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’.

One of the more obvious facts about the occurrence of grammatical concord in a language is the possibility of classifying the words -that operate the concord. The simplest kind of classification is one in which a class consists of all those words which require or display a particular set of agreements. In this way a definite number of classes is established, but there is no indication of any relationship between the classes, indeed the nature of such relationships, if any, is a subject for further investigation. As is widely known, in Bantu languages grammatical concord is operated by means of prefix agreement, a fact which is moreover one of the criteria used to determine whether or not a given language is to be accepted as Bantu. For this reason it is possible to examine on a general basis certain features of the class system of these languages that is involved in the use of concord.

On several occasions, when my Persian coaster ventured into the Indian Ocean and was battered by too heavy seas, and I was murmuring the verse of Hafiz:– Dr. L. D. Barnett, like the expert pilot he is, came to the rescue. As a token of gratitude I wish him to accept my translation of the chapter on India extracted from the unpublished part of Gardīzī′s historical work.

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.

An important passage which has often been treated, but not so far satisfactorily, is found on page 186 of the Iranian text of the Bundahišn, lines 11–12,

that is, but dēv ān kē-š pat Hindūkān paristēnd api-š vaχš pat ān butīhā mēhmān <i > čēegōn bōδˇāsaf paristēt: “the demon But is that which they worship in India and in his images a spirit is resident which is worshipped as Bōδāsaf.”

The tercentenary year of the second siege of Vienna by the Turks has seen the first-fruits of a long-planned venture, the publication in full of the Ottoman documents preserved in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv. This first part presents, in facsimile and with full transcription and translation, the texts of 36 documents issued in the name of Süleymān the Magnificent (1520–66), one being addressed to Charles V as ‘King of Spain’, 28 to Ferdinand I as ‘King of Austria’ and later as Emperor, and seven to Ferdinand's son and successor, the Emperor Maximilian. The earliest, a remarkably splendid fragment, is the beginning of a fetḥnāme, probably sent from Baghdad in December 1534 to report victories in Persia to Ferdinand as being (ostensibly) a friendly neighbour after the conclusion of peace the previous year; nos. 2–8 relate to negotiations during the war-years 1541–7; nos. 9–15, mainly recriminations over frontier skirmishes but with another fine fetḥnāme (no. 11) of 1549, belong to the brief period of uneasy peace; nos. 16–27 concern peace-feelers and embassies during the war-years 1551–62, no. 25 being the 'ahdnāme; a main topic of the remainder is the tribute, while no. 32 is the renewal of the 'ahdnāme of 1562 in favour of the new emperor Maximilian.

FOR years now the question of orthography in the South African Bantu languages has kept the authorities busy. It flares up periodically in different parts of the country, and local committees are called from time to time to deal with the conflagration.

In the past, unfortunately, these committees have too often concerned themselves with the problems of one language only, and apparently ignored both the effect their decisions would have on literature exchange and the attempts of previous committees to solve similar problems in related languages. Thus we have Zulu and Xhosa, very closely related languages, with considerable orthographical differences, while North Sotho and Tswana now differ from each other and from South Sotho, which (perhaps wisely) has set its face against orthographic change since 1906.

Until Dr. Jacob Nhlapo launched his campaign for Southern Bantu linguistic unity, few people had seriously considered the possibility of an orthographic system which would cover both the Nguni and Sotho groups, the feeling being that such unity lay in the realms of wishful thinking in view of the virtual impossibility of achieving unity within the groups.

The present article is an attempt to combine the experience of past efforts into a system that would actually be applicable to these two language groups. The acceptance of such a system would naturally involve great sacrifices of tradition and prestige from both parties. This aspect is not to be ignored, but at the same time can have little connection with the scientific elaboration of an alphabet. Consequently the argument “The Sotho (or the Nguni) would never accept such a solution” must be relegated to the sphere of practical politics.

Since the publication in the West last century of a major Sunnī work on the Islamic sects, those interested in the early firaq have found themselves dependent on the heresiographical tradition. Islamicists have had little choice in the matter; most writing and thinking produced in circles later deemed heterodox has not been preserved, and to a large extent is available only through the mediation of the heresiographers. While material of other sorts has not gone unstudied, it has for the most part been the heresiographers who have shaped the way we look at early Islamic sectarianism.

This marriage of modern scholarship and medieval heresiography is, however, a distinctly uncomfortable one. As indispensable as the firaq material may be, questions about its reliability persist. The difficulties which characterize this literature are well known, and hardly need to be rehearsed here: it is late, highly schematic, and frequently hostile to the doctrines and groups which it describes. To these might be added one other problem noted less frequently: most of the books in general academic circulation have passed through Ash'arite and/or Mu‘tazilite hands. If, as we shall see, the tradition is not entirely synoptic, there are at least powerful forces at work which militate against a diversity of perspectives.

Although the ratio between Egyptian gold coins (dinars) and those of silver (dirhams) is known to have fluctuated throughout the history of Islamic Egypt, no attempt has been made to explain the principles underlying the rate of exchange. Any such research is handicapped from the start by a deplorable failure on the part of numismatists to provide their fellow-historians with details concerning the alloys of various Egyptian coins. This drawback deprives us of any means of counterchecking the textual evidence. Nevertheless, it is the belief of the present writer that the material contained in written sources relating to the period of the Ayyūbids (A.H. 569–648/A.D. 1174–1250), allows us to ascertain certain facts concerning the contemporary exchange pattern. The analysis of the nature of that pattern shows clearly that the exchange rate of the gold and silver issues of the BaḥrI Mamlūks (A.H. 648–784/A.D. 1250– 1390), which remained fixed at 1: 20, 1: 25, and 1: 28 1/2, had its roots in the system of the Ayyūbids.

Contemporary accounts of the events which led up to the Afghan conquest of Persia in 1722 ascribe some importance to the role played by the Georgians in this catastrophe. The well-known narrative of Jonas Hanway and reports of Catholic missionaries, European travellers, and Consular agents, together with the published documents from Russian archives, indicate that the deterioration of relations between the Shah and the King of K'art'li was among the factors which assisted Mīr Maḥmūd's enterprise. In the present brief study, the archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the Quai d'Orsay, as well as Georgian sources, have been drawn on to sketch the history of Georgian relations with the government of Shah Sulṭān Ḥusayn, and follow up some suggestive indications contained in Professor Minorsky's own writings.

This article examines the attitudes of the Quranic mushrikūn to the resurrection and the afterlife, focusing on those who doubted or denied the reality of both. The first part of the article argues that the doubters and deniers had grown up in a monotheist environment familiar with both concepts and that it was from within the monotheist tradition that they rejected them. The second part (published in a forthcoming issue of BSOAS) relates their thought to intellectual currents in Arabia and the Near East in general, arguing that the role of their pagan heritage in their denial is less direct than normally assumed. It is also noted that mutakallims such as Abū ʿĪsā al-Warrāq and al-Māturīdī anticipated the main conclusions reached in this paper.

This article examines a group of ten Indonesian inscriptions citing a range of gāthās, mantras and dhāraṇīs. The texts, contextualized and in some cases read and identified for the first time, underline the pan-Asian character of Buddhism and the integral place the Indonesian archipelago once held in the ancient Buddhist world. The identification of the sources of several of these texts in known Sanskrit scriptures raises the question whether some of these texts, none of which survives as such in the archipelago, were once transmitted there in manuscript form.

This paper is a contribution to the study of the relations between science and technology in seventeenth-century China. I hope that its unusual perspective may help to illuminate the problem of how these two areas of human activity relate to each other in a more general context. Outside the small group of interested scholars the relations between science and technology are not seen as problematical. In the popular stereotype, scientists are trie people who make discoveries, while technologists simply find out how to use what they have discovered. This crude view has some support from historical fact. Over the last hundred years there has undoubtedly been a steady flow of useful ideas from (for instance) the physicist to the engineer and from the biochemist to the agronomist.

There exists a considerable body of scholarly literature on the contributions of the Jesuit missionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the knowledge of geography in China. Much of this literature is centred around the world maps of Matteo Ricci. Studies have been made on the different editions of these maps, on the sources of information (both European and Chinese) that Ricci must have used, on the reception by the Chinese literati of Ricci's time of the maps and the world-view represented by them, and on the possible influence of Renaissance cartography on Chinese map-making. Writers differ on the importance and utility of these maps and their influence.

THAT there existed an Arabic translation of the commentary of Themistius on the De Anima of Aristotle has long been known through the references made to it in the works of Ibn Rushd.1 The commentary itself is mentioned by Ibn al-Nadīm in the Fihrist.2 In his note on the De Anima he says: ‘ Themistius wrote a commentary on the whole of this work. He dealt with the first section in two sections, the second in two, and the third in three ’—a division which corresponds to that of the Greek text as we have it. Unfortunately, on the subject of the translation, Ibn al-Nadim's article is not without ambiguity. According to it, Hunain ibn Ishāq translated the entire De Anima into Syriac, while his son, Ishāq, translated the greater part of it into Arabic, and then made a second and complete translation. Ibn al-Nadīm proceeds to quote Ishāq himself as saying: ‘ I translated this work into Arabic from a defective manuscript. Then, after thirty years, I found an extremely good manuscript with which I collated my first version’. The quotation ends with the words: ‘ and it is the commentary of Themistius ’.

From the studies of Zurvanism made in this century, a large measure of agreement has been reached. It is accepted that Zurvan ‘est en general le dieu du firmament lumineux et étoilé … avant tout le dieu du sort … en général regardé comme un dieu quadriforme’; and that his cult was ‘enraciné surtout dans l'lran occidental’. But a fundamental disagreement has developed over the origin of Zurvanism. H. S. Nyberg, although pointing out scrupulously that ‘le mythe zervanite n'st directement attesté que dans le mazdéisme’, and that ‘nous ne trouvons jamais un système zervanite où Ormuzd ne soit représenté’, has nevertheless maintained that Zurvan is an ancient Iranian god, whose cult, older than Zoroaster, has been partly adopted into, and partly obliterated by, orthodox Mazdeism. In this he has been followed by a number of scholars.

One of the most controversial aspects of Hittite phonology is the question of the significance, if any, of the so-called plene-writing of vowels. Explanations for this practice have been sought in a variety of directions. Some have seen in it the continuation of a tradition inherited from predecessors of the Hittite cuneiform syllabary with perhaps little relevance to the facts of the Hittite language. Others have been more confident in seeing in it a method of representing some real linguistic feature, such as vowel length, while inconsistencies or apparent inconsistencies in its use have led others to the conclusion that it has often no functional significance at all. No full-scale investigation of the phenomenon covering the entire Hittite corpus has yet been carried out, nor is such an attempt practicable here. The present paper has the restricted aim of investigating one particular phenomenon, the occurrence of plene-writing in different syllables in different inflexional forms of the same words, and the material drawn upon is chiefly Old and Middle Hittite, since it seems likely that certain patterns of variation in the use of plene-writing were quite early disturbed by analogical levelling within paradigms, or eliminated by the abandonment of plene-writing in the words in question; nevertheless, I believe that the oldest texts in particular still preserve enough evidence for these patterns to be discernible and that the reasons for them are intelligible in historical terms.

The challenge of establishing the chronology of the early Zhou dynasty, especially the date of the Zhou Conquest of Shang, periodically arouses the intense interest of scholars. Down the centuries interest in the general problem has revived whenever advances in calendrical, astronomical, or textual knowledge seemed to offer the promise of a breakthrough. Extraordinary efforts have repeatedly been brought to bear, but until quite recently little progress was achieved in verifying benchmarks prior to 841 B.C., a date already regarded as secure in the time of Sima Qian toward the end of the second century B.C.

The Palaungs, called by themselves Ta-ang, are an ethnic group speaking a language of Northern Mon-Khmer type, distributed widely in the Shan State of Burma and the adjacent border regions of Yunnan, and having its greatest concentration in the former state of Tawngpeng in the northwestern part of the Shan State, where Palaungs are a majority in the population. Occupied chiefly in growing and trading in tea, they are at the same time the most prosperous of the minor hill races of Burma and the only one to have adopted Buddhism. Their language, which is not written—Shan being used as a written language by educated Palaungs—shows the influence of both Shan and Burmese; Shan loans are particularly frequent in the formal language of songs. A grammar and dictionary were published by Mrs. Leslie Milne in 1921 and 1931 respectively.