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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Up to this point I have attempted to show how Shen Nung was portrayed in late Warring States and early Han texts. I have also reviewed what we know about Nung (or Chu) and Lieh Shan shih, Keng-fu (Plough Father), and T'ien-tsu (Field Ancestor), since it may be one or all four of these figures that comes to be known as Shen Nung.

We can argue nothing for certain on this, and certainly T'ien-tsu in the Shih, was, we assume, a god of the Chou. But that point aside, there seems to be good reason to think that Shen Nung was originally a farming god of the Shang people. He is the hero who invented the plough, and the god to whom they turned when they needed rain. Ultimately, this may have been Hsieh, the first-born of the Shang people, known to us in our texts as Shu-chün or Yi-chün. That Shen Nung would become prominent only in texts that date from the late Chou should be no surprise; we should expect him to be overshadowed in early Chou times by their hero Hou Chi.

It is important to keep in mind as we proceed that in the materials we have examined so far, we have seen repeated references to ‘fire’ and ‘rain’ and ‘drought’. Ritual ways of producing rainfall and combating the drought could involve fire (yen-huo, in Shih, 211); they might also involve ‘invocations’, charging the drought demon to ‘Go to the north!’ (Shan-hai ching).

In certain types of Old Bodish transitive verbs (Types 2, 7, 8), the initial of the imperative is regularly aspirated and would correspond to what Li believed to be the primitive form of the verb except for morphophonic change.

But aspiration of these stems does not occur in the imperative in West Bodish, as it does in Old and Central Bodish. Citable examples from Sbalti and Burig are almost wanting. For Burig, Francke gives the imperative tog, corresponding to O.B. t'ogs “fasten!”, and Bailey has tsăt-“awake”, im. tsot. The last might have been aspirated if aspiration were characteristic of the West Bodish imperative; however, the only related form in Old Bodish is sod-pa, sad-pa. But it is significant that neither Read, pp. 46–7, nor Bailey, p. 17, in their discussion of the changes occurring in the West Bodish imperative, mention any alteration of the initial. Nor does Jäschke in his Tibetan Grammar. On the contrary, Jaschke does provide some positive proof that aspiration does not occur hi the West Bodish imperative in the few West Bodish (Ladwags or Lahul dialect) imperative forms in his grammar (99–101), and still more in his dictionary:—

In January of 1936 Dr. Ernest Mackay, director of the excavation of the American School of Indic and Iranian Studies at Chanhudaro, courteously arranged that I should have the use of a Brāhūī speaker and an interpreter for a number of sessions. The Brāhuāī, Dad Muhammad by name, belongs to the Nīchārī tribe of the Jhalawān division of the Brāhūīs. Some confirmatory note s were made as well with the aid of another of the Brāhūī speakers working at the excavation, of the same tribe and village as Dad Muhammad. The note s made were chiefly phonetic.

We witness two kinds of Chinese texts in Tibetan transcription, thosewhich have the Tibetan transcription by the side of the Chinese characters—much as the Japanese syllabic script occurs by the side of theChinese characters—and those which are in Tibetan script only.

When Buddist works in Sanskrit were first introduced into Europe, it was at once obvious that the language of some of them as it appears in the manuscripts was, in comparison with Classical Sanskrit, frequently ungrammatical, and on occasion barbarously so. The immediate and natural reaction of scholars accustomed to the regularity of Sanskrit was to stigmatize these shortcomings, and to attempt to remove as many irregularities as possible by forcibly emending the text. It was, however, very soon recognized that many of the seeming anomalies could not be abolished, and that they must be accepted as genuine in their own context. This was especially clear in the case of the verses of some of the older texts, where the metre often guaranteed non- Pāηinean forms; and the language of these verses, variously called the Gāthādialect, mixed Sanskrit, or hybrid Sanskrit, was recognized as something in its own right. The same courtesy was readily extended to the prose of the Mahāvastu, which in places could only have been made to resemble Sanskrit by completely rewriting the text. The prose of the other texts, being in many waysvirtually Sanskrit, took considerably longer to win the same recognition; but for many years now it has been generally admitted that here also is a language which must be judged according to its own standards, and not exclusively by the canons of classical Sanskrit grammar.

The higher-order subgrouping of Tibeto-Burman has been recently up for debate. The modern era of TB/Sino-Tibetan subgrouping began with Benedict 1972 (henceforth /STC), where that great comparativist refrained from offering a Stammbaum of the conventional type, leaving several individual languages and language groups unclassified, and placing Jingpho at the centre of diversity of the whole vast TB family (see Fig. 1.) Despite several peculiarities, notably the special position accorded Karenic and the lack of information on Baic (then called ‘Minjia’) or Qiangic, this scheme showed a healthily agnostic approach.

The field-work for the present article was begun in Kuwait in December 1958 and continued for a longer period in the spring of the following year. Besides making measurements on a fairly large būm, the Muhallab, lying in Kuwait harbour, we had many interviews with sailors and shipbuilders, all of the older generation of Kuwaitis.

In a recent article on Ya'qūb Pasha, the Jewish physician of Sultan Meḥmed II, Professor F. Babinger cites two passages from the brief account of the career of Ya'qūb given by A. Galanté in his Médecins Juifs au service de la Turquie. The first tells of the arrival of Ya'ūb in Edirne during the reign of Murād II, of his service with Murād and Meḥmed II, and gives the text of an alleged ferman exempting Ya'qūb and his descendants from all taxation in perpetuity, granted by Meḥmed II at Boghaz-kesen in Rabī' II 856/Apr.-May 1452. The second alleges that in 1571 the descendants of Ya'qūb applied to the Rabbinate in Constantinople for exemption from Jewish communal taxes on the basis of this ferman. As Babinger points out, Galanté refers the first statement simply to ‘un auteur hébraïque’, without further specification, while for the second statement he cites no authority at all.

Three details of the background ought to be explained before we come to discuss the subject itself: (1) the bimetallism of the Ch'ing currency; (2) the rigidity of the Ch'ing fiscal system; and (3) the financial stringency at the end of the Tao-kuang period.

IN the Introduction to his edition of the Āvaśyaka tales the late Professor Leumann wrote on p. 1 : “ Since-as may be easily understood—Jacobi, when he endeavoured to utilize the language and contents of the Jaina tales for Indology, started with the Uttarādhyayana Ṭikā, of Devendra which was in his possession, and since this author, belonging as he does to the period of decadence and therefore more familiar with Sanskrit, writes a rather doubtful Prakrit—therefore the editor was chiefly concerned with the establishing of a thoroughly reliable Prakrit text … that was to be suitable for clearing the way for a more correct judgment and utilization of medieval Jaina Prakrit.” The appearance of the first portion of Leumann's text was welcomed by Pischel in his Pkt grammar (§ 21) in the following terms: ” The most important text in JM is : Die Āvaśyaka-Erzählungen. Herausgegeben von Ernst Leumann. 1. Heft. Leipzig 1897. The absence of any commentary unfortunately renders the understanding rather difficult; some passages remain wholly obscure. But even these few forms show that from texts in JM we may yet expect much new and important material.”

It has already been noted by Professor F. W. Thomas 1 that there are several striking coincidences in religious topography between Buddhist Khotan and Nepal. In addition to place–names, however, there is also a considerable body of legendary tradition common to the two countries.

It has been frequently noted by linguists and other observers that in many parts of the Arabic-speaking world, the speech patterns of any one region divide quite sharply into two groups—that of the towns on the one hand, and that of the surrounding countryside on the other. The following is an attempt to show the relationship of two dialects of Arabic spoken in the province of Khūzistān in Iran which can be considered to be representative of urban and rural groups within their area.

Dirayta (ɗiraytá) is an Eastern Cushitic language spoken by a people calling themselves Diraaŝ (ɗiráaŝ), who live in the immediate vicinity of Gidole. Within Ethiopia generally the language is known as Gidoliñña. Dirayta and Musiya (Bussa or Busiñña) constitute the northernmost dialects of the Konsoid dialect chain, a linguistic entity first clearly established by Paul Black (forthcoming).

It is a fundamental point of comparative and historical linguistics that genealogical affiliation can only be established on the basis of concrete linguistic features, the more central the feature the more important for classificatory purposes. While there is no absolute consensus about how a central linguistic feature be identified, it can be taken as axiomatic that long-term reconstruction and classification rests most fundamentally on phonological and morphological criteria. Of these two, Hetzron (1976b) has argued that it is the morphological which is the most important because morphology represents the level of grammar that is both more complex and more arbitrary in the sense that the sound-meaning dyad has no natural basis. Precisely this arbitrariness ensures that morphological correspondences are relatively unlikely to be due to chance.