In the great mass of material already collected for the study of African folk-lore—to which fresh additions are daily being made— we do not find any considerable number of what may be called heroic legends. Yet some there are, as in the traditions of Kintu and other early kings of Uganda, in the tale of Mbega, current in Usambara, and probably many others, as yet unrecorded.

We must be thankful to Professor Berriedale Keith for once more calling attention to the problem of the doctrine preached bythe Buddha. The problem is indeed important for the history of Indian civilization, as well as for the comparative history of philosophy. Was there or was there not a real philosophy, or, to use an expression of the late M. Émile Senart, “ une pensée maàtresse d'ellemêeme,” in the sixth century B.C. in India ? Professor Keith thinks it “ really impracticable to discover with any precision the doctrine which Buddha in fact expounded ”. The reasons for this despair are several. First of all, an extraordinary diversity of doctrine has developed from the teaching of the Buddha in the sixth century B.C.1 Professor Keith apparently thinks that if a doctrine has much developed, it becomes “ undiscoverable ”. I rather feel inclined to disbelieve such an axiom. A rotten seed will have no growth; but a seed strong and healthy may produce luxuriant vegetation. The other reason is more plausible. “ What assurance have we that the Pali Canon really represents the views of the Buddha with any approach to accuracy ? ” But, even if it contained the records of contemporary eyewitnesses, the scepticism of Professor Keith would not be shaken, for “we need”, he says, “ only remember the difficulties presented by the Aristotelian view of the doctrine of Plato ”—in order to disbelieve an eyewitness of the highest authority.

The importance of poetry as the chief aesthetic experience of the Arabs as well as the principal repository of materials on their life and thought had long been recognized by the Arab and, following them, non-Arab students of Arabic culture. The fact that all the technical terminologies of Arabic verse which were formalized in ‘ilm al- ‘aruḍ (Prosody) are derived from the components of the bedouin tent—a highly prized possession—indicates the significance of the art to the Arab mind. The pride of place enjoyed by poetry in Arabic literary thought derives primarily from the hieratic idiom associated with it, as well as from its structural coherence, which relies on the harmony of prosodic factors (al-‘awāmilal-‘arūūiyya) associated with poetic praxis.

Since the publication of the catalogue of manuscripts in Indonesian languages in British public collections (Ricklefs and Voorhoeve, 1977), further MSS have of course come to light, as have some of those errors which inevitably attend such a work. It seems appropriate to publish here a list of additions and substantive corrections known to the authors by the beginning of 1981. The authors of the catalogue are grateful to those librarians and scholars who have brought such things to their notice, and particularly to Dr. A. C. Milner for offering his descriptions of Malay MSS found in the Wellcome Institute for publication here.

It has long been observed by Cushiticists that the prefix conjugation in various Semitic languages represents one of the major arguments for treating this language group as belonging to the Semitohamitic (Erythraic, Afroasiatic) language phylum. From Semitic and Berber we are acquainted with (at least) two different prefix conjugations, a short one and a long one. THe long from is found in Berber and in several Semitic languages, although there is no general agreement about this. With this in mind, we should be surprised if we could not find so-called long imperfect forms in Cushitic as well. A strong candidate would be the Beja present which nasalizes the second radical, which is lengthened in other languages. In this context, however, I should like, not to discuss the problem bearing on the verbal forms of North Cushitic, but rather to draw the attention of the compartive Semitohamiticist to some East Cushitic languages for which new material is now available. ITt seems convenient to limit this discussion to the Rendille and Boni languages which have recently become knownthrough the work of Bernd Heine (1975–76, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1982) and Hans-Jürgen Sasse (1979, 1980a, 1980b).

Note.— The script used to represent Egyptian Arabic speech in these notes is that of the International Phonetics Association, with the necessary modifications for Egyptian Arabic sounds, as found in Gairdner's Egyptian Colloquial Arabic.

The present article is based on photographs of nineteenth-century Arabic official letters, made by the author while carrying out conservation work on manuscript material for the Nigerian Department of Antiquities at the Northern Nigerian centres of Sokoto and Bauchi. Thanks to conscientious local custody, and the moisture-free atmosphere which these districts enjoy for most of the year, the greater number of these papers were still in remarkably good condition. At the same; time, progressive embrittlement of the fibres was making direct handling of the sheets undesirable, and some protection was felt necessary, The custodians of these collections had therefore been in touch with the Department of Antiquities, and it was decided as a first step to mount the most delicate and valuable specimens between sheets of glass, to be sealed at the edges with passe-partout and enclosed in light wooden frames.2 Since photo-graphy was likely to be more difficult after the completion of this work, the documents selected for treatment were first recorded upon 35 mm. film.

In the study of the early history of South East Asia the nature of the shipping which operated between India and the regions to the east has been the subject of much discussion. Sources for this study are rare enough and the fact that one of them, Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, § 60, is either corrupt, as Müller believed, or contains a difficult hapax legomenon, has proved something of a stumbling block. The text of the Periplus rests upon a single MS (Heidelberg: Cod. Palatinus Gr. 398 saec. X ineuntis) of which there is a fourteenth or fifteenth century copy in the British Museum (Add. Mss. 19391)

In a number of Nilotic languages spoken in East Africa it has been shown that there exists formal marking of case based exclusively on tonal differentiation. This has been fully described in Maasai (Tucker and Mpaayei, 1955) and all investigated Kalenjin dialects (Tucker and Bryan, 1962. 1964–5). It also is clearly present in my own data on Teso, though interestingly enough it seems to be lacking in the Luo group generally.

No written literature of an Indonesian people has been so brilliantly and completely described as that of the Achehnese in the north of Sumatra. This description was the work of Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje. Before it appeared in 1894 as one of the seven chapters of his work De Atjèhers, all that was known to the outside world about this literature consisted of a few specimina, printed (under Snouck Hurgronje's supervision) in K. F. H. van Langen's manual of the Achehnese language (The Hague, 1889). After some preparatory work in Holland and a stay of only seven months in Kutaraja (in wartime, cut off from intercourse with the country by the then prevailing system of a concentrated line surrounding the capital), Snouck Hurgronje was able to reveal the existence of a rich epic, romantic, and relïgious Achehnese literature, to give summaries of all its works of any importance and to deal elaborately with its chief masterpieces, to investigate the prosody of the poetry in which nearly all these texts are written as well as the origin of the foreign elements found in many tales and treatises. In the second edition of his work, which was published in English (The Achehnese) in 1906, only a few additions had to be made. The catalogue of the manuscripts, collected by Snouck Hurgronje himself and by some pupils and friends inspired by his example, will show some more, but they do not alter the general picture drawn in the first edition.

This article presents the results of further work on the Dōsiri dialect of Arabic, a preliminary study of which appeared in this Bulletin some time ago.

Since this first article appeared, I have been able to examine more closely the extent of 'Ajmi influence on the phonology of the dialect spoken by my Dōsiri informants, and to place their dialect more accurately within the group to which it belongs. It now seems certain that, although this Dōsiri dialect does not share all the distinguishing features of the Nejdi group, the parent dialect does belong to the south-central type of Nejdi dialect. As a result of the placing of the dialect of the Duwāsir a little more exactly, and of the comparative studies this has involved, a more precise formulation of some important phonological and syntactical features can now be made.

The historicity of books – their role as a force in history – has been addressed in post-war literary studies from different perspectives and across various disciplines. Nevertheless, the scholarship on the history of the book in medieval Islam is still relatively sparse, even though this society underwent a thorough process of textualization. But even authors who do consider the social and cultural role of books in medieval Islam look only at the production and consumption of Arabic books within the boundaries of Muslim society, relying on Islamic sources which reflect mainly the courtly milieu of scribes and secretariats. None discuss books produced and consumed by the religious minorities that were an indispensable part of this society, and none have made use of the abundant Genizah documents as source material. In the present programmatic article, I call attention to the many book lists found in the Cairo Genizah and to their potential as significant tools for developing a better understanding of the cultural and social history of the medieval Islamicate world.

The use of oral mnemonics in the transmission of instrumental music is a well-known and persistent feature of East Asian musics. In both Korea and Japan, there are several such systems for different instruments. There are also various systems of written mnemonics, that is, musical notation; many originally oral systems have come to be used as notations as well. Following Western scholarly usage, we shall often refer to oral mnemonics in general by the term solfège; although etymologically dubious, this practice at least helps avoid over-use of the unwieldy expression ‘oral mnemonics’.

The present paper will deal with one type of oral mnemonics in Korea, known collectively as yukpo or sometimes as kuŭm (cf. Lee, 1981: 31–4; Hahn, 1973: 79–83; Howard, 1988: 68, 91, 115, 182, 212, 227).3 Yukpo exist or are known to have existed for most string and wind instruments and even for percussion. By the sixteenth century at least, these originally oral syllables had begun to be written down as a kind of musical notation. The first mention of yukpo is in the Annals of King Sejo (A.D. 1470): ‘ Formerly there was only [for musical notation] the use of mnemonic sounds, called the Yukpo … The complexities are difficult to comprehend’ (quoted in Lee, 1981: 31, Condit 1976: 205, 207 has a more extensive but interpretive translation). This quotation suggests that yukpo were already considered both old and obscure by Sejo's time.

The Chadic (Afroasiatic) language Hausa, spoken mainly in Nigeria and the Republic of Niger, has a series of ‘glottalic’ obstruents. This includes both ejectives ([k’], [s’] or [ts’]; orthographic κ, ts) and two other consonants which have often been described as ‘implosives’ and are represented by the IPA symbols for implosives in Hausa orthography (б, d). In addition, there is a ‘laryngealized’ palatal glide (orthographic ‘y). The description of orthographic б, d as implosive has been called into question, however. Ladefoged, in his well-known work on the phonetics of West African languages (Ladefoged (1964: 16)), suggested that, while these sounds may on occasion show the ingressive air flow characteristic of implosives, their most consistent characteristic is a distinctive mode of vocal fold vibration (phonation type) known as creaky voice or laryngealization; thus, Hausa б and d should be labelled ‘laryngealized stops’ rather than ‘implosives’. One implication of this change in descriptive label is that, at least from a phonetic point of view, б and d should be grouped with ‘y.

This paper attempts to reconstruct aspects of the phonology and morphology of the Arabic of the Islamic conquests on the basis of Greek transcriptions in papyri of the first Islamic century. The discussion includes phonemic and allophonic variation in consonants and vowels, and nominal morphology. The essay concludes with a discussion on possible Aramaic and South Arabian influences in the material, followed by a short appendix with remarks on select Arabic terms from the pre-Islamic papyri.

The Mss. herein described were purchased, copied, or recorded during a tour V A in Hadramawt as Colonial Research Fellow. Besides visiting the main ”f Wadi lying between Kabr Hūd and Hainin, I made investigations in the Wādī f Daw‘an, Huraida in ‘Amd, and in the course of a journey from Bal-Hᾶf, on the I coast, to Habbān on the western fringe of Wāhidi territory. Time did not I allow of a systematic recording of all existing MSS., which can be seen in i hundreds, especially as this formed only part of my programme, but those described here are the more interesting MSS. inspected. A similar tour seems to have been performed by Dr. Hamidullah in the Yemen shortly before my own investigations in Hadramawt.

The many scholars, mostly saiyids, whom I met in Hadramawt gave generously of their assistance, often placing MSS. freely at my disposal; I must; mention in particular the ‘Attās family of Huraida, and Sālih b. ‘Alī al-Hāmidī of Saiwūn. On the other hand, I have been informed, I have no means of assessing how accurately, that there are occasional individuals in the country I who possess some valuable MSS. but would rather see them moulder to pieces ‘ than show them to strangers. I understand that some saiyids keep their books in the women's part of the house, as in learned saiyid society books are reckoned fair game to the casual borrower who succeeds in abstracting them while the owner is not looking.

For anyone wishing to discover new MSS.

This monument is found somewhat farther to the East than the two foregoing ones, about 48° N. and a little more than 107° W. of Greenwich, near a place said to have the name of Bain Chokto, between the Nalaikha post-station and the right bank of the upper waters of the Tola. The inscription is graven on two pillars that are still standing upright; on the first and larger of these the inscription starts on one of the narrow sides, the one turned to the West, and is continued round towards South, East, and North. On the other one, the inscription, which is a direct continuation of that on the larger stone, likewise begins on the West side, but here this is one of the broad sides. The latter stone is more weathered than the first, and the inscription from the very beginning not being here so carefully incised as on the other. On both stones the inscriptions are written in vertical lines as in the Orkhon inscriptions; but with this difference that while the lines in the latter read from right to left here they read from left to right.

One of the arguments for supposing that the ‘world's earliest printed book’, the Diamond Sūtra in the Stein collection in London, is actually the outcome of a long process of development relies on the very high quality of the images contained in the frontispiece. It is possible, of course, to point to much more crudely formed Buddha images stamped on paper from the same source at Tunhuang, but the dated examples that have been studied are actually later than the Stein Diamond Sūtra itself.1 The practice of printing Buddha images on paper and silk in India is attested in 792 by the Nan-hai chi-kuei nei-fa chuan of I-ching who was in India 673–85, and Paul Pelliot for one was prepared to believe that this practice, using Chinese materials, was originally derived from China itself.2 Frustratingly enough, however, no Chinese source has so far been identified which clearly mentions printing on paper at any point earlier than I-ching's text, which itself does not antedate by more than half a century or so the earliest printed materials we actually possess, notably in the form of a dharaṇī from Korea.3

The two famous monuments known as the Orkhon Inscriptions, erected in honour of the two Turkish princes, Kül-Tegin and his brother Bilgä Kagan, though mentioned in Chinese histories, remained forgotten and ignored down to quite recent times. They stand near the Lake Kocho Tsaīdam, to the west of the River Orkhon, about 50 miles north of the monastery of Erdentso (the site of the ancient city of Kara Korum), and about 25 miles to the north-west of the ruins of the capital of the Uighurs, Kara-Balgassun. They are two great square monoliths, which originally reposed in two sockets. Both these sockets are still in their original position, but the monuments have been thrown down, with the result that Monument II is in four pieces. They contain long Turkish inscriptions in Runic characters on three sides, and on one side (the western) the inscription is in Chinese. The Chinese inscriptions are very beautifully cut; the Runic inscriptions, which are also probably the work of the Chinese stonecutters, are less elegant. It may be mentioned that the Chinese inscriptions differ entirely in their contents from the Turkish.

A new dispute between Shaykh al-Azhar and the [Chief] Muftī concerning the marriage contract: Shaykh al-Azhar argues that the new contract permits the forbidden and forbids the permitted, that the contract is the creation of the secularists, and that it contains forbidden innovation (bid‘a) and is misleading; the Mufti holds that the contract does not permit the forbidden or forbid the permitted, that it is a result of a permissible independent reasoning (ijtihād mashrū‘), and that some of the articles included in the contract were approved by a few classical jurists.