In order to introduce Mozi's thought, almost every contemporary textbook on Chinese philosophy refers to his ten novel theses or dogmas, which have been preserved as the titles of the Core chapters (8–37): to elevate the worthy, to conform upward, to care for all, to condemn military aggression, to moderate expenses as well as burials, to acknowledge the will of Heaven and the percipient ghosts, and to condemn music as well as fatalism. Through a close reading of the Mozi and other early sources written by or attributed to masters, this paper argues, first, that these ten core ideas may not have been promoted by the earliest spokesmen of Mohism but gradually emerged while various layers of the book Mozi were written, and, second, that these ten ideas were not consistently attributed to early Mohism by Zhou and Han masters: their association of Mo with these specific mottos is limited and inconsistent. A focus on the most well-known motto – “care for all” – shows that there was no awareness of its belonging exclusively to one thinker or school. The difference between the earliest and the contemporary characterizations of Mozi sheds new light not only on early Mohism, but also on our preconceptions when reading early sources.

The book under review here is to be compared with the volume published over ten years ago under the editorship of Michael Cook, Studies in the economic history of the Middle East (London, 1970). It covers essentially the same subject over the same period of time in the same fashion, by a series of papers contributed to a major international conference. It differs first of all in the length of time it has taken to produce the work, seven years from the original conference at Princeton in 1974, compared with three from the conference at S.O.A.S. in 1967 to the publication of the earlier collection. It is in fact much longer, with more space and time allowed to the contributors to rewrite their papers and annotate them, in great and often discursive detail. The editor is to be complimented on the very high standard of the production of the mammoth tome which results. The weight is heavily on the countryside and the agricultural economy; neither trade, nor industry, nor urban life make much of an appearance except as their adjuncts. Only historical demography (4 articles) stands in any way as a separate subject. More usual is the emphasis upon Egypt, which once again receives the greatest attention, in ten or eleven out of the total twenty-four contributions. Atypical as the Nile valley may seem, its source materials continue to influence the pattern of research in the much wider field of the book's title. Elsewhere it is something of a shock to find, in the papers of Morony on seventh-century Iraq, Talbi on ninth-century Ifrīqiya, Burns on fourteenth-century Valencia, and Rafeq on eighteenth-century Syria, the wealth of detail that comes from a legal literature, an archive or court records, and to realize how few and far between such studies are outside Egypt.

The list of words and phrases contained in this article is one of ten manuscript vocabularies bound up in a volume lettered Kŏ Kwŏ Yï Yü which forms part of the collection of Chinese books made by the well-known missionary, Morrison (who lived from 1782–1834), and has been deposited on permanent loan by University College, London, in the Library of the School of Oriental Studies.

The appearance of Sir Harold Bailey's Dictionary of Khotan Saka brings to completion a project conceived as long ago as 1934 and initiated in 1945 with the publication ofKhotanese texts, I. The next two decades saw the appearance of five further volumes of texts (Khotanese Buddhist texts, 1951, and Khotanese texts, II–v, 1954–63) as well as of a much-admired volume of lexical commentary, Khotanese texts, VI: Prolexis to the Book of Zambasta (1967). In style and method the Dictionary closely resembles the Prolexis, demonstrating once again its author's extraordinary erudition and ingenuity, this time on a truly monumental scale.

In the literature which has grown up around the Burmese tradition of the 37 nats two omissions have been generally conspicuous. Much has been placed on record regarding the cults of individual members of this pantheon; yet what constitutes the corporate cult of the 37 remains obscure. In casting around for a unifying principle, writers on the subject have made much of the secular status of the persons who became nats and the manner of their deaths. It has escaped comment that most of the details recorded belong not so much tomythology as to hagiography, and concern the earthly careers of those who were deified rather than their nature and powers as gods.1

The Anglo-Ethiopian Treaty of 1902 was designed to determine the frontier between the Sudan and Ethiopia. In an annex to this treaty the British, Italian, and Ethiopian Governments embodied a number of agreed modifications to the frontier between the Sudan and Eritrea (Italy's colonia primogenita) as well as to that between Ethiopia and Eritrea. While the latter survived until the Italo-Ethiopian war of 1935–6 (and was re-established, in substance, by the British Military Administration in 1941 subsisting until the Ethiopian-Eritrean federation in 1952), the Sudan-Ethiopian frontier has remained substantially unchanged to the present day. The treaty was the culmination of protracted negotiations between the Emperor Menelik and the British Agent in Ethiopia, Lt.-Col. J. L. Harrington.

This paper is a study of the verbal forms of Bilin,1 which is spoken in and around the town of Keren in Eritrea. Bilin is usually regarded as one of the dialects of the Cushitic language of Agau,2 but it differs considerably from the Agau dialects of Ethiopia proper, and, while undoubtedly to be classified as Cushitic, has much phonological, and a little morphological affinity with the neighbouring Semitic languages of Tigre and Tigrinya. Research was undertaken in the field in 1952–3; several informants were employed, but much of the material was provided from the speech of one man, Teclamaryam Tecruray, and all the material presented here was verified as valid for his speech.

One of the greatest Persian poets, Afḍal al-Dīn Ibrāhīm Khāqānī, is still insufficiently known to the public. Only in 1937 was his Dīvān printed in Tehran, and before that date the readers had to content themselves with an inconvenient Indian lithograph published some seventy years ago. The long Mathnavī (Tuḥfat al 'Irāqayn) in which the poet describes his pilgrimage accomplished in 551–2/1156–7 is available only in Indian lithographs.

The economic state of Ṣafavid Persia has not been extensively studied and much of that which is known is deived from European sources, British, Dutch, and Russian in particular and to a lesser extent from the French, Venetian, Turkish, and Portuguese archives. There is no doubt that among the buildings of the Court at Iṣfahān there were one or more registries (daftarkhāna) in which archives were kept and documentation recorded on a systematic basis. There is internal evidence from royal correspondence to earlier exchanges of letters and in some cases later decrees are modelled on earlier ones. Unfortunately, economic information from Persian sources has scarcley survived and it has to be presumed from circumstantial evidence that following the occupation of Iṣfahān by the Afghans the archives were destroyed or burnt.

In this essay an attempt will be made, with the assistance of Chinese sources, to define the political status of Tāmbraliṅga in South East Asian history from the end of the tenth century until the early thirteenth century. This subject has been bedevilled by a textual error in the Sung shih in connexion with an embassy from Tāmbraliṅga to China in 1001, with the name for Tāmbraliṅga rendered as ‘Tan-mei-liu ’; the transliteration should have been ‘Tan-liu-mei ’ The error was a minor one, but unfortunately it has had consequences out of proportion to its size. In particular, it seems to have been indirectly responsible for an exaggerated estimate of the extent of Śrīvijayan influence in the Malay Peninsula during a considerable part of that empire's history.

Both the Muslim exegetical tradition and most Western scholarship have posited that the term islām in the Quran means “submission”, i.e. to God, and that it refers to the religion brought by the prophet Muhammad. This paper argues that neither of these assertions is correct. Rather, the abstract noun islām as used in the Quran means “tradition”. It is underlain by the Aramaic mashlmānūtā, which in turn was the term generally used to translate the Greek paradosis. That the Greek usage had a direct impact on Arabic is also considered. The wide range of meanings given paradosis by Greek and Syriac authors is surveyed. A close reading of Quran verses in which the word islām appears shows that it refers to the prophetic tradition of monotheism rather than the surrender of an individual to God. It is synonymous with the Logos of Abraham, in which all the monotheistic religions participate.

In his phonemic analysis of Lhasa Tibetan in Love songs of the sixth Dalai Lama Jaw Yuanrenn (Y. R. Chao) notices ‘variations’ of some of the phonemes, and ascribes some of these ‘variations’ to differences in tempo or to chance: of the phoneme that he writes as ‘e’ he says ‘ i, 10 3 khrel gzhung tş'ilcuῃtş'ilcuŋ’ [it may sometimes change to l, e.g. in song 10, line 3, khrel gzhung tş'cuῃ is pronounced tş'ilcuῃ]; of the phoneme ‘a’, ‘ә 1 2 lam buhi lamp'ø lәmpø’ [it may change to ә in rapid speech, e.g. in song 4, line 2, lam buhi lamp'ø is pronounced lәmpø]; and of the phoneme ‘o’, ‘u, 36 3 rlung po luŋpo luŋbu’ [it may occasionally be pronounced u, e.g. in song 36, line 3, rlung po luŋpo is pronounced lunbu]; but a phonological analysis of the speech of Rinzin Wangpo (rig-'dzin dbang-po) (R.), a Lhasa-dialect-speaking Tibetan, overwhelmingly suggests that vowel alternations such as these should be attributed to vowel harmony.

This Law was promulgated under cover of Legislative Decree No. 59 of 17th September, 1953, during the Shishakly regime, and came into force on 1st November of the same year. It thus represents the latest development in the series of reforms in Shari'a law, as applied by the courts, which have appeared, one after the other, in the different countries of the Near East during the last few decades. The first major example—if we ignore legislation primarily concerned with matters of procedure—was provided by the Ottoman Law of Family Rights of 1917 which, short-lived though it proved in Turkey, was applied at the end of the First World War, with minor modifications, in Syria and Lebanon and, with further modifications, in Jordan. Next, there were the series of Egyptian reforms of 1920, 1929, 1923, 1943, and 1946—preceded, interspersed, and followed by similar, but much more piecemeal, innovations in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Then, as the immediate precursor of this Syrian Law, came the Jordanian Law of Personal Status of 1951—while a somewhat similar enactment has now been under consideration for a number of years in Iraq, but seems unlikely, for the present, to be promulgated.

In a previous study I indicated that some verbal constructs in Hindi whose components were analysable, at the morphological level, as noun + verb could be considered as comprised in the overall category of verb at the syntactical level on account of their patterning in the participial forms, and suggested T. Grahame Baileys term ‘conjunct verbs’ as a convenient term of reference for this sub-category. The aim of the present study is to consider ‘conjunct verbs’ more closely, and to relate both these and what Bailey terms ‘compound verbsx2019; to each other and to the Hindi verbal system as a whole.

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.

There is no article “funeral” in the Enchclopædia of Islam so it seemed good to collect the material on this subject. The first charge on a Musulim' estate was the cost of his funeral, the provision of grave-clothes, tomb, and the expense of washing the body.

Washing

The body was washed by those nearest to the dead; normally men prepared a man for burial. “They turned up their sleeves, tucked their shirts into their belts, washed him, and wrapped him in the winding sheet.” Abū Baki was washed by his widow and Jābir b. Zaid gave orders that his widow should wash his body; this rule is generlized in al-Mudawwana.

With few surviving chronicles and the loss of almost all the state archives, historians of the later Ṣafavid period have to rely to a disproportionate degree on the accounts of European travellers. Fortunately some of these, such as Chardin, Tavernier and Olearius, have left pre-eminent examples of the genre, but even so, few attempts have been made to explore their preceonceptions, prejudices or the extent of their understanding of Persian society. Almost all travelled for a well-defined purpose, as members of diplomatic missions, military advisers, missionaries or merchants, and their attitudes and the kind of information they recorded naturally were determined by these preoccupations. They did not necessarily ask the kind of questions that interest historians today and rarely reached levels of Persian cultural and intellectual life beyond the Court and provincial officialdom.

One of the great problems in the study of Zoroastrianism has been to determine what were the new elements in Zoroaster's teachings—elements which roused such bitter hostility among his own people that he was driven to seek exile and to find his first converts among strangers. It is a problem because, through comparison with the Vedic religion, it has been possible to establish a good deal about the religion of the Iranians before Zoroaster, and naturally even more is known about the religion of the Zoroastrian church after him; and the two are remarkably and disconcertingly similar, as if the second were in many respects a natural development of the first, without any break in continuity, whereas neither is very fully or clearly reflected in Zoroaster's own highly complex Gāthās. Western scholars have fairly generally sought to explain this apparent anomaly by postulating that in many points of doctrine the religion of the Zoroastrian church is not in fact that preached by its prophet; they suppose, that is, that the followers of Zoroaster fairly rapidly betrayed his teachings and evolved a syncretic religion in which they reverted to many ancient beliefs and observances which he himself had denounced.

The data and analyses of Tangut verbal morphology which I have presented (1979b, 1981, 1982, 1985) represent the cumulative result of more than twenty years of research of Tangut texts. It is with great regret that I saw my analyses misunderstood (LaPolla, 1992). In order to clarify my view on the Tangut verbal agreement, I feel compelled to give a succinct account of the phenomena causing so much controversy in the Tibeto-Burman linguistic literature.

The Tangut verb shows agreement for person and number of actant. The three overt agreement morphemes are <-ŋa2> (first person singular), <-na2> (second person singular) and <-ni2> (first and second person plural). The Tangut verb shows overt agreement only with first and second person actant. Third person involvement is marked by zero. A Tangut intransitive verb agrees with the subject, i.e. the ‘intransitive subject’. The two rules for the distribution of the overt agreement markers in the transitive verb as formulated in my Tangut grammar (Kepping, 1985: 233–4) are: (1) If one and no more than one of the actants is a first or second person, then the verb will overtly agree with that actant regardless of its syntactic role, and (2) if a transitive verb has two non-third person actants, the verb will agree with the grammatical patient or ‘transitive object’.

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.