In or about 1925 or 1926, three stones which were said to have been brought from Lo-yang, and which contain parts of a Kharoṣṭhī inscription, were shown to the Lazarist missionaries in Peking; and in 1926 a priest of the mission, Georges Prévost, who had come to the conclusion that the script was Palmyrene and the language Hebrew, produced an interpretation on this basis in a pamphlet of 31 pages. Such an explanation naturally involved its author in numerous difficulties both of language and palaeography; and since the pamphlet was printed only in a limited edition for private circulation, it might seem kinder to pass over in silence a mistake so unfortunate. Prévost was indeed aware of some of the difficulties, although he appears to have entertained no doubts at all about the identification of the script and language. But in spite of the restricted circulation of the original pamphlet, its existence has been recorded in several other publications; and the mention in print of these ‘Hebrew inscriptions’ from China, when the photograph is not easily accessible, is a potential nuisance to scholars. It is therefore desirable to prevent any future misunderstanding by making it clear that the inscription which is republished here is in fact the same as Prévost's ‘inscriptions sémitiques’.

The early imperial period was a time of rapid change in medical ideas and practices in China. Manuscripts and artifacts excavated from tombs of the second century B.C. along the Yangtze river valley bring fresh insights into some of the processes involved in medical innovation in the early centuries of the empire. Through examining exorcistic practices and petty surgery to the refinement of a body sustained and nourished by physiological essences, this paper describes recurring patterns found in the changing medical techniques associated with stone, be that lancets, hot pressing stones or mineral prescription. After the transition to a culture of applying fine metal acupuncture needles vestiges of these treatments found in early Chinese stone culture remain enshrined in both the theory and practice of canonical medicine.

In two recent articles in the Transactions of the Philological Society the problem of Dravidian words in Sanskrit has been discussed, and a considerable number of etymologies have been presented.1 Roughly 170 Sanskrit words of Dravidian origin are dealt with in the two articles. There remains an even larger amount of material which has not been touched on in the above two articles, and the bulk of this is brought together in the list of etymologies proposed here. The present article contains 315 items, involving a larger number of words since several words may be treated together, bringing the total number of Dravidian words in Sanskrit dealt with in the three articles to well over 500. This is a very considerable number, and shows that the extent of Dravidian influence on Sanskrit has always been underestimated rather than overestimated. It by no means exhausts the field, and another supplementary list will eventually be necessary. When the subject has been fully dealt with, it is unlikely that the total list of Dravidian words in Sanskrit will be less than 750, and it may well turn out to be considerably more.

As a result of the gradual attrition of final syllables, which caused the Old Iranian nominal plural endings to become insufficiently distinct from those of the singular, the plural was extensively remodelled in almost all Middle and New Iranian languages. Such renovation could come about in two ways. Either the more distinctive pl. inflexions, such as the gen. *-ānām or the instr. and dat. forms containing *b, could be extended or adapted to supply other cases, as happened in Parthian, Šuγnī, etc., or the old pl. could be replaced by a surrogate pl. derived from a sg. collective noun. The latter process is well illustrated by Sogdian, where the usual pi. suffix is -t (oblique -ty) after heavy stems, -t– (obl. -ty') after light stems. As is indicated by the inflexion, which is that of an old ā-stem, and by the fact that f. sg. forms of the articles and demonstratives are used with pl. nouns, this suffix derives from that of the OIr. f. abstract-collective nouns in *-tā-.

The jungle tribes (or, as the Malays style them, Orang Utan) of the Malay Peninsula are not altogether an unknown quantity from the point of view of anthropology and linguistics. A number of scholars and travellers have devoted themselves to the study of them, the most important being Hrolf Vaughan Stevens, R. Martin, W. W. Skeat, the leader of the Cambridge expedition, Annandale, and Robinson.

Among the Arabic documents preserved in the archives of Sicily is one relating to the affairs of the Jewish community in Siracusa at the end of thetwelfth century. Belonging by origin to the episcopal church of Cefalù, it isnow in the Archivio di Stato at Palermo (Tabulario della Chiesa Vescovile di Cefalù, Perg. no. 25), and was included in the collection published by S. Cusain 1868–82.

The language of Zanzibar par excellence is Swahili, and Zanzibar may be said to be the home of this language, not in the sense that its oldest form is spoken there, but because the Zanzibar dialect has come to be known best, owing to the writings of such men as Steere, Madan, Sacleux, and, to some extent, Krapf, though his dictionary is mainly devoted to the Mombasa dialect. Also in the days of the opening up of Africa, explorers and traders generally fixed up their caravans in Zanzibar, and these porters and soldiers journeyed into the far interior, some of them remaining there and thus making Swahili a lingua franca understood, as Steere says, along the coasts of Madagascar and Arabia, and in Central or inter-Tropical Africa, as well as by the Seedees (Sidis) in India.

In an earlier issue of BSOAS I published some notes on an interesting feature of the Socotri language, namely that certain imperfect forms lack the t-prefix which marks 2nd and certain 3rd person forms in Semitic languages.

The J(ibbāli), or Śherí, language of Dhofar also exhibits this negative feature, and in much the same series of forms; principally the indicative, subjunctive, and conditional forms of causative verbs, intensive-conative verbs, quadriliteral verbs and passive verbs.

Arab historical writing was not a specialized study in the seventeenth century. Organized work in Arabic and Islamic studies was still a recent development in western Europe generally. The first modern English Arabist, William Bedwell (1562–1632), was during most of his life an isolated figure: the principal result of his studies was an Arabic lexicon which was never printed, although he bequeathed the MS to Cambridge with a fount of Arabic type for that purpose. In the third decade of the century, however, some younger scholars began to interest themselves in Arabic.

Despite their period from the tenth to the twelfth century, at the height of the Middle Ages; despite their position in Egypt, at the centre of the civilization of the Near and Middle East; and despite their prominence as the third Caliphate of Islam, the Fāṭimids lack a satisfactory modern history of their dynasty. This is partly because of the length of their life, which covers the histories of so many hundreds of years; partly because of the span of their empire from North Africa to Egypt and Syria, stretching across the histories of so many regions; and finally because, at the level of Islam itself, their empire was divided between their dawla or state and their daՙwa or doctrine. The doctrine, which focused on the Fāṭimid Imām as the quṭb or pole of faith, gave the dynasty its peculiar strength and endurance. The failure of that doctrine to supersede the Islam of the schools, however, left the Fāṭimids increasingly isolated and ultimately vulnerable. Standing outside the mainstream of Islamic tradition, the dynasty's own version of its history was disregarded. Instead, its components passed out of their original context to be incorporated into the regional or universal histories of subsequent authors. Maqrīzī was alone in compiling his Ittiՙāẓ al-ḥunafā' as a history of the dynasty in Egypt, introduced by a miscellany of information on its origins and previous career.

This monograph was originally intended as a continuation of “Swahili Phonetics”, which appeared in African Studies, vol. 1, nos. 2 and 3, 1942, but war-time typographical difficulties rendered publication impossible then. I am very grateful to the editor of the S.O.A.S. Bulletin for publishing it now. Although it may be read as a separate monograph, some knowledge of Swahili phonetics is necessarily taken for granted, and I have numbered the paragraphs as from the end of “Swahili Phonetics”, so as to allow for cross-reference to that article.

This study owes its inception to Sir Percival David, who possesses among the treasures in his private collection one of the few surviving copies of a large engraved map of the world, known to students of cartography as the Map of Hajji Ahmed. Invited by its owner to translate for him the legends in the map and especially the lengthy text accompanying it, which are written in Turkish, I became aware that a close analysis of this text yielded more information than has so far been obtained about the origin of the map.

PŪr-i BahĀ (probably Tāj al-dīn, son of Bahā al-dīn) was a contemporary of the Mongol il-khan Abaqa (663–80/1265–82), son of Hulagu, and was closely associated with the family of great statesmen, Juvaynī. He is now a forgotten poet and the information available hitherto has been scarce. Even the most accurate editor of the history of ‘Alā al-dīn Juvaynī forgot to mention Pūr-i Bahā, among the panegyrists of the Juvayni family. Yet Pūr-i Bahā enjoyed a considerable reputation in his day. According to Hamdullah Mustaufā (Tārīkh-i Guzīda, 816) his dīvān was well-known (mashhūr), and Waṣṣāf (see below) readily quoted his verses.

A study of the poetry of the Sīra shows that a high proportion of it is the work of more or less professional forgers who supplied narrators with poems especially prepared to suit the narrative and appeal to the audience whose outlook towards the events of early Islam had undergone considerable change. Two or three generations after the final victory of Islam and the death of the Prophet, the persons as well as the events of that era were becoming part of pasthistory. Past events had begun to take a different form and when viewed acrossthe years they appeared like a panorama in which only certain high points werevisible, and different landmarks were differently placed in relation to each other. Time had produced a shift of interest and a change in outlook, andcertainpersons were becoming more legendary and less human.

Neolithic sites of the North Karnataka region produce artifacts belonging to two distinct industries.1 The first comprises mainly blade and ‘geometric’ tools manufactured from a series of siliceous rocks. Their manufacture entails a definite tradition of core preparation and striking of bladeflakes.2 The second industry comprises core and flake tools manufactured from a group of igneous and metamorphic rocks. Their manufacture entails different techniques based upon flaking, grinding, and pecking. The artifacts to be studied here belong to the second industry.

Needless to say the Amharic speakers also have close contact with the speakers of the other Semitic Ethiopic languages as well as of the Cushitic languages. Nearly all the Semitic Ethiopic and Cushitic languages have many Arabic loanwords for the same reasons mentioned above in connexion with Amharic. It is, therefore, often difficult to know whether an Arabic loanword in Amharic came directly from an Arabic dialect or through the intermediary of another Semitic Ethiopic or Cushitic language. Since we have no adequate means at our disposal for a historical treatment of the Semitic Ethiopic vocabulary, we shall most probably never be able to determine the precise origin of some of the words considered here as borrowings, that is to say whether they come directly from an Arabic dialect or through another Semitic Ethiopic or Cushitic language.

In her deconstruction of the category ‘ritual’, Bell (1992: 6) suggests that all theoretical discourse on this subject is based on the opposition between thought (beliefs, symbols and myths) and action (the enactment of such cultural templates). Bell further demonstrates that this basic distinction has generated two other homologized structural patterns in ritual theory. In the second pattern, (represented in the works of Durkheim, Tambiah and Turner), there has been an attempt to produce a synthesis of the initial dichotomy. In the third pattern (represented in the studies of Geertz), this opposition and integration has led to another permutation of the original pattern, in which ‘ritual participants act, whereas those observing them think’ (Bell, 1992: 28).

The following study contains a translation of al-Bīrūnī's rendering into Arabic of the third chapter of Patañjali's Yogasūtra cum commentrary. (On this point see our translation of al-Bīrūnī's rendering of the first two chapters of Patanñjali's Yogasktra). This translation is based on Ritter's edition of the Arabic text. Comparison has been made with the unique MS of Ritter's Text: KöprÜlÜ, 1589, fols. 412a–419a (writen on the margins). We have also compared the text with paralled passages and expressions in al-Bīrūnī's India.

Many classical Islamic sources argue that it is not permissible for non-Muslims to reside in the Ḥijāz, especially Mecca and Medina. Such arguments are usually based on a famous Prophetic saying, “Two religions should not join/remain in the peninsula/land of the Arabs”, and on the reported action taken by the second caliph ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb to remove non-Muslims from settlements in western Arabia. In this article, it is argued that the contradictory nature of the evidence for this expulsion casts serious doubt on whether such a widespread action actually took place, certainly not in the decades immediately following Muḥammad's death. It concludes that the widely attested classical prohibition on non-Muslims residing in the Ḥijāz rather had much more to do with the gradually evolving need to draw up firmer communal boundaries, which could help distinguish Muslims from others, and the role played by sacred spaces in doing so.