The most exciting experience I had during my visit to Morocco in the winter of 1951–52a visit made possible by the generosity of the Eockefeller Trust was the discovery, in the famous Qarawūyūn Library in Fez, of a manuscript containing one half, the second half, of an Arabic translation of the Nicomachean Ethics.The shortness of my stay in that ancient and fascinating Moorish city, and the disabling indisposition that befell me there, made it impossible for me to do more at the time than take note of the existence of this precious codex; but later the authorities of the Institut des Hautes Etudes Marocaines in Rabat, to whom I am infinitely obliged, procured for me a microfilm of the manuscript. It is now my high privilege to publish this preliminary note, in anticipation, I hope, of a full edition later on.

Of the Primitive Indian stops it is true to say, as Dr. J. Bloch says of their descendants in Marāthī, that in most of the modern Indo-Aryan languages they have in principle remained unchanged. This is certainly true of initial stops; and although single intervocalic stops have with the exception of the cerebrals disappeared, new intervocalic stops, double or single, have been introduced as the result of assimilation among consonant groups.

The object of this paper is to give preliminary information about Shāhrudi, one of the Iranian dialects spoken in Khalkhāl, the south-eastern province of Āzarbāijān lying between the Caspian province of Tālesh to the east, Ardabil to the north, Zanjān to the south, and Miyāna(j) to the west.

Our information about the Iranian dialects of Āzarbāijān, where a form of Turkish is the common language, has until recently been very defective. The scanty material available was summed up by Professor W. B. Henning in a recent article. Since then, however, several studies of the current dialects of Āzarbāijān have been published.

THIS paper is the outcome of a short study of the pronunciation of an Ossete born in Dzaeusegi-hseu (Wladikavkaz). The Digoron dialect of Ossetic is my informant's mother tongue, but as he left his homeland more than twenty years ago and has in the interval probably had more occasion to speak Kussian and Polish than his own language, the possibility that his pronunciation has been thereby affected cannot be discounted. At the suggestion of Professor H. W. Bailey a short investigation of his pronunciation of Ossetic was undertaken. Some of the material used was taken from notes put at my disposal by Professor Bailey, to whom I am greatly indebted for his generous help and for much invaluable information and criticism. Other material was found in a collection of folk-stories, the Pamyatniki narodnogo tvorchestva Osetin, or was supplied by my informant himself. The tentative nature of any linguistic analysis based on a short study of the pronunciation of one speaker is obvious, and it will be understood that the findings are only valid within these limitations.

The typographical conventions adopted in this paper are as follows:—

Italic type is used to show the roman spelling of Digoron as used in the Pamyatniki or by my informant.

Heavy type is used for the phonetic transcription of my informant's pronunciation.

Heavy type in single quotes is used to indicate the units of what may be called “unuttered speech”.

The use of all three conventions is demonstrated by the following statement:— “nivәrun niværun is the realization of the junction of ‘ni’ and әvәrun’”.

Among the many controversies between the Sautrāntika and the Vaibhāsika recorded in the Abhidharma-koś-bhāsya of Vasubandhu, 1 a large number are devoted to discussions of the reality of a Vaibhāsika category called cittaviprayukta-samslāras (tr. ‘pure forces’ by Stcherbatsky).2 The Vaibhāsikas enumerate thirteen such samskāras 3 and declare them to be distinct from the traditional three categories of dhannas, viz. rūpa (matter), citta (mind), and caitasikas (mental concomitants). Whereas the first ten of these samskāras have a bearing on the Buddhist theories of causation, unconscious

Malay is one of the best-studied of all Austronesian languages, both synchronically and diachronically. We would not therefore expect a study of Malay historical phonology to uncover much that is new. In this paper, however, I will suggest that a basic change has been overlooked in past work on the language.

Just before the intellectual impact of Britain on Indian Islam a religious reform movement had swept over Muslim India. Although this movement itself does not come into the scope of the present essay, we note it at the outset because: (a) Intellectually it sought to regenerate Islam by going back to the pure and simple Islam of the early period and tried to weaken the hold of medieval authorities on the Muslim mind. Consequently, although reactionary in itself, its ‘purification’ impetus prepared, in some measure, the way for subsequent intellectual developments.

Puppetry in China has a long history. The modern remnants of a rich tradition testify to the wealth that was, and the art is being revived in various ways, and given new forms. Although there is more early literature and specific comment in ancient books on ancient Chinese puppets than there is for any other kind of puppetry in its early days, it is not absolutely clear when they originated. The words nearly always used to refer to puppets are mu-ou-hsi ‘wooden doll plays’ and k'uei-lei-tzu, k'u-lei-tzu, k'uei-lei, or k'uei-lei-hsi. The original meaning of the latter terms is tantalizingly elusive, but the k'u might possibly suggest a hole or aperture within which they were performed. These are historically the most common words used. The earliest mention of any of the terms is found in Feng-su t'ung by Ying Shao (fl. c.a.d. 178), but the origins of puppetry may either lie much before or after that book.

In this essay, I look into the growth in the Ottoman ilmiye hierarchy, and its emergence as a distinct career path, through an analysis of the backgrounds and careers of forty-nine officials who reached the highest four ilmiye positions. The analysis reveals that towards the middle of the sixteenth century new teaching and kadılık offices absorbed the growing number of ilmiye officials. After 1570, limitation of tenure periods and rules for promotion and removal were introduced to facilitate the employment of more officials. Meanwhile, greater emphasis was placed on receiving one's education and obtaining teaching positions in the central cities, especially Istanbul. Those scholars educated and taught in areas distant from the centre lost the opportunity to reach the highest ilmiye posts. In addition, after 1550, the sons of government officials were increasingly favoured in the ilmiye hierarchy.

A passion for card games, like a delight in drinking tea, is something which nowadays unites China with the rest of the world; and, as with tea drinking, many have surmised that the pastime of playing cards arose in China and spread westwards. I begin this study with a consideration of the rules of card games, and suggest that the rules themselves may offer, in some cases, evidence of transmission from East to West. To those interested in past cultural contacts, this suggestion in itself illustrates the value of trying to reconstruct the regulations of early games long forgotten, quite apart from the value of such research to sinologists. But it is not just the rules of play which need to be considered in such a context. The format of the playing card as a physical object that is small, portable and suited to mass production has prompted the thought that cards may have been one of the easiest samples of Chinese printing technique to pass between East and West. For this reason, the main focus of my study in reconstruction is on a pastime, the yezi xi (game of leaves), which dates to about the same time as our earliest sources on the origins of printing, but which eventually died out, to be superseded by other amusements. Are the surviving materials sufficient to confirm or deny existing speculations about its form? And if this was not a card game, when precisely did such games develop? But before considering such sinological questions, let us start closer to home.

The two principal obstacles to the study of the older forms of Marathi language and literature are the shortage of definitive texts of early works and the dearth of critical bibliographies from which one might discover what texts are available and in what form they exist. Date's Marāṭhī-grantha-sūc¯ is of course invaluable for anything published before 1937, but even this work is not exhaustive and the idiosyncrasies of its arrangement according to subject-matter make it sometimes difficult to discover how many of the works of any particular early writer exist in printed form. For an unpublished work, unless one is fortunate enough to find it in the British Museum or India Office Library catalogues of Marathi MSS, one can only consult the index of a general history of Marathi literature such as V. L. Bhave's Mahārāṣṭstra-sārasvata. There one may well find numerous references to and quotations from the work in question, but only exceptionally will there be any indication of the source of these quotations. One is left to conjecture whether they are from a MS belonging to the author or from some early printed pothī that has escaped the attention of Date. On occasions the same quotation is repeated in a different part of the book with substantial variations in its text, and when a work is described but not quoted one can never be sure whether it is in fact extant or whether description and perhaps even short quotations are not taken from some intermediate secondary source or commentary.

There are six complete versions of the Pavāraṇā Sutta (Pravāraṇā Sūtra). The Ekottarika Āgama version (EĀ 32.5) differs significantly from the other five. It contains an episode involving Ānanda, a non-arhat, which is not found in the other five versions. In the five versions other than EĀ 32.5, this Pravāraṇā ceremony is depicted as an assembly of arhats, who are endowed with different “liberations”. This paper shows that such divergences are correlated with one another and that EĀ 32.5 could be earlier than the other versions. In this connection I elucidate diverse notions of liberation as developed in the textual history and discuss the possibility that sectarian stance on the issue of liberation has a bearing on the inclusion of various types of arhats in the five versions, and their exclusion from EĀ 32.5, whose sectarian affiliation is identified in this study as Mahāsāṃghika.

In the summer of 1951, the presence in London of an Ellice Islander, Penitala Teo, gave me an opportunity of making a sound recording in a little-known Polynesian language. The briefness of his stay, as well as other factors, did not leave time for more than a cursory analysis of his speech, but there was enough evidence to establish a prima facie case for recognizing aspirated as well as non-aspirated consonants.

Works of fiqh often have chapters or sections concerned with various questions related to the topic of entering the Ka'ba, usually signalled by headings such as Fī dukhūl al-Ka'ba or Al-ṣalāt fī (jawfi) 'l-Ka'ba. In them a number of ḥadīths are referred to, many of which are to be found in the classical collections and some of which occur as well in ‘historical’ literature such as sīra and ta'rīkh. This paper discusses the way in which this material is presented and developed, both in fiqh and in ḥadīth and ‘historical’ literature, what sort of questions it is concerned with, and what reasons there may be for its existence. This last question is taken up at the end of the paper but here it may be said that I think that the fiqh and ḥadīth material is relevant to an understanding of the development of the Muslim sanctuary and that it illustrates a tension, which is also observable in other traditional material, between two concepts of the sanctuary: is it ‘open’, comparable to a temple or church, or is it ‘closed’, like an ark or sacred stone? Both concepts exist within Muslim tradition, and it seems to me likely that the material discussed in the following two sections has been generated, originally, by the tension between them.

The following schedule of an inheritance was discovered by me in 1962 when, by courtesy of the Kano Native Authority, I was carrying out a survey of manuscripts contained in the Library of the Shahuci Judicial School, Kano. In the course of my searches I unearthed from the back of a cupboard a bundle of miscellaneous papers. On examination these proved to consist largely of single folios of Arabic, Fula, and Hausa MSS displaced from their contexts. Scattered among them, however, were a number of sheets which appeared to be taxation returns; lists of booty; household accounts of the palace; fragments of prayers, wirds, Qur'anic charms and the like. Among them was this incomplete schedule of an estate.

1.1.1. It has been said that ‘the interrelation of language and other aspects of culture is so close that no part of the culture of a particular group canproperly be studied without reference to the linguistic symbols in use’.1 One manifestation of cultural change in the language is seen in ‘linguisticborrowing’, which, both as a general linguistic and cultural phenomenon, andas a process related to particular languages, has attracted the attention of a great number of scholars, including many linguists.2

The curious fact has long been known that the greatest single festival of the Zoroastrian year, Nō Rōz, is celebrated twice over, with almost identical observances, on two separate days, namely Rōz Ohrmazd of Māh Fravardīn, and Rōz Hordād of the same month, i.e. on the first and sixth days of the first month of the year. As al-Bīrῡnī recorded, writing c. A.D. 1000: ‘On the sixth of Fravardīn, the day Hordād, is the Great Nō Rōz, for the Persians a feast of great importance’. The first of this month was celebrated as the Lesser Nō Rōz. Sasanian melodies were named for both Nō Rōz ī wuzorg and Nō Rōz ī xwurdag; and later the two days were also known respectively as the ‘special’ Nō Rōz (Nō Rōz-i xāṣṣa) and the 'general’ Nō Rōz (Nō Rōz-i ‘āmma). Among the Parsis the Great Nō Rōz ‘is kept with as much pomp and rejoicing as…New Year's Day’; and in Persia orthodox priests still do not recite Rapithwin Gāh, the daily prayer which marks Nō Rōz and the return of summer, until noon on Rōz Hordād of Māh Fravardīn, on which day the faithful there gather together for communal services to celebrate the beginning of the new religious year.

Navarātri (Tam. Navarāttiri) is one of the most popular and important annual festivals in the south Indian city of Madurai. The same is true elsewhere in the state and, in somewhat different forms, the festival is also popular in many other regions of India, notably Bengal (where it is known as Durgā Pūjā) and Karnataka (where it is called Dasarā). Navarātri means ‘nine nights’ and throughout India the festival is celebrated on the first nine lunar days (tithi) of the bright fortnight (i.e. the fortnight ending on full moon) of the lunar month of āśvina. In the Tamil calendar, however, the year is divided into twelve solar months and Navarātri is said to occupy the nine lunar days beginning with the day after new moon in the solar month of puraṭṭāci (September-October). Very occasionally, the Tamil formula may supply the wrong date. In many years, the festival only lasts eight weekdays, as two lunar days may fall within one weekday. (In some parts of India, a Navarātri festival is celebrated in the spring, but that is not discussed here.)

Immediately after his successful conquest of Muslim Sicily (1060–92), Roger de Hauteville set about dividing the spoils amongst the small band of Norman, French and Italian knights who were his closest followers. This distribution of the land of Sicily and its inhabitants was in part based upon the fiscal documents of the Muslim administration, which were salvaged and adapted to post-conquest circumstances by a small cadre of Greek bureaucrats imported from Calabria. The documents were of two types: lists of tax-payers, known in Arabic as jarā 'id (sg. jarīda; Greek plateia; Latin plated); and descriptions of estate boundaries, known as hudud (sg. hadd; Greek periorismos; Latin divisa). These were the foundations of the Arabic administration of Norman Sicily.