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.

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.

Modern scholarship dealing with the history of Arabic grammar has almost entirely neglected serious consideration of the possibility that during the very early period of the Iraqi grammatical schools, a Medinese centre of that science was a living fact. I believe that the data collected by some scholars, including myself, will now allow the conclusion that such a school really existed and probably disappeared during the first century of the 'Abbāsid regime. First, the few accounts of eighth-century Medinese grammarians in modern works will be surveyed, then the available material will be carefully studied and evaluated.

It seems impossible at present to publish an investigation into a problem of the grammar of a language without becoming involved in the disputes which are being conducted between adherents of different methodological schools. In his review of my monograph Zur Funktion einiger Hilfsverben im modernen Hindi (Mainz, Akademie, 1958) in BSOAS, XXIII, 3, I960, 602–3, Mr. Burton-Page has made statements which indicate clearly enough that there is a difference of opinion between him and me on matters of principle. Moreover, he points to his article ‘Compound and conjunct verbs in Hindi’ (BSOAS, XIX, 3, 1957, 469–78), which seems to be typical of a kind of structuralist approach. This article, in connexion with the judgments and programmatic and methodological statements of the review, implies a particular challenge for discussion. I am grateful to Mr. Burton-Pago for this challenge.

The significance of Political Philosophy for the philosophy of Islam and A Judaism in the Middle Ages has been recognized in recent years, and the importance of Plato's Republic and Laws together with Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics for the falāsifa is becoming increasingly evident. Attention has been drawn to Alfārabī's political treatises, to Ibn Bājja, to Averroes' Commentaries on Plato's Republic and on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, to Ibn al-Ṭiqṭaqa and to Ibn Khaldun. The reception of Platonic and Aristotelian political ideas conditions—in varying degrees—the attitude of the falāsifa to the State as such, to the Muslim State in particular, and therefore to the Sharī‘a of Islam and to Greek philosophy, both practical and theoretical. This is already clear from the writings of Alfārābī, but in his attempt at blending and harmonizing Greek-Hellenistic and Islamic conceptions no Alfarabian philosophy proper with distinct features of a definitive, authoritatively formulated synthesis emerges. It was left to Averroes—to use the name by which Ibn Rushd was generally known to the West—to work out a peculiarly Islamic religious philosophy. He establishes in unequivocal terms the supreme authority of the Sharī‘a and its identity of purpose with falsafa, religious philosophy in the Faṣl al-maqāl, the Manāhij, the Tahāfut al-tahāfut and his Commentary on Plato's Republic. The last named forms the main subject of the present article. In an earlier study it was considered in connexion with his Commentary on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics already, but not with his other treatises just mentioned. This is, however, necessary in order to gain a correct, balanced view of his philosophy, and especially of his political thought. It is equally important to see his political Commentaries against the background of his active life as qāḍī and of contemporary Muslim history in the Maghreb.

Numerous Arab geographers and Persian literary texts refer with a variety of detail to an important desert caravanserai known as Dayr-i gachīn (Ar. Dayr al-jiss), situated to the south of Ray. The word dayr, meaning in Arabic ‘monastery’, or perhaps ‘hospice’, seems a natural term for a caravanserai. That the term could also mean a domed building and a fire temple is suggested by both the Burhān-i qāti' and the Farhang-i Ānandrāj. The Burhān-i qāti', under ‘Khwarnaq’, states:

Khwarnaq is the arabized word for Khuwarna, and this was a most excellent building which was built for Bahrām-i Gūr by Nu'mān b. Mundhir … and the other palace, which had three domes, one inside the other, and was built as a temple and a place of worship, they called Si-dayr since in Pahlavi they call a dome ‘dayr’.

Among the numerous Islamic documents preserved in the Venetian State Archives are a few which come from the chancery of Mamluk Egypt. One of the most interesting of these is a letter from Sultan Qaitbay to the Doge Nicolo Trono, dated 10 Sha'bān 877/10 January 1473, which is to be presented here in its original Arabic together with a contemporary Italian translation found in the enormous diplomatic register known as the Libri Commemoriali.

This article explores the careers of craftsmen and other commoners, who succeeded in joining the bureaucratic system and occupying high positions in the Mamluk administrative establishment, eventually acquiring great power and even political authority. At the same time Sufi shaykhs, also men of common origin and beneficiaries of Mamluk philanthropy, emerged as mighty and authoritative figures, venerated equally by the aristocracy and the populace. The newly privileged groups also figure as founders of Friday mosques following a flexible new attitude on the part of the authorities. This social fluidity, often criticized by historians of the period, was the result of the pious patronage of the Mamluk aristocracy, which brought academic education to the reach of a large part of the populace. Towards the end of the Mamluk period, the structure of religious institutions had itself been levelled: the Friday mosque with Sufi service replaced the earlier madrasas and khanqāhs. The article also discusses how the visual arts of the period mirror the social changes with new aspects of artistic patronage.

For 300 years after Vasco da Gama touched Calicut generations of traders, merchants, missionaries, soldiers, and other emissaries from at least five different nations of Europe took their turn in India, pursuing their interests at a respectful distance, making no obtrusive efforts to scrape acquaintance with Sanskrit culture. Such advances were socially difficult, and would not have been welcomed. Moreover, our early associations were with Dravidian India, and very few cultured Brahmins sought membership of Christian Churches.

The monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai possesses a large collection of odocuments concerning its own affairs and dating from the Fāṭimid, Ayyūbid, Mamlūk, and Ottoman periods. They were used for historical purposes as early as the seventeenth century by certain writers belonging to the monastery, but, if exception be made for the pioneer (but limited) work done by B. Moritz in the early years of this century, they remained unexploited by modern scholars. The American expedition of 1950, which has microfilmed about one-half of the library's manuscripts in various languages, brought back microfilms of the entire collection of Arabic and Turkish documents, thus making a thorough study of them possible for the first time. There is no need to specify the earlier bibliography of the Sinai documents, since readers of this Bulletin can obtain the necessary information from an article of mine published in an earlier volume.

While working in the Algemeen Rijksarchief, The Hague, in 1973, this writer had his attention drawn by Dr. G. V. Smith to an envelope in Koloniaal Archief 982 (Overgekomen Brieven en Papieren 1620) which apparently contained several early Javanese letters. Upon investigation these proved to be original correspondence between the dignitaries of Bantěn and the Dutch under Jan Pietersz. Coen after the Dutch conquest of Batavia in 1619. They are written not in Javanese but in Malay, five of the letters employing Javanese script and one Arabic script. The letters are of interest as evidence of the Bantěn opinion of the Dutch (although the reader would be wrong to accept the innocent tone of the letters at face value) and as early examples of pasar Malay, the lingua franca of maritime South-East Asia.

On several occasions in his writings Ibn Sīnā discusses the problem of destiny (al-qadar), by which he means primarily the problem of reconciling the divine determination of human acts and characters with the rewards and punishments of the after-life, in such a way as to safeguard God's justice to man. This aspect of the problem of theodicy had arisen long before his time out of statements of the Qur'ān and Traditions, and had been settled in their own fashions by Mu'tazilite and predestinarian theologians. Ibn Slna as a philosopher could hardly avoid offering a solution, if only to satisfy the doubts of his Muslim public; but he goes beyond a perfunctory answer, and seems to show a genuine interest in finding an intellectually convincing solution consistent with his own philosophy.

On the hills in the angle formed by Assam and Bhutan2live the Hruso, called by their neighbours Aka or Angha, a band of “ bold and daring robbers and cut-throats ” who exert great influence on the powerful and numerous clans of the Midzi tribe on the southern slopes of the Himalayas. The Hruso act as intermediaries for the Midzi in contacting the peoples of the valley of Assam.

Being rather inconspicuous among the many beautiful and important exhibits of the Benaki Museum in Athens, the small bowl described in the present paper has so far received but scant attention and has not been published before.

It is well known that, according to Pliny, the originating terminal for caravans conveying frankincense from South Arabia to the Mediterranean was at Shabwa; and there has been much talk of an ‘incense road’ followed by those caravans. It is, however, very unlikely that there was any single ‘road’ invariably followed. More probably, there was a multiplicity of routes, any one of which might be chosen according to prevailing circumstances. One such route runs directly from Shabwa to the eastern end of the Wādī Jawf, across a gravel corridor bisecting the Sayhad sand-desert, surveyed by Philby in 1936. The possibility of this route has been disregarded mainly because of a widely prevalent but tendentious translation of Pliny's remark, ‘evehi non potest nisi per Gebbanitas’, as ‘[the frankincense] cannot be exported [from Shabwa] except through the land of the Gebbanites’, where the text says nothing about a ‘land’ but merely ‘by the Gebbanites’. Other possible routes are one skirting the southern edge of the sand-desert and passing through Tumna', and one reaching the upper Wādī Bayḥān by way of Nisab and the Wadi Markha. West of Bayhan, the passes of Nagd. Marqad and Mablaqa clearly represent alternative routes.

IN the literary world of medieval Christendom, few works rival the popularity of the edifying tale of Barlaam and Ioasaph. As is well known, the work purports to relate the conversion of the Indians by the Christian sage and ascetic Barlaam. In reality, it is a Christianized version of episodes from the life of Buddha. In its Western form, it consists of a set of apologues or fables woven into a narrative framework, and interspersed with quotations from the Scriptures and from the Greek Fathers. All versions in European languages derive from the Greek Barlaam, which became well-known from the 11th century onwards.

The Akhbārī/Uṣūlī controversy within Twelver Shī‘ism has been portrayed in Western-language scholarship primarily as a scholastic dispute over jurisprudential methodology which came to fruition only in eleventh/seventeenthcentury Ṣafawid Iran. Uṣūlism is generally characterized as having stressed recourse to rationalist, subjective forms of analysis—particularly the principle of ijtihād (independent judicial reasoning)—on legal questions where the revealed sources were deemed wanting. Akhbārism has been portrayed mainly in negative terms, as having forbad recourse to speculative reasoning in favour of reliance solely on the Twelver-accepted revelation— the Qur'ān and the sunna, the latter especially including the akhbār (sg. khabar), the Arabiclanguage body of statements of and narratives about the twelve Shī‘īImāms, the last of whom disappeared in 260 A.H./A.D. 873–874.

The Zāyande Rūd, from Lenjān to the Gāv Khūnī, was regulated by an elaborate system, which is said to go back to Safavid times. This system remained in force until A.H. 1315 (shamsī, A.D. 1936), when it underwent alteration, owing to the fact that, on government orders, the cultivation of cotton was substituted in the lands watered by the Zāyande Rūd for the cultivation of rice.

The details of this regulation are found in an interesting document, popularly known as Shaikh Bahā‘ī’s ūmār, to be found in the Finance Ministry of Isfahan. The precise date of the origin of the ūmār is uncertain. The following words are written at the beginning of the document: “Written in the sealing office of the late Shah Tahmasp 923.”

The Treatise on the Mahāyāna Awakening of Faith, an indigenous Chinese composition written in the guise of an Indian Buddhist treatise, is one of the most influential texts in the history of East Asian Buddhism. Its outline of the doctrines of buddha nature (foxing), buddha bodies (foshen), and one mind (yixin), among others, served from the medieval period onwards as one of the main foundations of East Asian Buddhist thought and practice. The Treatise is putatively attributed to the Indian writer Aśvaghoṣa, and its current Chinese version was traditionally conceived of as a translation from an original Sanskrit text. In the course of the twentieth century, however, many important scholars of Buddhism have called into question the textual history of the Treatise. Even if the specific circumstances of its creation are still largely unknown, the view that the Treatise is an original Chinese composition (not necessarily written by a native Chinese) is now prevalent among scholars. Meanwhile, and for more than one hundred years, the text has also become a source of knowledge of Buddhism in the West thanks to a number of English translations. After examining the early textual history of the two existing versions of the text, this article will offer some examples of its modern appropriation by a novel group of readers and interpreters, an appropriation that took place during the first decades of the twentieth century amidst efforts to re-envision Chinese and East Asian Buddhist history and the place of Buddhism in modern society.