Yenitsa, in Ottoman Turkish Yenije-i Vardar or Vardar Yenijesi, is a small town some 50 km. west of Thessaloniki. Situated at the foot of Mount Païkon, near the lake of the same name (which was drained several years ago), it was in the Ottoman period an important Turkish military and cultural centre, particularly as being the base of the ghāzīs, the ‘warriors for the Faith’, who had followed the great march-lord (uj-begi) Evrenos on his campaigns in Thrace and Macedonia. Very early, perhaps as early as 1372, Evrenos had come to Central Macedonia with his followers and settled in this place, where already there was probably a Byzantine castle. There soon grew up a township, from which Evrenos and his sons and grandsons set out on repeated raids in all directions, devastating the countryside and preparing the way for the definitive occupation of Macedonia, and later of Albania, by the ‘central’ apparatus under the command of the sultan. It is probable that the several occupations of various towns in this area, such as Veria (Turkish: Karaferye) and Thessaloniki, were the achievement of these raiders. Yenije soon had a con-siderable Turkish population, so that in 1430, after the final occupation of Thessaloniki, Murad II was able to order the deportation from there to the newly-conquered city of a thousand Turkish families without reducing Yenije's prosperity.

It is a remarkable fact that of the Achehnese language, one of the most important languages of Sumatra, no grammatical description has ever appeared in print that meets minimum requirements. The only grammar extant is K. H. van Langen's Handleiding voor de beoefening der Atjehsche taal (The Hague, 1889). But notwithstanding Van Langen's laudable effort under difficult conditions, his work does not do justice to the language. There are two main objections. First, it is based on the written language. This is (or was in Van Langen's time) exclusively written in Arabic script, which clearly represents an earlier stage of the Achehnese language when certain phonemes had a different value and certain finals existed which have now been dropped. But Van Langen based even his transliteration in Latin characters on these archaic and obsolete Arabic spellings. The second objection is that the author never realized that Achehnese is an inflecting language, and treated certain personal prefixes as indicating a passive voice and a gerund instead of flexional elements of the verb. One aspect of his work is, however, still useful: the chrestomathy which forms a part of it, written in Arabic script, with a transliteration and a translation of some of the texts.

A discussion of the mathematical manuscripts of Mauretania requires an overall introduction to this almost completely unexplored literature.

Its foundations must first be established. Between the years 1978 and 1985 a project financed initially by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (BRD), then by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, was entrusted to Dr. Rainer Oßwald and myself by the Mauretanian Ministry of Cultural Affairs. Its objective was the collection and protection of the selected Arabic manuscript literature of Mauretania.

The study of Muslim lexicology concerned with the Qur'ān has a short but illustrious bibliography, the highlights of which may be summed up for the purposes of the following discussion by mentioning four people: Arthur Jeffery, whose Foreign vocabulary of the Qur'ān contains a lengthy introduction concerning various classical Muslim attempts to come to grips with the Qur'ānic lexicon; Chaim Rabin, who in his Ancient West-Arabian attempts to use a text which deals with dialect words in the Qur'ān as one of Ms sources for the reconstruction of ‘pre-literary Arabic dialects’; Lothar Kopf, who, through his articles and posthumously published dissertation extracts, exposes many of the trends and pitfalls in Arabic dictionaries, most notably those features which result from the influence of the Qur'ān; and John Wansbrough, who via his Quranic studies has treated us to his analysis of some of the early texts and has provided some very cogent and persuasive arguments concerning the motivations behind the compilation of such treatises.

Although in Chinese culture surgery has not usually been seen as a major part of medical practice, during the Sui (A.D. 581–618) and the Tang dynasties (A.D. 618–907) it showed a marked flowering in the field of ophthalmology. There are indications that it was closely related to Indian medical and surgical ideas which were transmitted to China. The evidence is found in historical records, popular literature and also in medical works and compilations. Interestingly, the origins of this transmission are seen in Chinese Buddhist canonical literature which emerged during the introduction of Buddhism into China in the late Han period (A.D. 25–220) and the mutual contacts which followed immediately thereafter.

Ibn Khaldūn runs the risk of being everything or nothing—or, at least, no more than this or that. It has long been customary to separate the Muqaddima or so-called Prolegomena from the body of the Kitāb al-'Ibar or so-called Universal History, and to treat them quite differently as an essay in the philosophy of history distinct from a much more commonplace amalgam of historical information of varying value. Regarded as no more than a vast compilation of historical knowledge in the manner of the time, this great bulk of the work has received much less attention than the much more famous introduction. By concentrating on Ibn Khaldūn's later career in Egypt, Fischel dwelt on the chapters dealing with the Mamlūks and the Mongols, and with Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Judaism. Treating him as an historian of the Marinids in Morocco, Shatzmiller has located the ‘Ibar as a whole in the dynastic tradition of Fes.4 The Marinids were a self-consciously Berber dynasty whose official histories fall into the well-established category of Mafākhir al-Barbar or ‘Boasts of the Berbers’, and it might be said that Ibn Khaldūn's classification of his material according to race merely reflected the origin of his magnum opus in a familiar literary tradition, from whose constraints he was only freed by the collapse of the political order in the Maghrib in the second half of the fourteenth century.

Considering the unique position of the Modern South Arabian languages within Semitic it is surprising how little has been published concerning them. A case in point is the Jibbāli language of Dhofar, whose extreme phonetic and phonological complexity should arouse the interest of the general linguist as well as of the Semitic specialist. This becomes clear in even a brief perusal of the most notable pioneer study of the language, T. M. Johnstone's Jibbali lexicon.

This article examines the competing theories dealing with the origin of the so-called plural suffix -men in Chinese. Their internal consistency is assessed both diachronically and—in a novel approach—on the conceptual level, that is, with reference to the fundamental value of -men today. As a result, the theses favouring an autochthonous development come out on top, to the detriment of those postulating an exogenous source. -Men is in all likelihood an outcome of the grammaticalization of the notion of ‘clan’, operating on a substratum of ancient Chinese collectives.

The absence in Socotri of a t- Prefix in some imperfect verbal forms has been noted briefly in a number of learned atricles, but this important feature of the language has not been adequately documented or analysed. It is possible, however, to show that the non-occurrence of a t- prefix is observable only in the imperfect forms of certain types of verb, principally the causative verbs, simple quadriliteral verbs, simple hollow verbs, certain intensive-conative verbs, and, it seems likely, the passives of simple verbs.

The study of fortification in the Indian subcontinent is a discipline not only of intrinsic merit but also of considerable extrinsic value, for the material it may be expected to yield is of relevance to the archæologist, antiquarian, and historian, taking these terms in the broadest sense; indeed, it is these, in somewhat narrower terms perhaps, who have helped to amass the not inconsiderable body of material which is at present available on the fortified sites in the subcontinent, most of which have long been known to archæologists and art-historians. The old series of Archæological Survey of India Reports (1862–84), largely reports of tours by Cunningham and his associates, contain much material on the major fortified sites of the subcontinent, although some of this is merely incidental to the main purposes of the reports; the New Imperial Series of the Archæological Survey, including the regional surveys, presents more precise and detailed description of individual sites, and this is supplemented by the Archæological Survey of India Annual Reports, from 1902 onwards, and the reports of various states with autonomous departments of archæology, most notably the Nizām's Dominions whose sometime Director, Dr. Ghulam Yazdani, has in addition to considerable work on the Deccan sites published in those reports produced two valuable monographs. These works have supplemented the evidence of the sites themselves with the available historical material, documentary and epigraphic, and further epigraphic material is available in the volumes of Epigraphia indica and Epigraphia indo-moslemica, as well as in some of the Memoirs of the A.S.I. Less reliable technically, but always useful and often suggestive, is the information available in the gazetteers of the various provincial governments and states. The journals of learned societies with an Indian interest add more to this material, as do the catalogues and journals of Indian museums.

Section 274 of the Secret History of the Mongols (Yuanchao bishi) tells us that Khagan Ögödei placed governors over the conquered peoples whose cities were ‘Asud, Sesüd, Bolar and Mankerman-Kiwa’. I present the entire passage, first, in the transliterated edition published in 1972 by Igor de Rachewiltz, then in two English translations, the first by Francis Woodman Cleaves, the second by Rachewiltz:

batu büri güyük möngge teri'üten olon kö'üt qanglin kibca'ud-i bajigid-i oro'ulju ejiljayaq meget balaqasu ebdeljü orusud-i kiduju ülüttele talaba asut sestüt bolar man-kerman kiwa teri'üten balaqad-un irgen-i dawuliju else'üljü daruqacin tammacin-i talbiju qariba.

The present paper discusses the synchronic status and the origin of the semi-vowels /j/ and /w/ in Old Tibetan on the basis of modern Tibetan languages and other Sino-Tibetan languages, in particular Rgyalrong and Lolo-Burmese.

The long-awaited Greek-letter inscription discovered, on 6 May 1957, by the Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan in the course of their excavations at ‘Surkh-Kotal’, the ancient Bagolango, has now been made public by M. André Maricq under the title of ‘La grande inscription de Kaniṣka et l'étéo-tokharien, l'ancienne langue de la Bactriane’, JA, CCXLVI, 4, 1958, 345–440. It is wonderfully well-preserved and, once one gets accustomed to the somewhat barbaric forms of certain letters, offers not the slightest difficulty to the reading. The difficulties lie elsewhere: this is the first substantial, and at the same time readable, document of the Iranian language once spoken in Bactria and, appropriately to a text in an unknown language, is slow in yielding its meaning to the scholar, who inevitably has to be guided partly by often contradictory internal evidence, partly by uncertain comparisons with related languages. All those devoted to Central Asian history and languages will be grateful to M. Maricq for his painstaking work and for his unselfishness in publishing this superb monument before being able to submit more than a partial interpretation.

Bi-polarity is the use of the same term to denote both speaker and addressee. It is possible to distinguish broadly three types of bi-polar term in Kuwaiti Arabic (KA). The first type is characterized in form by the use of the monolexic kin-terms: /yuba/ ‘father’, /yumma/ ‘mother’, /yaddi/ ‘grandfather’, /yadda/ ‘grandmother’. The second type consists of the vocative particle /ya/ + the KA kin-term for brother /?ax/ + 2nd person pronominal suffix. The third type of KA bi-polar term consists of the joining word /wa/ ‘and’ + the personal pronoun /ana/ ‘I’ + one of the monolexic kin-terms + 2nd person pronominal suffix. In this paper a comparison is made between these three types of bi-polarity exploring the relationship between their respective forms and functions.

IN my book Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande (1937) there emerged from the treatment of these three topics a picture of some features of the Zande mind, revealing itself often as a suspicious, distrustful, hostile mind. Another facet of this mentality is revealed in the Zande concept of sanza (pi. asanza).

The immense conservatism of Zoroastrisniam brings it about that, even where circumstances have forced a break in the continuity of particular observances, yet the maintenance of the main tradition of belief and practice is so strong that it leads in time to something very like these old observances coming back into being agin, in response to the continuing religious needs of the community. Thus the practices of latter-day Zoroastrianism are often of the greatest help for understanding diffcult points in the Pahlavi books. It is accordingly of interest to examine in their light those passages relating to the founding of sacred Fires which have been recently brought together by J.-P. de Menasce in his work Feux et fondations pieuse dans le droit sassanide; for, as the author points out, such juridical texts, embodying case-law, represent actual situations and practices, which can profitably be compared with those of to-day.

Amar Chitra Katha (Immortal Picture Stories) is India's leading comic book series, featuring hundreds of mythological titles about the Hindu gods. Founder Anant Pai initially eliminated all miracles, believing them to be unscientific interpolations. But while producing Tales of Durga (no. 176, 1978), he declared that the comic must be an “authentic” recreation of the Devī Māhātmya scripture, and that all miracles in the classical Sanskrit text must be faithfully rendered in the comic. This article examines the discourse of authenticity that surrounds the production of Tales of Durga in particular and this comic book series more generally. Through a careful reading of the Devī Māhātmya, content analysis of Tales of Durga, a consideration of the unique characteristics of the comic book medium, and interviews with comic book producers, this study provides insight into modern interpretations of the Devī Māhātmya and evolving Hindu attitudes towards the martial goddess Durga.

The Portuguese presence in Sri Lanka dates back to the early sixteenth century and lasted some hundred and fifty years. It gave rise to a Creole language based on Portuguese, Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole (SLPC), which Dalgado (1936) considered to be the most vigorous of the Portuguese Creoles.

One of the arduous problems of ancient geography is the location of the furthest points in Atropatene (Azarbayjāan) which were reached by Antonius in 36B.C., by the Byzantine allies of Khusrau II in A.D.591 and by the Emperor Heraclius in A.D. 624–7.

On savait depuis longtemps que Hamdullāh al Mustaufī al-Kazwīnī, dans la partie d'histoire naturelle de son Nuzhatu-’l-ḳulūb de 1339, avait donné les noms de beaucoup d'animaux, et parfois de minéraux et de plantes, en turc et en mongol, mais le texte n'était accessible qu'en manuscrit ou dans une médiocre édition lithographique de Bombay parue en 1893-4.