognize as ‘standard’. Mr. Liou was born in Peking in 1927 and lived there until 1950. His family come from a village within 30 miles of Peking, and have lived in the capital for the last three generations. He has not therefore been subject to ‘non-Pekinese’ linguistic influences to any great extent.

This article examines the transformation of the sacred landscape in the cities of Syria and Palestine from late antiquity to early Islam. This phase of urban and architectural history, often obscured by the changes brought in during the medieval period, is investigated through a close comparison of textual and material evidence related to the main urban religious complexes. It is suggested that the new Friday mosques were frequently built contiguous to Christian great churches, creating a sort of shared sacred area within the cities. Legal issues related to the Islamic conquest and the status of minorities are considered in order to explain the rationale behind such a choice by Muslims.

Le 28 juin 1245, à l'ouverture du Concile de Lyon, le pape Innocent IV groupa sous cinq chefs ses principaux soucis. Parmi ceux-ci figurent les ravages des Tatares qui, terram Christianorum intraverant et Ungariam occupaverant non parcentes sexui vel etati quin omnes interficerent.

It is possible to distinguish broadly four types of Swahili poetry in East Africa today.

The first type, mashairi (lit.) ‘poems’, is characterized in form by symmetrical verses which have an equal number of lines (usually not exceeding six) in each verse, and an equal number of syllables (usually not more than sixteen) in each line. This type is extremely popular with the people and with the majority of the poets: mashairi appear regularly in Swahili newspapers—Baraza, Kiongozi, Uhuru, etc.—and weekly radio programmes in Tanzania and Kenya are devoted to them. It is thus not surprising that almost every Swahili scholar is familiar with this form, and the bulk of the publications on Swahili poetry both in English and in Kiswahili are on it. Since much has been written on its prosody, I shall not discuss it further here.

The variety of spoken Arabic some aspects of which are discussed in this article is the dialect of 'Anaiza, a fairly large town of the Qaṣm province of Nejd.

Most of the work on this dialect I have done with Mr. Muḥammad al-Shmikh of 'Anaiza ('Unaizah).

This paper (to be published in two parts in subsequent issues of BSOAS) aims to explore the meaning of colour in Shang rituals. Operating within an established framework of Shang religion and archaeology, it offers a detailed analysis of the evidence found in oracle bone inscriptions. The oracle bone inscriptions from Yinxu, the late capital of the Shang dynasty, can be divided into different diviner schools and subgroups. Part 1 of the paper will examine the inscriptions of the various diviner groups under the kings' school, and will reveal regular patterns in the use of colour.

Mīrzā Mahdī the biographer of Nādir Shāh, gives but little information on the subject of the Iranian campaigns in 'Omān during the period 1737 to 1744, probably because 'Omān was, relatively speaking, merely a secondary theatre of war and because Nādir did not go there in person. Fasa'I, in his Fārsnāma-yi-Nāsirī, also devotes but little space to the subject, notwithstanding the fact that Muhammad Taqī Khān Shīrāzī, the Beglarbegi of Fārs, played a prominent part in the campaigns.

It is widely held belief among bedouins that common linguistic characteristics point to a common genealogical origin. Bearing in mind the importance attached to racial origin amongst bedouins, it is not surprising that they should be keen observers of the dialect of their own and neighbouring tribes. My investigations of the bedouin dialects of the North and East of Arabia do indicate that a common geographical origin is often reflected in a uniform dialect. In this area many bedouin tribes seem to have left an original homeland in the west some 200 years ago, so that in the somewhat isolated conditions of bedouin life their dialect retains the characteristics of the speech of their homeland. A particularly striking case of this is the Rashāyida, a tribe which ‘Arab tradition allies to the Hutaim of north-western Arabia. At some time this tribe broke up and many of them moved east to become clients of the Muṭair. Many others however crossed by sea to the Sudan when they acquired new camels and resumed the nomadic way of life. At present, with the increasing prosperity of Saudi Arabia, many of these have returned as immigrant workers or have been repatriated. Their dialect, however, after a period of perhaps 150 years' separation, is still recognizably of the Najdī type. It would not be possible for dialectology to verify bedouin genealogies; nevertheless, it can be seen that it might support traditions about the earlier location of tribes, since historical sources are not very informative for the medieval period in the Arabian peninsula.

The following studies are all based on the registers of land, population, and revenue contained in the Ottoman archives in Istanbul. They will be limited to the Arabic-speaking provinces of the Ottoman Empire, and to the first century of Ottoman rule. It is not my purpose to attempt a general study of the history of these areas in this period, nor to correlate the information derived from the archives with that obtained from other sources in a comprehensive historical monograph. My aim is rather to offer a series of studies in detail in a certain class of documents and on a few special topics; that is, to make a number of soundings in depth at selected points, rather than a surface survey of this material. The topics have, as far as possible, been chosen so as to give a wide range of variety, dealing with town and country, inland and coastal areas, mountain and plain. The first two studies deal with Palestine, which of all the countries under consideration has by far the richest documentation in outside.sources, and therefore offered the most promising field for a first experimental study. This study presents in outline the picture of Palestine in the early Ottoman period that emerges from the registers, and is intended as an introduction to the material as a whole. It will be followed by a documentary study of the quarters, population, and taxation of the towns of Palestine, and then by further studies on selected rural and urban areas in Syria and Iraq.1

Arabic documents containing eyewitness reports on historical events are very rare. They are the more welcome when they complement and illustrate the often very deficient literary sources. This is the case with the excerpts from two business letters of the 12th century published here, one sent from Aden to India and one from the same town to Cairo. Both passages describe one and the same event: the attack on Aden by a fleet sent by the King of Kīsh with the aim of taking the town or at least a part of it.

The attributes of the Indian king have long been familiar, but taken together they have an inexplicable feature-their apparent incompatibility.An explanation for one, bhū-bhojana, is hinted at by J. J. Meyer&s Trilogie altindischer Māchte und Feste der Vegetation (Zürich and Leipzig, 1937), and the setting in which the subject is to be reviewed has been entirely recast by the lengthy and exhaustive article by J. Gonda, entitled ‘Ancient Indian kingship from the religious point of view’(Numen, III-IV, 1956–7). It is much to be hoped that these works will not escape the notice of historians of India, and it is assumed in this paper that Professor Gonda&s article is accessible to the reader.

The present paper provides a systematic description of interjections in a moribund Eastern Kalahari Khoe language – Tjwao. After analysing original evidence within a prototype-driven approach, the authors conclude the following: (a) in Tjwao, the interjectional lexical class constitutes an internally diverse category confined between the canonical centre and a non-prototypical periphery; and (b) primary emotive interjections exhibit the highest degree of canonicity and extra-systematicity, while the canonicity and extra-systematicity of secondary phatic interjections is lowest.

This article questions certain assumptions on the intellectual history of modern Islam and on one of the most influential modern reform movements, the Salafiyya. By looking at the Sufi origins of one of the main Salafī reformers, it relativizes the notion of an inherent anti-Sufism of this reform movement. The article examines how Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849–1905), the famous Egyptian reformer, converted to Sufism in his youth after experiencing a spiritual and intellectual crisis. The influence of his paternal great-uncle Shaykh Darwīsh al-Khādir and of Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī (1837–1897) on ‘Abduh's spiritual and intellectual formation will be investigated. In his youth, Sufism provided him with an alternative form of religiosity with which he could express his dissatisfaction with the representatives of mainstream Islam in his time. ‘Abduh's mystical inclinations found its literary expression in his first major work, the Risālat al-Wāridāt (Treatise on Mystical Inspirations), whose contents will be discussed in detail.

The Emperor Tewodros II (1855–68), although remembered to-day mainly as an energetic modernizer, was also involved to a significant degree in the history of traditional Ethiopian libraries.

Tewodros had intended to build a great church dedicated to Mädhane Aläm ‘Saviour of the World’, on Christian ground near the natural fortress of Mäqdäla which had served him as state prison, granary, and family sanctuary no less than as a storehouse for his accumulated treasures.

‘Apocalyptic’, it has been pointed out, ‘is only another word for “revelation”, and apocalyptist for “revealer”. Essentially, therefore, prophecy and apocalyptic [are] identical.’ Prophecy in its turn has been defined as ‘the declaration of knowledge which cannot be apprehended through the ordinary faculties, but is acquired either by revelation from a deity or by some other mantic power inherent in te seer himself’. Through the accidents of history a distinction came to be drawn by students of Jewish sacred literature between ancient prophecy and later apocalyptic, the latter flourishing in the intertestamental period; and in the Jewish tradition it is apocalyptic which, it has been said, ‘was the first to grasp the great idea that all history, alike human, cosmological and spiritual, is unity. … Apocalyptic sketched in outline the history of the world and of mankind, the origin of evil, its course, and inevitable overthrow, and the final consummation of all things’.

Saint worship is a form of religious expression common to most Islamic societies, but it is especially important in the religious life of the Māppiḷas, the Muslims of Kerala State, South India. The Māppiḷas' largest public festivals are a variant of saint worship known as nerccas. These are expensive and elaborate ceremonials which combine nominally Islamic elements with certain features of indigenous folk festivals. Thus, while the focal point of each nercca is the reverence shown to a pīr, shaykh, or shahīd, all the festivals are conducted within a ritual framework derived from the worship of folk deities in Kerala. The nerccas are important just because of this hybrid character; that is, they provide examples of an especially complex variety of Islamic saint and martyr worship. However, the festivals are equally important when they are viewed solely as a source of information about Kerala Muslims, for the Māppiḷas possess only the most fragmentary records concerning their own past and the nerccas offer one of the most important means by which it is possible to study the history and religious culture of this important Muslim community.

Alchemy, on the rare occasions when it has been made the subject of reasonable inquiry, has usually been studied as part of what one may call the pre-history of science. But if, to use a favourite phrase, we are to see in alchemy merely “the cradle of chemistry”, are we not likely, whatever its initial charm, to lose patience with an infancy protracted through some fifteen centuries?

It is certain in any case that another aspect of alchemy—its interest as a branch of cultural history—has hitherto been strangely neglected. Mr. Walter Scott, for example, omits alchemistic writings from his great edition of the Hermetica on the odd ground that they are merely “masses of rubbish”. But if texts are to be dismissed as rubbish because they contain beliefs that we cannot share, I see no reason why the religious and philosophical parts of the Hermetica (and with them many books which to-day enjoy a far wider popularity) should continue to claim attention.

The Anglo-Saddozai government in Afghanistan was overthrown by a series of risings in 1841–2. The first of these risings was that of the eastern Ghilzai tribes, who broke the line of communīcatīons between Kabul and Jalālābād at the end of September and the beginning of October 1841. On 1 November disturbances began in Kabul and these were followed by risings in the Kohistān, in the area of Ghaznī, and, sometime later, at Qandahar. In January 1842 the Kabul garrison withdrew, under treaty, but was entirely destroyed. In March 1842 the garrison at Ghazni surrendered and was destroyed. The garrisons at Jalālābād and Qandahar held out and were reinforced from Peshawar and Quetta respectively. In August and September they advanced and reoccupied Kabul, but soon afterwards the British withdrew altogether from Afghanistan. Between January and August 1842 there was a struggle for power among the various groups in eastern Afghanistan, which ended in the victory of Muḥammad Akbar, son of Dost Muḥammad. Although Akbar and his supporters were forced to fly at the time of the reconquest they were soon able to return, resume power, and prepare for the restoration of Dost Muhammad in May 1843.