In light of the recent discovery of Warring States period bamboo slips, now in the collection of Tsinghua University, inscribed with texts described as shu, “documents” or “similar to shu”, this article explores the question of “what were shu?” It suggests that shu can be understood as a literary form apart from the history of the Confucian classic, the Shang shu 尚書 (Ancient Documents) or Shu jing 書經 (Book of Documents) and the Yi Zhou shu 逸周書. Formal characteristics include: shu were – or pretended to be – contemporaneous records; and shu include formal speeches by model kings and ministers from ancient times. Many shu include the expression wang ruo yue 王若曰, which is also found in bronze inscriptions, where it indicates that a royal speech was read aloud by an official. Thus, the literary form originated with the practice of composing speeches in writing before they were read out in formal ceremonies, with a bamboo slip copy presented to the officials addressed. Later shu were fictional compositions, written in the style of these ancient documents.

The first manifestation of the regional cultures of India as we know them today was, in most cases, the literature produced by the medieval bhakti (devotional) movements. Composed in the regional languages, the bhakti literature provides evidence of early forms of these languages. Further, by its very existence, it marks the genesis of pride in the languages, of acceptance of them as appropriate vehicles for literary expression. Often addressed to local or regional deities (who are sometimes identified as local manifestations of gods worshipped throughout India), this literature clearly served to articulate and focus regional devotion to such deities. In addition, it is also possible that the bhakti literature provides evidence of the process by which people began to think of the regions as regions (i.e., their genesis as cognitive regions), began to identify themselves as belonging to the regions, and began to take pride, not just in the languages or deities of the regions, but in the regions themselves. This is the process which led ultimately, in very recent times, to the formation of the states of modern India.

The letters of the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologos, studied and exploited by Byzantinists since they were published for the first time by E. Legrand in 1893, are now available in a new edition by G. Dennis, in which they are translated, accompanied by the appropriate comments and, in most cases, accurately dated. These letters constitute a most valuable contemporary source for the years 1382–1417 because they help to fill one part of the much deplored ‘gap’ in Byzantine historiography. Moreover, they include evidence which sheds light on some details of early Ottoman history, as will appear from the following analysis of Manuel's material dealing with the conflict between the sultan Bāyezīd I and the ruler of Sivas, ḲāḲi Burhān al-Dīn Aḥmad in 1391.

This article argues that the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti constituted the kernel of a ritual text recited during the Yasna ceremony. Zaraθušhtra's Gathas were arranged around it, and so were the holy prayers and later additions in Younger Avestan. The arrangement of the extant Older Avesta is probably the original one, and may go back to the composer himself. Its compositional principle is that of parallelism and ring composition, a pattern which can be found both in individual Gathic hymns, two of which (Y 28 and 43) are analysed, and in the structure of the entire Yasna.

It is not too much to describe the Ṣaffārids of S‚stān as an archetypal military dynasty. In the later years of the third/ninth century, their empire covered the greater part of the non-Arab eastern Islamic world. In the west, Ya'qūb. al-Laith's army was only halted at Dair al-'Āqūl, 50 miles from Baghdad; in the north, Ya'qūb and his brother 'Arm campaigned in the Caspian coastlands against the local 'Alids, and 'Amr made serious attempts to extend his power into Khwārazm and Transoxania; in the east, the two brothers pushed forward the frontiers of the Dār al-Islām into the pagan borderlands of what are now eastern Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier region of West Pakistan; and in the south, Ṣaffārid authority was acknowledged even across the persion Gulf in ‘Umān. This impressive achievement was the work of two soldiers of genius, Ya'qūub and 'Amr, and lasted for little more than a quarter of a century. It began to crumble when in 287/900 the Sāmānid Amīr Ismā'īl b. Aḥmad defeated arid captured ‘Amr b. al-Laith, and 11 years later, the core of the empire, Sīstān itself, was in Sāmānid hands. Yet such was the effect in Sīstān of the Ṣaffārid brothers’ achievement, and the stimulus to local pride and feeling which resulted from it, that the Ṣaffārids returned to power there in a very short time. For several more centuries they endured and survived successive waves of invaders of Sīstān—the Ghaznavids, the Seljūqs, the Mongols—and persisted down to the establishment of the Ṣafavid state in Persia.

This article aims to contribute to an understanding of the evaluation of musical artistry in Africa, through Mali as a case study. The discussion focuses on the informal discourses of the occupational group of Mande artisan-musicians known as jeli (pl. jeliw, jalilu), concerning the ideal of musical greatness, signified by the polysemic term ngaraya; while there is consensus about the ideal, there is much debate about who qualifies. Drawing on extensive interviews and fieldwork with leading jeliw over the past twenty years, it pays special attention to the views of and about Malian women singers, who since the 1980s have – somewhat controversially, as explored here – been the “stars” on the home scene. The article shows how local discourses challenge the widely accepted view that only men are the true masters (ngaraw). Many women jeli singers (jelimusow) have a special claim to ngaraya, and some also seek to position themselves within the canon, as they increasingly move into centre-stage of Malian popular culture. The importance of learning directly from senior master jeliw remains a core issue in the evaluation of ngaraya for both men and women, encapsulated in the phrase “the true ngaraw are all at home”.

‘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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

The study of oral literature is among the many areas to which Wilfred Whiteley made an important contribution. He was one of the founder editors of the extensive ‘Oxford Library of African Literature’, and played an essential part in both the development of the study of African oral literature and the maintenance of scholarly standards through generous encouragement and informed advice to colleagues and students working in this area. His primary interest was in Africa but, with his background in Classical studies and his continuing co-operatioii with American folklorists, he also took a wide comparative approach to oral literature. It is appropriate therefore to devote this paper, in a volume in his memory, to some comments on one aspect of oral literature viewed in a comparative context.

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.

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 observations offered in this article are based on notes on the pronunciation of a number of Gujarati speakers of different classes from various districts, including field notes recorded in 1938.

Although the speakers included Christians from Khera District and Surat, peasants and telis from Ahmedabad district, Nagar Brahmins of Ahmedabad, and Brahmins from South and Central Kathiawar, they all in their different ways and often in different words, provided examples and illustrations of widespread characteristics of Gujarati.

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.

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

‘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’.

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 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.