Generation- and age-set systems are found in many parts of the world. They are of particular importance in Africa, and especially in East Africa where some ethnic groups operate socio-political and cultural systems in which generation-sets play a dominant role. Ethnographic descriptions of generation-set systems abound, but their theoretical understanding seems still to be inadequate. With examples from the Toposa and Turkana, this paper aims to contribute to the theory of generation-set systems. Moreover, the processes described and the ideas expressed may also contribute to the general theory of socio-political and cultural systems.

The Kushan god μοζδοοανο is attested on a group of rare coins of Kanishka I, where he is depicted as a bearded male bearing a trident in his right hand and riding a two-headed horse. It has been universally assumed that the name μοζδοοανο is connected in some way with that of Ahura Mazda, the supreme deity of the Zoroastrian religion, the second element of the Bactrian form being generally interpreted as an epithet meaning ‘victorious’.

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).

According to the Nihongi, a chronicle of Japan written in A.D. 720, the first Chinese calendar was brought to Japan in the year A.D. 554. It is now generally agreed that before this time there was no native calendrical system and that earlier dates given in the Nihongi were calculated retrospectively, and in some cases inaccurately, using Chinese systems (Nakayama, 1969: 7–8). The Chinese calendar was not only a method for keeping track of the days but also a complete astronomical system for calculating the movements of the heavenly bodies.

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).

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 Lord Salisbury's long administration came to an end in the summer of 1892, there ended also an era in British diplomacy. This was not immediately apparent because the development of the ‘new course’,2 different from Lord Salisbury's, took more than a decade. Lady Gwendolen Cecil has described Lord Salisbury's policy as ‘neighbourliness’. Dame Lillian Penson has called it ‘practical co-operation’. This policy had by 1892 secured for his country a position of political authority in Europe which was unique, in that it ‘owed nothing to military pre-eminence or that subtle manipulation of international jealousies, which was the chief weapon of Prince Bismarck's genius’. Its weakness was that it was his alone and depended for its success upon personal characteristics which could not be passed on to a successor.3

The category of participle (P) usually includes at least two distinct paradigms. The terms for these vary, as it is not easy to determine the often language-specific nature of the opposition encoded in them. Temporal- ‘aspectual’ terminology is widely applied, giving present or ‘imperfect’ or progressive Ps as opposed to past, preterite, or ‘perfect’ Ps. An alternative popular opposition in many a linguistic tradition is of active vs. passive Ps. To avoid commitment to any of these nomenclatures, I use neutral formal terms: PI and P2.

In order to establish the place of P in the verbal system of a given language, the relevant verbal-syntactic categories of that particular system must first be isolated. For this, I define the following components of indicative verbal systems in non-aspectual languages.

Küçük Muḥammad was a man of obscure origin who, in 1087/1676, seized control of the Janissary headquarters in Cairo. Twice ousted from this position, he regained power there finally in 1103/1692, after collusion with Ibrāhīm Bey b. Dhi'l-Faqār, a prominent grandee of the Faqāriyya faction, and Ḥasan Ağga Balfiyya, the influential commanding officer of the Gönüllüyān corps.

Recent epigraphic discoveries shed new light on merchant groups in early medieval Bengal, a region whose history in the period from the mid-sixth to the thirteenth centuries is shrouded in obscurity. The present article attempts to provide a better delineation of this history with additional information from new inscriptions, and presents a transcription, translation and discussion of the Rajbhita stone inscription which records the activity of an association of merchants called vaṇiggrāma. The history of merchant groups in early medieval Bengal can be delineated as a process of the ruralization of urban elites in its early phase, and of the organization of merchants located in rural space towards specialized groups comparable to jātis in its later phase. The new inscriptions enable us not only to fill gaps with new information, but also give us perspectives from which we can go beyond unilineal simplicity.

In this article I edit and comment on the Hoernle manuscript IOL Toch 81 (H 149.292) with fragmentary texts in three languages, Sanskrit (6 lines) TocharianB (1 line) and Turkic (15 lines). The primary interest is in the Turkic text, which probably forms part of an upāsaka's vow. Its orthography, morphology and lexis, perceptibly different from standard Uighur, show features which point to high antiquity and perhaps to non-Uighur provenance. Some Buddhist terms seem to be deliberately designed on a Manichaean foil. Thus the Turkic part of the manuscript may date back to the second half of the ninth century, or, if non-Uighur, to an even earlier period.

This study argues that five treatises on the legal status of Friday prayer in Twelver Shiite law that were composed between 1555 and 1563, in the middle of the reign of Safavid Shah Tahmasb, were all penned as part of a heated competition over the post of shaykh al-islām of the Safavid capital Qazvin. Detailed analysis of the first four treatises and the context in which they were produced, building on a 1996 article that discussed the fifth, demonstrates the influence of politics and academic rivalry on texts of Islamic law and other sciences, the types of rhetorical strategies used by scholars in the competition for patronage, and the importance of support of scholars for the establishment of legitimate rule and an official religion.

In Iranian Studies [I], BSOS vi (1933), 945 ff., I commented briefly`upon a text of the Bahman Yašt (Vahman yašt or yasn), in which certain ethnical names occurred. It was desired then chiefly to point out the name of the Karmīr xyōn “Red Chionitae” beside the Spēt xyōn “White Chionitae”, and the forms of the name of Sogdiana. I did not, however, succeed in interpreting the whole passage satisfactorily, and after ten years I venture once more to call attention to it. To the bibliography given in BSOS vi 9451 should add here the edition of the Bahman Yašt by Anklesaria, The Zand-î Vohûman Yasn 1919 (which came into my hands after I had written the'paper); B. N. Dhabhar, The Persian Rivayats of Hormazyar Framarz, 1932, which contains on p. 465 a translation of the Parsi-Persian text to be found in M. R. Unvala's. Dârâb Hormazyâr's Rivâyat ii 91 (1932); Markwart, Provincial Cities of Eranshahr, p. 69.

The applicability of Western concepts to an understanding of gender in other cultural settings has become increasingly problematic. We need to elicit an understanding of how particular societies define sexual difference, and derive locally grounded ideas of self and the materiality of the body as a starting point for analysis. This paper examines some of the wider implications of this view for notions of cultural context and comparison. Its ethnographic examples come from Latin America. They build on the regional interest in spiritual and symbolic forms as ‘scripts’ for gender identifications, exploring the diverse ways in which idealizations, images and icons are read in ways that encompass both ‘local’ and ‘non-local’ narratives. However, the discussion aims to be relevant beyond this geographical location, suggesting that both secular and sacred discourses appear to work at a number of different, sometimes contradictory, levels, often drawing together transcultural notions of being, and generating a field of meaning in which gender, value and morality are constituted.

It is a common supposition that to understand a philosophical writing, knowledge of the philosophical sources on which it draws suffices. Yet, abstract subtleties are often suitably dressed in poetic comparisons, whose threads are spun from a different source. While the body of logical argument appeals to the intellect, the dress of literary tropes allures the emotions. Philosophy is not simply mathematics, for it involves a sentiment, which in Mahāyāna Buddhism means susceptibility to its religious ethos embodied in its path, bodhicitta, and bodhisattvas. Through Candrakīrti's comparison of buddhas and bodhisattvas to the king of geese, I shall here examine the use of similes and metaphors in Indian Buddhist philosophical writing. The analysis illustrates the subtle influence that popular narratives eulogizing the deeds of saints had on such texts, and proposes to revisit philosophical texts as literary works.

In the following pages an attempt will be made to resolve certain obscurities in the references made by Byzantine writers to the Turki nations of Central and Western Asia in that period—the sixth century—when the two civilizations first came into contact. It is hoped thereby to throw additional light on the situation of the various Turki tribes at that date.

At Sāmarrā’ there are the remains of a number of ‘Abbāsid walled tracks which appear to be racecourses. Ernst Herzfeld found one track in the course of the German expedition of 1911–13 to the ‘Abbāsid capital at Sāmarrā’, and the outline of two more became known from a series of maps of the Sāmarrā’ district made by the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force in 1917. Herzfeld published his first brief discussion of these courses in 1948 in his Geschichte der Stadt Samarra’, and a further description was published posthumously in his Persian empire in 1968. At about the same time in 1948, a fairly extensive discussion was published by Ahmad Susa in his Rayy Sāmarrā’, though without much illustration. Sūsa enumerated five courses, but it has proved necessary to exclude two, for they seem not to have been for racing. One further course has been added here, not identified before.

In the Manuscript Collection of the Cairo Library (Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriya), there is an unpublished and practically unknown manuscript (Kashf al-Asrār al-'Ilmiya bi Dār aḍ-Ḍarb al-Miṣriya), which contains a treatise dealing with problems of the Egyptian mint. It was composed by Manṣūr ibn Ba'ra a-ahabī al-Kāmilī. Although the manuscript is only a late copy of the original work, it constitutes an important source for the study of the monetary system and minting problems of medieval Egypt.

The use of seven names for Hell in the Qur'ān, though often noted as proper to Muhammad, has never been fully explained. Yet the notion they stand for is an important element in the preaching of the Prophet of Islam and runs through the whole context of his message. A solution of their problem therefore may provide increased understanding not only of their author's inner sentiments during the Meccan years of persecution but also of the external influences that moulded his thought and expression over the two decades in which the Qur'ān was announced as a divine revelation to the people of Arabia.

Among the British Indian merchants engaged in trade with Persia in the first half of the nineteenth century was Hjj Nr al-Dn Muhammad b. Ahmad al-Dn Muhammad, a native of Masulipatam. He was a rich and highly respected merchant, holding at one time a position of influence at Shrz, where he had settled at the beginning of the century and married. He was a Sh' and reputed to be pious and well versed in the tenets of Sh'ism. He had intercourse with Husayn 'Al Mrz Farmn Farm (the son of Fath 'Al Shh and governor of Frs from 1214179980 to 12501834), Fath 'Al Shh, and Muhammad Shh; he also enjoyed the favour of the latter's prime minister Hjj Mrz Aqs, who referred to him in 1843 as his esteemed friend,2 but eventually forfeited this because of the partiality which Muhammad Shh showed him for many years.3 In due course Hjj Nr al-Dn acquired possession of two estates in Frs. His title to them was subsequently questioned and the dispute led to a long and complicated case with the Persian government.