In al-Wāqidī's Kitdb al-maghāzī and in that part of Ibn Ishāq's Sīra which deals with Muhammad's life in Medina and is contained in Ibn Hishrm's version of al-Bakkā'Ī's recension, there are similar and sometimes identical passages. Since Ibn Ishāq is the earlier of the two authorities, it has been assumed on a plausibly a priori basis that al-Wāqidī modelled himself on his predecessor in the arrangement of his material, and drew from him much of the basic warp of his narrative to which he then added his own weft.

Kemant is spoken in the districts of Kärkär and Čəlga, to the north and west of the town of Gondar in north-west Ethiopia. The type of Kemant described in this paper is that of Kärkär only, collected in Gondar itself and in and around Təkəl Dangay, a little to the north of Gondar. Kemant belongs to the Agaw group of Cushitic languages.2 The material for this paper was collected in the field during the winter of 1973–4. Several informants were used, but principally Taddäsä Zäwdu of Təkəl Dəngay and Gäbrä ∃gziabəher Alämu of Gondar. It is not possible here to give any accurate figure for the number of Kemant speakers. However, Kemant does appear to be under heavy pressure from Amharic, and all my informants were bilingual in both Amharic and Kemant.

THE paradigms that may be set up for the nominals in Tigrinya1 in terms of the category of number (established on syntactical and further morphological grounds) consist of two members, conveniently termed ‘singular’ and ‘plural’. The morphological analysis for the forms placed in this grammatical relationship may, for some of them, be given in terms of ‘external flection’ or ‘sumxation’, but for many forms, including those in commonest use, the differences of syllabic pattern, and other differences throughout the entire forms, justify the use of the traditional term ‘broken plural’. It is the purpose of this paper to make a phonological analysis to handle the morphological relation between the broken plurals and the singular forms with which they are grammatically paired.

LAMALANGA is situated on the north-west coast of the island called Raga, or Araga (Pentecost Island), in the central New Hebrides, Melanesia.

The head station of the Melanesian Mission on Raga is at Lamalanga which itself is on the coast; but the people who speak the language represented in this grammar live on the hills just above the Mission Station. Dr. R. H. Codrington published a grammar of the language spoken at Vun Marama on the same coast, a few miles north of Lamalanga.

For more than a millennium, cow slaughter has been a source of bitter contention in South Asia. Hindus revere the animal; Muslims like to eat it and, until recently, the cow has been the preferred animal of sacrifice at the Islamic festival of ‘Id-ul-Adha¯. This paper looks at how, over the twentieth century, Indian governments of differing type and ideological colour—British and princely during the late colonial period and Congress nationalist after 1947—have tried to mediate this vexed question. It finds that while policies differed widely, there was a tendency for all governments in the early twentieth century to be guided by social custom and local opinion, so that in the small Muslim-ruled state of Mangrol, which had an official ban, the Muslims who killed cows occasionally for food were never prosecuted so long as they kept their activities discreet—but this ‘discretionary’ option became politically unviable once the country embraced democracy.

It is about three-quarters of a century since the maryannu (maryanni) of Mitanni and its dependencies, appearing in Hittite and Egyptian records of the second millennium B.C., were first discussed in connexion with the IndoIranians. In 1910 H. Winckler interpreted the word as a title belonging to Aryan infiltrators from the north, who had come to form an aristocracy among the Hurrians; and he recorded the suggestion by F. C. Andreas connecting it with Vedic márya ‘ young man, man, hero ’. Subsequently W. F. Albright presented a carefully documented case for considering the maryannu to be primarily ‘chariot-warriors’, arguing that from about 1700 to 1200 B.C. ‘chariots played the same role in warfare that cavalry did later, and the chariot-warriors occupied the same social position that was held by the⃛ feudal knights of the Middle Ages’. He further pointed out, with regard to Vedic márya, that a semantic development from ‘young man’ to ‘warrior’ is widely attested. Thereafter R. T. O'Callaghan adduced yet more evidence from Egyptian and cuneiform sources to confirm that ‘from the mid-fifteenth century to the midtwelfth century B.C., and from the Mitanni kingdom down through Palestine beyond Ascalon, the term maryannu is to be understood primarily as a noble who is a chariot-warrior’. The area was one where Indo-Aryan names occur at about the same period; and in the fourteenth-century Kikkuli treatise from Boghaz-köy, on the training of chariot-horses, Indo-Aryan technical terms appear. There were solid grounds therefore for thinking that Indo-Aryans, bringing with them horses from the Asian steppes, had played a leading part in developing chariotry in the Near East at that time, and that it was this which enabled a group of them to become locally dominant there.

The chapter about innovations in mosques in al-TurtŪshī's Kitāb al-hawādith wa-'l-bida‘ contains a remarkable tradition about the building of the mosque of the Prophet in Medina which deserves special attention. This tradition, not included in the orthodox collections of hadith, is of considerable importance: it seems to belong to a large body of early traditions omitted by later collectors of hadīth, and it may throw some light on an attitude of the Prophet which was later ignored by Muslim scholars. This tradition may help us to understand the views and opinions of the early Muslim scholars.

The normal method of settling questions of inheritance in Babylonia was not by testament but according to a division among the male heirs. In legal terms, then, inheritance was normally ab intestato in Babylonia. The regulation of the size of the portions of the various heirs in a family varied according to local custom and regulation. Testaments are known sporadically from Old Assyrian and Middle Assyrian sources but are not found among the documents from Babylonian proper. In place of testaments we find posthumous regulations of inheritance among the heirs and parental regulation of inheritance by means of gift, i.e. donatio mortis causa. Such documents are infrequent, and we must assume, not only that normal inheritance was ab intestato, but also that frequently, and perhaps as a general rule, the parental estate was administered jointly by the heirs.

Of all the diseases which afflicted mankind in the nineteenth century cholera has a good claim to the unenviable title of being the most dreaded. It was certainly the one which prompted the first sustained efforts to devise and implement international sanitary conventions. The reasons why cholera was so feared are many. Until the second decade of the century it was confined to the Indian subcontinent—where it had probably existed since ancient times—and medical knowledge of it elsewhere was practically nil. In 1817, however, maritime trade carried the infection to other lands and thus began the first period of diffusion which lasted for some six years. By the early years of the twentieth century a further five massive epidemics had occurred, almost every country in the world had been affected and the cumulative death toll was measured in millions. Persia, being so close to the original source of infection, suffered in every one of those epidemics and also from several other more limited and localized outbreaks.

This article takes as its point of departure the conclusions drawn in Professor Arberry's paper “Orient Pearls at Random Strung”. It is hopefully intended both to add to those conclusions in their own sphere of poetical criticism and to suggest something of the relevance of the problem as a whole in the broad structure of Persian thought. (It seems scarcely necessary to add that the extent to which that will imply Islamic thought and Eastern thought generally is, in every sense of the word, incalculable.)

It was Harold Fleming who first drew the attention of linguists to the Bayso language. Reports concerning the existence of such a people on Gidicho Island in Lake Abaya go back to the beginning of the century and descriptions of various cultural and economic aspects of the life of the Bayso and other inhabitants of Gidicho appeared subsequently; but concerning the language nothing was available until the publication of Fleming's germinal article in 1964. The latter followed a brief period of work on the island with a Bayso speaker. The 216-item vocabulary list and brief indications of the grammar have nevertheless proved tantalizingly suggestive to everyone working on questions of genetic relationships within Cushitic. Alongside the Bayso material the article also presented the first data on the Rendille language of north-east Kenya. Fleming's conclusions that Bayso, Rendille, Boni, and Somali constitute a Macro-Somali group were seen as linguistic support for H. S. Lewis's hypothesis of a south Ethiopian (rather than a northern Horn of Africa) origin for the Somali. Since the initial presentation of these proposals, linguistic research into the Dasenech (Galab), Elmolo, and to a limited extent Arbore, languages has led German linguists to propose an extension of Fleming's Macro-Somali to include these languages. Until very recently the limited nature of the data available on many of the relevant languages had tended to detract from the strength of arguments about their internal relationships. Heine's reports of his recent researches on Rendille, Elmolo, and Boni, as well as his work on the diachrony of the ‘Sam languages’ have done much to advance our knowledge. To date, however, the material available on Bayso has remained restricted to what was presented by Fleming in 1964. The primary purpose of the present paper is to set out the results of research conducted for a period of 17 days during September 1976.

The word eduka first occurs in Sanskrit in the Mahābhārata. It is accepted by the Poona edition but there are several variants. The passage is of interest because of the light it throws upon the meaning: viparītaś ca loko'yam bhaviṣyaty adharottaraḥ eḍūkān pūjayiṣyanti varjayiṣyanti devatāḥ śūdrāḥ paricariṣyanti na dvijān yuga-saṃkṣaye (64) āśrameṣu maharṣīnāṃ brāhmaṇāvasaiheṣu ca deva-sthāneṣu caityeṣu nāgāndm ālayeṣu ca (65) eḍuka-cihnā pṛthivī na deva-gṛha-bhūṣitā1

The advancement of learning is learning is chiefly made in these three ways—by pure research, by applied research, and by interesting the general public in the results achieved. The last item is not the least important, although scientists, especially those engaged in pure research, are apt to discount and even to ignore it. In any event it is essential to publish the fruits of research among fellow-scientists for criticism, appraisement, and development. The spark of learning, which passes from master to pupil, is so feeble that unless fanned to a vigorous flame by some external agency it is apt to flicker out. It was only by a stroke of good fortune that the works of Mendel were brought to light after a long lapse of years.

In this article I provide a complete translation and analysis of the recently unearthed bamboo manuscript, Rong Cheng shi, from the Shanghai Museum collection. This manuscript presents a previously unknown version of China's early history from the time of legendary rulers Yao, Shun, Yu and their predecessors to the establishment of the Zhou dynasty. The narrative is critical of both the dynastic principle of rule and “righteous rebellion”, and advocates instead the ruler's abdication in favour of a worthier candidate as the best mode of rule; in addition, it hints at the unusually active role of “the people” in establishing the supreme ruler. Moreover, despite being associated with the southern state of Chu, the Rong Cheng shi presents a unitary view of the past, which rejects the multi-state world and promulgates the notion of the unified “All-under-Heaven” as singularly legitimate. The text has far-reaching significance in terms of both history of Chinese political thought and of early Chinese historiography.

In colloquial Tamil the form-class of expressives includes some items which have in each member of a reduplicated pair an initial voiced stop, alongside many with initial voiceless stops. This is unlike the form-classes of nouns and verbs which have in initial position only voiceless stops, except for some borrowings from Sanskrit or other sources. The writing system has no provisions for such initial voiced stops, except for a very few items with the ‘northern letter’ j-. The etymological dictionary shows that in general, when in colloquial Tamil these voiced stops appear in expressives, etyma that appear in the other Dravidian languages also have voiced stops; they are then to be reconstructed for South Dravidian or in some cases even for Proto-Dravidian, and it is to be assumed that they were found in all periods of Tamil even though they were not written as such.

At the moment, both in the British Protectorate and in Somalia, the adoption of a standard orthography for the Somali language is fiercely debated. In discussion of the merits of the various scripts proposed, technical problems of orthography have to some extent been lost sight of. Nationalistic arguments have favoured ‘Somali writing’ (‘Ismaaniya) while religious or Pan-Islamic arguments have supported an Arabic script. This article discusses an orthography invented some 20 years ago by a well-known Gadabuursi sheikh, Sheikh ‘Abduramaan Sh. Nuur, the present Government Qā1E0D;ī of Borama District in the west of the British Protectorate. The script has not, as far as I am aware, been previously described in the literature on Somaliland. I publish it here with no intention of attempting to contribute to the already abundant confusion in the choice of a standard orthography for Somali.

The turn of events in Tehran completely frustrated whatever chance there might have been for a loan from Britain in 1898. On 21 July Durand reported that Muzaffar al-Dīn had complained that the loan was not big enough. Hewanted §2,000,000 and he would not increase the security. The Amīn al-Sultān was ‘practically in power’ (he was reinstated on 12 August 1898 as Sadr-iA'zam), and was working vīgorously against the loan. This is partly explainedby his being himself a farmer of customs from whīch he drew an estimated§ 70,000 annually and so was against any foreign control. The sum which the Shah named could not be raised in London on the security offered. Besides,after the return to power of the Amīn al-Sultān the loan discussions betweenthe British and the Persians took on an air of unreality.

A new edition of the astronomical compilation MUL.APIN follows closely upon the recent publication of two sections of the large compendium of Babylonian astronomical omens known as Enūma Anu Enlil. The text of MUL.APIN likewise includes a section of astronomical omens, as well as a catalogue of stars, including the ‘fixed’ (ziqpu) stars, and information regarding the planets, heliacal risings, the path of the moon, calendrical intercalations, and a shadow table and water clock. This modern edition is clearly presented nd well-translated, and includes notes on both the philology and astronomy of the text.

This article includes a line-by-line translation and textual analysis of the Warring States period Chu script bamboo slip manuscript, Zigao 子羔. It argues that the manuscript differs from the transmitted Confucian tradition, but would have been considered a ru 儒 (“Confucian”) text. Unusual features include: (1) The disciple is Zigao, who is described negatively in the Lun yu. (2) The term tian zi 天子, “son-of-sky/heaven” is used literally, to refer to the divinely conceived progenitors of the three royal lineages. (3) The term san wang, “three kings”, refers to these progenitors rather than the founding rulers. (4) Confucius advocates abdication. (5) The progenitors of the dynastic lineages, rather than the founding rulers, are juxtaposed to Shun 舜, who received the rule from Yao because of his merit. A Chinese edition, with direct transcriptions and alternative readings of the Chu script graphs, is appended.

The sanctuary of Shaykh ʿAdī, the only monumental complex of the Yezidis, lies at Lalish, 35 kilometres north of Mosul, in Iraqi Kurdistan. It is dedicated to its founder, Shaykh ʿAdī (d. 1162). Although it has been suggested that it was converted from a Christian monastery, Arabic sources and architectural analysis indicate that it may originally have been the zāwiya where Shaykh ʿAdī and his disciples retired to meditate. After his death, the sanctuary grew up around his tomb and became a centre of pilgrimage. It is a large complex containing buildings of different sizes and functions. It was not conceived as a centrally planned structure and its different parts were added progressively as and when circumstances dictated. The dominant architectural style is derived from that which characterizes the twelfth–thirteenth-century Shiite buildings of Mosul, and was continued by the Yezidis until the present day.