WHEN the geographical term ‘Bengal’ is used in any study of the old or medieval period of the literary history of the area, it must be borne in mind that it has so far been impossible to delineate its then boundaries with precision. Such early cartographical evidence2 as there is, suggests that it is improbable that the topography of Bengal resembled very closely that which is now familiar in our modern maps. The great rivers, which are the most distinctive characteristic of the formation of this part of India, are known to have made considerable changes in their courses; and the constant depositing of silt in the delta districts has almost certainly increased the area of its land surface during the centuries.

The legal and social attitude towards delicts against individuals in the great settled states of South Arabia is a subject on which information is very scant. All that has survived in the case of homicide is a fragmentary legal prescription of uncertain import, a temple regulation on the subject of slaves, and two incidental communications gleaned from dedicatory inscriptions. To this may be added a general prohibition contained in a late Greek law code purporting to stem from the Homeritae. Moreover, this small corpus of information is geographically limited in the first case to Qatabān, and in the remainder to Saba', while each instance refers to a different stage in the social development of South Arabia.

Throughout the ages from antiquity until modern times the extraordinary prowess of the horse-archers of Asia has excited wonder and admiration in those who have had the opportunity of observing them in action or of hearing of their feats. From the comments of observers and historians, therefore, a reasonably instructive account of their capabilities might be assembled. There can be no doubt, on the other hand, that a picture based solely on data of this kind would have its limitations in that it would capture the impression of what the eye perceived rather than reproduce the details of technique which alone can enable us to distinguish between fact and fiction or probable and improbable in the accounts of our witnesses. By a happy chance the evidence of a Mamlūk writer goes far to fill the lacuna. The source of the testimony is a technical treatise bearing on the training of archers. Entitled Kitāb ghunyat al-ṭullāb fī ma'rifat al-ramy bi 'l-nushshāb, the work was written circa 769/1368 by a certain Ṭaybugha '-Baklamishi '1-Yūnānī, about whom we know almost nothing beyond what can be gleaned from his treatise. Unlike many Arabic technical manuals of a similar kind dating from the later Middle Ages, the Ghunya will bear examination by the expert, for Ṭaybughā has an essentially practical mind and a complete grasp of his subject-matter. To judge from the number of extant MSS—17 are traceable in published works of reference—the work would appear to have been long esteemed throughout the Middle East as an authoritative source of instruction, and it may be surmised that Ṭaybughā's own words provide a clue to one of the reasons for its popularity: ‘Since archery and riding are enjoined by authentic command of the Prophet and since I knew of no work by any predecessor on the subject of shooting from horseback I felt I should accord the two accomplishments joint treatment in a single work, seeking thereby to comply with the command of God and His Messenger and to render a service to those of my brethren who campaign and fight in the jihād’.

Gurungkura is the Nepali name of a language spoken in West Central Nepal by the Gurung tribe.2 These studies are based on the speech of G./Lieut. Ganesh Gurung, M.C., l/2nd K.E.O. Goorkha Rifles, who during 1950 was seconded for duty as a research assistant at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

The Anglo-Russian Convention, signed at St. Petersburg on 31 August 1907, contained provisions relating to Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet. The text of the agreement would seem to suggest that the matters adjusted were purely local in character—an arrangement arrived at between two countries settling problems in far-away frontier regions. But the Anglo-Russian Convention was of much greater significance. It represented a change not only in Anglo-Russian relations, but in Britain's fundamental European policy. It also meant that the role of the Government of India, which had often been a powerful factor in the determination of foreign policy in the nineteenth century, became less significant. It seems highly probable, too, that in the years when Sir Edward Grey was Foreign Secretary (December 1905 to December 1916—holding office for a longer consecutive period than any other Foreign Secretary in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, the next being Castlereagh, 1812–22) the permanent staff of the Foreign Office exercised more influence and had a more decisive voice in the conduct of the country's foreign policy than they ever had before of have had since.

Music has its origin in Nature, a fact which is recognized by the Chinese. Music may be conscious (men) or unconscious (animals, storm, etc.). Vocal imitation preceded instrumental, which may have originated in the limitations of the human vocal chords.

Speech is communication between man and man, between mind and mind; music is communication between man and Nature, the gods, the spirits. Ancient music was no more than the sounds of Nature combined into some sort of system. As we see in this work, vocal imitation of the sounds of Nature came before instrumental music. Learners of whistling were numerous when Shun ‘developed music and invented the lute’.

The famous British orientalist E. G. Browne, a physician by training, was interested in Turkish language and literataure long before he became Professor of Arabic at Cambridge. It was at Cambridge that he wrote most of the works in the field of Persian studies, which were to bring him recognition as an outstanding Iranologist. But Browne's sense of affinity with the Turks endured from the time of the Russian-Turkish war of 1877–78, when he was only 16, until the end of his life in 1926. In 1914 he wrote in his introduction to The press and poetry of modern Persia: ‘Curiously enough it was the Ottoman Turks, a people far less original and talented than either the Persians or the Arabs, who so far as the Near East is concerned, introduced the hitherto unknown ideas of ‘the Fatherland’ (watan), ‘the nation’ or ‘people’ (millat) and ‘liberty’ (hurriyyat) and who succeeded in giving to these old words this new and potent significance.’

The view has more than once been mooted amongst archaeologists, though dissenting voices have frequently made themselves heard, that the art of the ‘Graeco-Buddhist’ School of Gandhāra is contemporary with the zenith of the Kuṣāṇa dynasty under the rulers Kaniṣka, Huviṣka, and perhaps Vāsudeva. A further analysis is naturally required to convert this proposition into terms of absolute chronology. Yet the basic thesis is one that would find justification in an argument developed by Ibn Khaldūn in his masterpiece of historical theory, the Muqaddima:

‘The monuments of a dynasty are its buildings and large (edifices). They are proportionate to the original power of the dynasty. They can materialize only when there are many workers, and united action and co-operation. When a dynasty is large and far-flung, with many provinces and subjects, workers are very plentiful, and can be brought together from all sides and regions. Thus even the largest monument can materialize’.

The asbāb mentioned in five passages of the Quran have been interpreted by medieval Muslims and modern scholars as referring generally to various “ways”, “means”, and “connections”. However, the word meant something more specific as part of a biblical-quranic “cosmology of the domicile”. The asbāb are heavenly ropes running along or leading up to the top of the sky-roof. This notion of sky-cords is not as unusual as it may seem at first, for various kinds of heavenly cords were part of Western Asian cosmologies in the sixth and seventh centuries ce. According to the Quran, a righteous individual may ascend by means of these cords to heaven, above the dome of the sky, where God resides, only with God's authorization. The heavenly cords are a feature of quranic cosmology and part of a complex of beliefs by which true prophets ascend to heaven and return bearing signs.

The simplest, irreducible part of the verb is the root, which carries the lexical information, and to which are suffixed markers of person, tense, mood, etc. Most verb roots end in a consonant, the commonest shapes being CVC- and CVCC-, but also VC- and VCC-: qal- ‘see’, wäš- ‘hear’, arq- ‘know’, abz- ‘finish’, mars'- ‘choose’, ward- ‘play’, aq- ‘be’, is'- ‘curse’, and so on. Dissyllabic roots are extremely rare in the material and almost all appear to be loans from Ethiopian Semitic: wływär- ‘throw’, färaq- ‘be wide’, mikwir- ‘try’, addin- ‘hunt’, tinfis- ‘breathe’; dissyllabic Agaw roots are is'aq- ‘send’, iqa- (also shortened to qa-)‘wash’. In addition there is a comparatively small number of roots with the shape CV-: xwa/t- ‘eat’, fi- ‘go out’, gwi- ‘get up, rise’, bi- ‘lack’, yi- ‘say’, and so on.

steering between opposing explanations of religion as either sui generis or sociological construction, this paper argues for an alternative way of conceptualizing the phenomenon called ‘sikh theology’. normally attributed to the interior religious experience of the founder of sikhism, ‘sikh theology’, it will be argued, can more usefully be envisaged as the product of a discursive regime, a regime of colonial translation, which effectively demarcated the conceptual framework of modern sikhism. this regime of translation contains an ideology about religion that made translators such as ernest trumpp imagine the work of translation as providing a remedy for a scripture perceived as lacking conceptual coherence, or in the case of trumpp's non-sikh protagonist m.a. macauliffe, as based on a ‘dialogical interaction’ with sikh native informants. the paper's main focus is to show how key theological concepts passed from trumpp to macauliffe, and were inadvertently imbibed by writers of the exegetical commentaries on scripture such as bha¯i¯ vi¯r singh, even as they were contesting trumpp's odium theologicum.

In the Saṅgītaratnākara, a thirteenth-century musical text by Śārṅgadeva, listed under svaraprastāra (lit. extension of notes) is a complete enumeration of all the possible combinations of the 7 notes of the Indian musical scale. This enumeration begins with the single note (ārcika) and is followed by all the possible combinations of two notes (gāthika), three notes (sāmika), four notes (svarāntara), five notes (auḍuva), six notes (ṣāḍava), and seven notes (pūrṇa). Each of these series of kūṭatānas (series of notes in which the continuity of the sequence is broken) develop in the same logical order based on the precedence of the ascending line over the descending line. In Śārṅgadeva's arrangement the first of the 7 note series is the straight ascending line, sa ri ga ma pa dha ni, which, for easy comprehension will be rendered as l 2 3 4 5 6 7 in this paper; and the last of the 7 note series is the straight descending line, ni dha pa ma ga ri sa, rendered 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 here. The changes in the order of the notes take place from the beginning of the series, at first involving only the first two notes, then the first three notes, then the first four notes, and so on. In fact, the progression for the 7 note series includes the progressions for all the smaller series within it. Thus the 7th note of the 7 note series remains constant until the progressions of one, two, three, four, five, and six notes have been exhausted. Only then is the 7th note replaced by the 6th. The chart on p. 308 is an abbreviation showing the nature of the progression. The 2 and 3 note series involving the first 2 and 3 notes respectively are complete. Beginning from the 4 note series, the chart is abbreviated as follows. The 4 note series is divided into four groups determined by the terminal note, each involves change in the first 3 notes, and each of these groups corresponds to the previous 3 note series, which is in fact the first group of the 4 note series. Of the remaining groups only the first and last sequences are given with an indication as to the number of sequences comprising that group. Similar abbreviations are used in the longer series that follow. Commas have been placed to indicate that the preceding numbers now replace the original ascending sequence (mūlakrama) and that the progressions which follow in that group involve change in only these preceding numbers. For example, if one wishes to determine the complete series from 1 2 4,3 5 6 7 to the end of its particular group 4 2 1 3 5 6 7 the comma after 4 indicates that only the first three numbers change.

The only publications in this dialect1 of the Galla language are translations of the Gospels of St. Luke2 and St. John3 and the Acts of the Apostles.4 The orthography used in these texts, obviously, has practical aims in view and dispenses with much of the phonetic detail which would be of interest to a linguist. As far as I know, there are no published works which would give a description of this dialect. The grammars of Borello,5 Hodson and Walker,6 Moreno,7 Nordfeldt,8 and Tutschek9 all deal with other dialects of Galla, which differ from Borana in many details.

The last ten years have seen a remarkable increase in the number of published studies about the Sīrat Banī Hilāl, or, to borrow the term used by francophone specialists from the Maghrib as well as from France itself, La Geste hilalienne. The subject matter and the approach of these specialists has been varied. Their interests have focused on the myriad plots of the narrative of the sīra, the imagery employed, the performance of the shā ‘ir and the documenting of the texts, be they oral or written. In aggregate, these studies have done much to clarify the nature of the work itself and its relationship, if any, to the exploits of the real Banū Hilāl during and after the eleventh century within the Maghrib. They have also contributed to a better understanding of the literary value of all the best known Arabic folk epics.

In the history of Hebrew letters, few dates have so cavalierly been invested with literary and linguistic significance as 1886/7, the publication date of Mendele's short story BeSeter Ra'am.

Such scholars of literature as Ravnitzki, Klausner and Werses have hailed its style as the pointer or veritable trigger to a redeployment of the traditional ‘synthetic’ (composite Biblical/post-Biblical) Hebrew style—instead of being confined to the registers of non-fiction, it now rose to supplant Biblical Hebrew as the standard for narrative prose. Some historians of language have gone so far as to present it as a total innovation (for its time) in that the aforegoing Haskalah writers had adhered almost exclusively to a Biblical manner.

Abī Manṣur al-Tha'ālibī devotes twenty pages of Yatīmat al-dahr to selections from al-qaṣīda al-sāsāniyya of Abū Dulaf al-Khazraji, the fourth century A.H. poet, who prided himself on being a member of the ‘world brotherhood’ of beggars and impostors known by the ‘royal’ name of banū sāsān. This group of people used a special jargon, munākāh, a considerable part of which is preserved in this poem of Abk Dulaf's.

In the year 577/1181–2, in a letter to the Caliph in Baghdad explaining his activities in Syria, Saladin writes that he is engaged in a struggle for Islam against a three-fold enemy—the infidel Frankish invader, the heretical and murderous Assassins, and the treacherous Zangid rulers of Mosul, whom he accuses of intelligence and even alliance with both Franks and Assassins.

THE origin of the term miḥrāb is somewhat obscure. In Islām it is usually particularly applied to the prayer-niche, and the article in the Encyclopaedia of Islām2 treats of it only as such, yet this technical usage of the word seems to be derived from a more primitive and general meaning, and on the balance of the evidence its emergence as a name for a part of the sanctuary appears to be Islāmic only. Miḥrāb has been discussed by Nöldeke,3 by Horovitz,4 and by Landberg.5 It has been discussed in connexion with architectural studies by Creswell,6 and by Sauvaget.7 These studies cite a number of references and sources which I have re-examined, but do not propose to repeat in toto. Each of these authorities shows conclusively that the employment in the technical sense of prayer-niche is not early.

By the Han empire, concepts of the cosmos were changing basically from that of the ‘Four Quarters’ (Si fang) to the ‘Five Phases’ (Wu xing), with a place for emperors to act as an essential pivot in the interlocking relationships of Heaven, Earth and Man. Differing views of the duty of monarchs may be discerned, e.g., in the memorials of Dong Zhongshu and the chapters of the Huainanzi, and the underlying questions could lead to antagonisms between emperors and kings, or between high-ranking officials of government and scholars of traditional writings. The part that individual Han emperors played in determining decisions of state may well be limited to a few instances. While it may be questioned how far they were conscious of the intellectual basis that supported their authority with its implied responsibilities, Wang Mang tried to exploit a view of the cosmos to assert his claim to power.