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.

This study presents some new observations on selected features of the phonology and morphology of the Omani Arabic dialects, and attempts to place them in a peninsula-wide typological framework. The paper is based on the results of an analysis of tape-recorded conversational data gathered in more than thirty, mainly rural locations in northern Oman between 1985 and 1987. Most of the speakers were men and women aged 35 and above with little or no formal education who, if not retired, were engaged in traditional occupations such as farming, fishing, pottery and animal husbandry. Much of the data was gathered in the context of a study of the epidemiology of rheumatic diseases conducted on a random sample of 2,000 Omanis adults by my wife for the Omani Ministry of Health, during which the subjects were interviewed by me at length in their homes or places of work.

WHILST the tonal languages spoken in West Africa have latterly received W a good deal of attention, it has not been generally realized that such languages are found also in parts of New Guinea. In New Guinea there are in fact two types of tonal languages. In one, the tones may be described as ” ornamental”, i.e. though they exist they do not seem to have semantic value, but rather to be connected with a certain type of sentence rhythm; in the other the tone systems are more definitely akin to those of Western Africa, and in such languages tones do possess semantic value. It is interesting that one at least of the latter group of languages tends also to be monosyllabic. It is hoped to provide a study of the former class of languages—at least one representative of which is also found in Northern Australia—at a later date. The present paper is occupied with the languages in which tones do have semantic value.

These languages, so far as has been observed yet, are two in number, and they are spoken along the shores of Huon Gulf, in north-eastern New Guinea. The map on p. 186 will show their locations. Both belong to the group of languages known as Melanesian, and this makes the occurrence of tones even less expected. A considerable number of other languages are spoken round about this area, and though some of these also are Melanesian, they do not seem to have developed tones. Moreover, it would seem that the use of tones in these two languages antedates the coming of the Melanesian languages, for reasons that will be given towards the end of this paper.

The Ayyubid Sultan Salāḥ al-Dīn (Saladin) used the pious endowment (waqf, pl. awqāf; alternatively ḥubs, hubūs, pi. aḥbās) as a major instrument in his efforts to gain political and military control over Egypt and Syria. In pursuit of this aim, he systematically converted properties belonging to his enemies into awqāf. The present study investigates some of the legal and social aspects of Saladin's waqf policy in the territories conquered by his armies. Here, I examine Saladin's endowment policy and his political aims from the viewpoint of the Sultan and his court. I will not reflect on the motives of the beneficiaries, those people of religion (al-mu῾ammamūn; literally ‘ the turbaned’) who co-operated with him, even though ‘ mingling with the monarch’ (malik or sultān) apparently clashed with some of the principles stipulated in guides for Suḟi novices.

The ‘Song of Bagauda’ (WB) is apparently known to Joseph Greenberg, for he quotes two hemistichs from it in his article on Hausa prosody. He refers to the work briefly, among a list of unpublished Hausa poems as a ‘qaṣīda History of Kano’, but gives no further details of subject-matter or provenance.

The biographer al-Mālikī reports that, in the year A.H. 171, Rūh b. Hatam, the governor of the Maghrib, offered the post of qādī to ‘Abd Allāh b. Farūk, a scholar-jurist of Qairawān. ‘Ibn Farūk firmly refused the offer. The governor, however, forced him to take his seat in the mosque and ordered the litigants to address their pleas to him, Ibn Farūk weeping the while and crying to them: “Have mercy upon me, that Allah may have mercy upon you”. When he thus refused to judge, the governor ordered that he be bound and taken up to the roof of the mosque: if he should then still refuse he was to be thrown over the edge.

The Site numbers used in the present study are marked in the general map accompanying the first article (BSOAS xv, 1953, p. 28). More detailed maps of the central Eastern Desert and the Eastern Delta appear below, p. 212. The E. Delta map shows two new site numbers: (a) Site 17 (at El-Maḥemdīlya = Gerra ?) is the spot where Clédat actually found inscription No. 82 and it may be that Site 16 (at ancient Mons Casios) does not figure in the present study (see classical notes, p. 242). (b) Site 18 (QaṣEsr Gheiṭ), east of El-Qanṭara on long. 33° E., has a Nabatsæn fragment, No. 83. Nos. 50–1 and 52 (at Sites 11 and 9, see BSOAS xv, p. 17) are briefly repeated here for convenience, as. Winkler's inscriptions from the Leucos Limen road came to light after the first article had gone to press.

The student who approaches the study of the turbulent life of Ibn Taymiyya will soon realize that Shams al-Dīn al-Dhahabī, his renowned shāfi‘ī disciple, is indeed one of the main sources for the Hanbalī scholar's biographers. Al-Dhahabī wrote many biographical notices of Ibn Taymiyya and one of these has been identified with the manuscript source presented in this article. The article briefly introduces the source, discusses its content and its importance in relation to the early biographies of Ibn Taymiyya as is evident from the text, and raises some questions about the state of consensus towards the Hanbalī jurist among his traditionalist Damascene fellows. An edition and annotated translation of the Arabic text are appended to the introduction.

The Japanese language was traditionally written vertically. Recently, journals, textbooks and academic reference works have appeared with the script written horizontally. One reason for this may be that quotations of foreign names and articles (written in European languages) and mathematical equations often appear in technical texts, and it is therefore more convenient to have the main text of this kind of work written horizontally.

In the following, I will analyse a lost text from the Shang shu the ‘Ancient documents ’. The story recorded in this text that of an ominous portent—seven years of drought which occurred at the beginning of the Shang Dynasty, of a divination in which human sacrifice was demanded of the Shang founder Tang, and of the ritual in which he offered himself as a sacrifice to the Lord on High. I will argue that this text provides a conceptual link between the role of the king in Shang times as a medium between the spirits above and the earth below and the Zhou theory of the king as the recipient of a changing mandate of Heaven.

If there has been one dominant, quasi-official theory for Turkish classicalmusic in the second half of the twentieth century, it is that particularlyassociated with Ezgi and Arel. Their notational conventions have becomestandard, supplanting earlier norms, and the framework they developed is theone still employed in recent general accounts of the modal system, whether thesimplified introductory survey of Yilmaz (1983), for example, or the moredetailed and comprehensive coverage of Ozkan (1984). Both of these follow theanalytical models provided by their predecessors, and begin with an expositionofintervals and the various species of tetrachord and pentachord formed from them before moving on to describe the structure of the makams themselves. Thesequence interval, scale, mode, nevertheless forms a conceptual continuum: theintervals denned are restricted to those deemed to occur in Turkish classicalmusic, and the nomenclature of the various species, for all that they appear asabstract assemblages of intervals, identifies them with characteristic segments ofwell-known and important makams.

The romance of Vīs and Rāmīn has many claims to our attention. Fakhr A al-dīn As'ad Gurgānī wrote his version of it some time between A.D. 1040 and 1054, almost nine centuries ago, and only half a century after Firdausī completed the Shāh-nāma. The poem is based on an old “pahlavī” tale vaguely reminiscent of Tristan and Isolde, King Mark and Brangane. Many of its episodes echo feelings and attitudes dissonant with the post-Islamic ideas of marriage, women, and love. The poetic gifts of Fakhr al-dīn Gurgānī are also beyond doubt. Whatever the inconsistencies in the presentation of characters, whatever the length of the dialogues and soliloquies of the two lovers, these defects are redeemed both by the purity of diction of the poet and by bis truly humane understanding of men's passions, soarings, and failures.

This article examines the information given in the Quran, as distinct from the exegetical tradition, on the livelihoods pursued by the mushriku¯n to whom the Messenger was preaching. It finds them to be uniformly described as agriculturalists and seafarers. The purpose of their maritime activity is not usually specified, but on one occasion it is said to be for fishing. The believers, too, are agriculturalists in some passages, but they are more commonly described as traders. There is a wealth of passages depicting them as such, and preaching to them in commercial imagery, in the suras classified by the tradition as Medinese.

The existence of a totally indigenous Oromo writing system is not something that is very widely known about among Éithiopisants, and our present description of this remarkable achievement is written in the belief that the subject has never before received attention. Remarkable achievements are generally the achievements of remarkable men, and before embarking on a consideration of the writing system itself, it has seemed only appropriate to devote the first section of this paper to a short biographical sketch of the man who devised the system. At this point we are bound to acknowledge our great indebtedness to Shaykh Mahammad Rashād, a student of Shaykh Bakri Saṗalō, who not only gave us copious information about the life of his teacher, but generously provided us with copies of a number of manuscripts, among which is one (shown in Figs. 2–5) which sets out in a clear way the principles of Shaykh Bakri's orthography. Without the Amharic and Arabic explanations of this key we should have been involved in a work of decipherment, and the present study might well have proved impossible. We are likewise indebted to Dīmā Yōnīs, who took great pains on our behalf in interviewing former students and friends of Shaykh Bakri, and subsequently translated into English and typed out the information he collected.

Between 1985 and 1987 the present writer took part in a multi-disciplinary study of the Wahiba Sands organized by the Royal Geographical Society. During this time I was able to travel extensively through and around the Sands to visit many bedouin families of the Āl Wahība, who inhabit the greater part of the area, and other tribes including the Āl ،Amr, Āl Bū ،Īsa, Ḣikmān, Hishm and Janaba who are found in certain enclaves, particularly to the east and north of the main sand desert. The purpose of my research was to make a social and ethnographic survey rather than a purely linguistic one, but in the process I was able to record some dialect speech including the text presented below.

Very little was known about the bedouin of this part of Oman prior to the Wahiba Sands Project. Holes has recently published examples of some related dialects and has proposed a classification scheme as the basis for a dialect geography of Northern Oman (Holes, 1989). Bedouin dialects of central and eastern Arabia have been more extensively described and classified (Holes, 1983; Ingham, 1982(a), 1982(b), 1986; Johnstone, 1961, 1964, 1965, 1967). Comparative studies of the distribution of certain features of present-day dialects have been shown to shed light on the population movements of the past, often supporting the written histories and oral traditions of the area.

The giving of gifts, though not peculiar to Persian society, is particularly common in that society. There are a large number of words designating gift or present. Among them are ḥadiya, ՙatiya, ṣilat, tuḥfa, ՙinayat, inՙām and pīshkash. Some implicitly define the status of the giver or the recipient. ՙInāyat implies a favour conferred by the giver; inՙām defines the superior status of the giver in relation to the recipient and often amounts to a gratuity. Pīshkash, which may originally have had a fairly neutral meaning, came to mean a present from someone of an inferior status. In the ninth/fifteenth century, if not before, it came to be used also in the sense of a due or tribute paid to the ruler or his officials. Tashrīf, pāy-andāz, taՙāruf, taṣadduq, khidmatī and taqdīmī usually signify an inferior status on the part of the one who offers the gift.

A Detailed analysis of single statements corroborates more and more our conviction that the elements of Hindu mentality (viz. philosophy, religion, and fine arts) are subject to certain fixed and common rules of thinking. If we acknowledge any one analytical method—of course the most general possible—as sufficient and adequate, we can presume that whatever may at any time be the object of our analysis must follow the method adopted. If we accept as a principle for the veracity of all judgments that they must be subjected to the rule of sapakṣe sattva and vipakṣe asattva, then the analysis will show that in reality all statements are measurable under the aspect of those two criteria. The only breach in this principle was made by a Jaina logical school which, while anticipating the principles of our “implication”, admits the syllogism fulfilling the anyathānupapannatva condition, i.e. it accepts as true conditional sentences of which the protasis does not reach beyond the sphere of the predicated subject (pakṣa). In other words: the argument, when predicating a fact, forms a true sentence, even if it does not predicate the class to which the fact belongs. Whilst the Buddhist syllogism oscillates between class inference and sentence calculus (sapakṣa and vipakṣa being the necessary conditions), the Jaina syllogism advances exclusively the sentence calculus, and the validity of the predication is confined merely to the implication in question.

To show how great were the profits in the medieval Levant trade may seem like bringing coals to Newcastle. The accounts of the strenuous efforts made to discover the sea route to India bear witness to the Europeans’ desire to get a greater share of these riches. Anybody passing by the old palaces along the Grand Canal of Venice becomes aware of the riches accumulated in the trade of the Indian spices. However, it goes without saying that the margin of profit changed in the course of time. Certainly they were very great in the period of the Crusades, both on the Red Sea and in the Mediterranean. In a Judaeo-Arabic letter written in 1134 in Aden by Abū; Zikrī Kōhēn, one reads: ‘If you would have come this year (to Aden), there would have been no need to journey to India. Youngsters came who had never travelled before, who have no knowledge of selling and buying, and those (of them) who had a hundred earned another hundred…and if he were a Muslim—a hundred and fifty’. The riches of the Kārim merchants, who specialized in the spice trade on the Red Sea, were fabulous, if one can believe the Arabic chroniclers. Judging from the Geniza documents, one would be bound to conclude that the profits in the spice trade were much greater than in other branches of trade. But in the later Middle Ages, when it had become a wholesale trade conducted on regular lines, did it still yield returns much greater than other branches of trade and industry? And if this was indeed so, how can one explain the fact that the Levant traders succeeded in maintaining high prices for the Indian commodities destined for mass consumption?

The Archives of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) include a small lot of material relating to the three expeditions to western China organized and financed by Count Ōtani Kozui (1902–14), with the aim of exploring Buddhist sites. Ōtani also recognized the significance of promoting their results outside of Japan and integrating them into the international academic community, primarily Britain. Since his collection was later dispersed, the material in the RGS Archives provides valuable information on the expeditions and clarifies the context for some of the discoveries. In addition, it evidences traces of the interaction between Japanese and British scholarly circles, as an example of the complex international network of scholarship on Central Asia in the early part of the twentieth century. It also shows the efforts invested by the Japanese side in trying to have their results acknowledged as being equal to those of Western explorers.

In this study, a reconstruction is offered for the phonetic evolution of rhymes from Old Tibetan to modern-day Amdo Tibetan dialects. The relevant sound changes are proposed, along with their relative chronological precedence and the dating of some specific changes. Most interestingly, although Amdo Tibetan, identically to its ancestor Old Tibetan, does not have phonemic length, this study shows that Amdo Tibetan derives from an intermediate stage which, like many other Tibetan dialects, does make the distinction.