It is astonishing how soon the Arabs fade out of Muslim history, Arabia itself excepted. There are notable instances to the contrary like the Hamdanids and the Banū Hilāl, but they are few. During the rule of the Fatimids in Egypt the Banū Jarrah of Tai' were the most important of the bedouins in Syria; their chief Mufarrij b. Daghfal b. Jarrāh died in 404/1013 and his son Hassān succeeded him. Contemporary with Hassān was Fadl b. Rabi'a b. Hāzin b. Jarrāh, who was, perhaps, as Ibn Khaldūn suggested and Ibn Hajar affirmed, the ancestor of the Āl Fadl: This Fadl was at times an ally of the Franks and at times an ally of thesultan of Egypt. He was banished and joined Sadaqa b. Mazyad and in 500/1106 was the ally of Sadaqa against the Saljūq sultan Muhammad b. Malikshāh; later he abandoned Sadaqa.

The full title of this little work, which occupies 19 pages in 8vo, is as follows:—

Verdadeira e exacta Noticia dos progressos de Thamas Kouli Khan Scach da Persia no Imperio do Gram Mogô, Escrita na lingua Persiana em Delhy em 21 de Abril de 1739, e mandada a Roma por Mons. Voulton.

Acrecentada com outras chegadas por varias partes, com hum Mapa do Thesouro do Gram Mogôr levado a Hispahan pelo mesmo Schach. Dadas a luz na lingua Portugueza.

The present notice is merely an annex to V. V. Barthold's article on Ḥfiẓ-i Abr which has stood the test of 70 years.

Ḥfiẓ-i Abr, a Khorsnian by birth, was a distinguished historian of Timrid times. He belonged to the class of those learned men whom rulers liked to attach to their courts. He studied in Hamadn, and worked under the patronage of Tmr, Shhrukh, and Prince Baysunqur. He died in Zanjn in 83414301.

These notes are based on the pronunciation of Mr. Lai Mama, of the Baptist Mission at Lungleh, whose recent presence in London afforded an opportunity, rare in this country, of studying Lushai at first hand. The investigation was short and incomplete, but sufficient phonetic data were collected to enable certain principles governing the structure of the monosyllable in isolation to be stated.

A convention existed among Manichæan copyists whereby most Parthian poetry was written as prose, the verses being separated only by some device of punctuation. The method saved a considerable amount of paper. Yet there are texts set out as poetry, in separate lines with a space between verses. The two great hymn-cycles, Huwīdagmān and Angad Rōšnan, are invariably presented in this way. These exist in the fragments of thirty-odd MSS. of very varied character; it is evident, therefore, that in their case the manner of presentation did not depend on individual taste or means, but was regarded as proper to the texts themselves.

Bintulu, an Austronesian language spoken in the district capital of that name and in several smaller communities in the basin of the Kemena river, Fourth Division, Sarawak, has two previously unrecognized implosive stop phonemes, 6 and d. Where these segments occur in lexical items known to reflect a Proto-Austronesian (PAN) reconstruction, they appear to result from an unconditioned phonemic split of PAN *b, *d, *D, or *j. A hypothesis constructed to account for a wider range of linguistic facts offers an explanation of some of these apparent irregularities. Most if not all residual discrepancies can be accommodated under an ancillary hypothesis of borrowing, independently motivated by various considerations. The case of the Bintulu implosives is of general theoretical interest, as it necessitates modifications in some recent claims regarding the diachronic sources of implosive stops.

Several years before the war a photograph of a stone inscription in Aramaic letters was published in the Persian language periodical Kabul (vol. ii, 1932, p. 413). The following note (in Persian), printed below the photograph, constitutes the whole of our information on the material, history, and provenance of the inscription:ߞ

“A historical inscribed stone: A few years ago a broken stone tablet (lauhe) with ancient Sanskrit writing was procured in the neighbourhood of Pul-i Darunta, Laghmān, and entrusted to Kabul Museum. So far its contents have not been read and understood. The original of the above (depicted) stone is in Kabul Museum.”

Laghmān, older Lamyān (from Lambayān<*Lampakāna), is the name of a district on the left (northern) bank of the Kabul river, a little above Jalalabad; it comprises the valleys of the Lower Alingār and Ališang. This district, whose name is familiar to Sanskritists as Lampāka (also Lambāka), was traditionally regarded as part of the Indian borderlands, the ultima Thule of Jambuduīpa. Cf. Mémoires de Hiouen-thsang, i, 55, “en partant de ce royaume ( = Kāpiśī), il… franchit les montagnes noires, entra dans les frontières de l'lnde du nord, et arriva au royaume de Lan-po”. Cf. also Lampāka in the Yaksa catalogue of the Mahāmāyūrī, and further H. Lüders, SbPAW., 1930, 43, 48, 51, 63. One may presume that the traditional view reflects the conditions prevailing under the Maurya dynasty.

The inscription was made known in Europe by Professor Morgenstierne, who, on finding that the alphabet was Aramaic, asked H. Birkeland to publish it.

N. Sims-Williams's proposed identification of a Bactrian god μοζδοοανο as deriving from Ir. *miždvah, Vd. mī1E0D;dhvás could shed light on the role of this word as an epithet of Rudra and Siva in India. The identification would seem in turn to derive support from the extent to which in India the epithet has been appropriated by Vedic Rudra. It is even possible to identify a stratum of Sanskrit literature that shares the Bactrian conception of Mīḍhvān as a supreme god.

With the affluence brought by oil, the cities, towns, and villages of Saudi Arabia are being transformed as they are rebuilt; the older mosques are being replaced by new ones in concrete and built in styles unknown in Najd 30 years ago. As a result, structures built in accordance with traditional designs are being gradually obliterated by modern, alien buildings. This process has virtually wiped out the older mosques on the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia and those in Najd may well vanish in the course of the next few years. This article attempts, albeit very incompletely, to catalogue some of the traditional mosques of Najd and to describe their architectural characteristics. I shall deal with these buildings within their geographical areas beginning with al-Ḥawṭca in southern central Najd and moving northwards, towards al-Qaṣīm and Sudayr.

In a volume dedicated to Sir Ralph Turner, it can scarcely be inappropriate to devote an essay to a text which bears every sign of being the first Christian adaptation of that legend of the Buddha which, migrating from the cultural environment of the Lalita-vistara and the Buddha-carita, finally evolved into the story of the Christian worthies Barlaam and Ioasaph.

Since the German Turfan expeditions of half a century ago, it has become increasingly clear that an early stage in the story's development may be sited in those areas of Central Asia where Buddhism and Manichseism, the former using Sanskrit, the latter Iranian and Old Turkish as literary media, for a time overlapped. Thus, among the Turkish Manichaean fragments recovered at Turfan are two extracts from a prototype (or two separate sources) of the Barlaam legend: firstly, the episode of the meeting of the Bodisav (Bodhisattva) prince with the decrepit old man; and secondly, an unsavoury tale, later incorporated in the Arabic version by Ibn Babuya, concerning a drunken prince who mistakes a corpse for a desirable maiden.

This study is concerned with the interpretation of number and gender concord as abstracted from sentences of different types whose common feature is the inclusion of a participial form. This term is used here, rather than the more usual ‘participle’, as the forms being considered here do not exactly correspond with what are described in the traditional grammars as ‘present (or imperfect) participle’ and ‘past (or imperfect) participle’; the term is applied here to those members of a verbal paradigm which can be colligated with huaa, huii, or hue.

In his recent translation for the Hakluyt Society of Ma Huan's Ying-yai sheng-lan, Mr. J. V. G. Mills has published illustrations of four Chinese stellar diagrams and made some comments on them. He has, however, stated that ‘having no astronomy or higher mathematics, he is not competent to express a considered opinion on astronomical difficulties, or to check the consistency of the data of the diagrams’. He hopes ‘that an astronomer will find time to examine these interesting diagrams’.

A good deal of effort and ingenuity has been devoted to the problem of establishing the historical identity of Palṭiel, an enigmatic figure in the eleventhcentury chronicle of Ahima'as. In this work, the author relates what purports to be the history of his family over the previous two centuries and gives pride of place to one Palṭiel ben Shefaṭyah, an astrologer who rose to high office under the Fṭimid Caliph al-Mu'izz in Tunisia and Egypt. The family, according to Ahima'aṣ, had lived in Oria, in southern Italy, for generations. Then came the Fṭimid raids on the Italian mainland. With al-Mu'izz as their commander, 'they devastated the entire province of Calabria, and reached Oria, on the borders of Apulia; they besieged it, defeated all its forces; so that the city was

Besides the well-known Vālmīki-rāmâyaṇa, three other Sanskrit poems entitled “Rāmâyaṇa” are current in northern India, and are highly esteemed. They are (1) the Yōga-vāsiṣṭha-mahārāmâyaṇa, (2) the Adhyātma-rāmâyaṇa, and (3) the Adbhuta-rāmâyaṇa. Of these the first and the last claim to have been composed by no less a person than Vālmīki himself; but the Adhyātma-rāmâyaṇa forms a section of the Brahmâṇḍa-purāṇa, and does not suggest any pretension to his authorship.

The extent and nature of Chinese penetration into Central Asia during the third century and the problems raised by the Chinese and Kharoṣṭhī documents that have been found at the various sites of Lop-nor, Niya, and elsewhere have recently formed the subject of articles by two scholars. Professer Brough has suggested that the territory of the state of Shan-shan was incorporated into the Kuṣāṇa empire for a short period, perhaps in the middle of the second century, before independent rules took over control. He believes that a further change was marked by the adoption of the royal title jiṭuṃgha from the seventeenth year of king Aṃgoka, and that thereafter the country was subject to Chinese control (or at least nominally so) for the period of about 60 years until the end of King Vaṣmana's reign; and he suggests that the seventeenth year of king Aṃgoka can be identified with 263. Professor Enoki has recently taken the opportunity to revise his earlier theory that the year in question should be identified as 609; and he now believes that the five kings mentioned by name in the Kharoṣṭhī documents should be dated from the middle of the third century to the decade starting in 330.

In this paper, a synchronic study of the syntax and the semantics of the causative verb shi in Han period Chinese, particularly in combination with negatives, is at issue. Two different structures involving negation of this verb exist in Han period Chinese: first, (NP1) NEGshi NP2 V2P and second (NP1) shi NP2NEG V2P. A thorough analysis of the first structure ‘(NP1) NEGshi NP2 V2P' shows that two different semantic interpretations are required to account for the syntactic differences between the two structures. The article proposes that the first structure has to be analysed as an analytic causative construction with a visible causative verb which, in its negated form, contrasts with an affirmative causative construction. The negative has scope over the entire causative construction including V1 and V2P, whereas in the second structure the negative has only scope over V2P

The province of Khurāsān constituted the centre of political, cultural, and religious life in the Sunni Islamic world from the ninth until the mid-twelfth century, after which Khurāsān was completely eclipsed. The question of how this occurred has remained almost completely unstudied; and the one study that there is does not consult the key primary literary sources for the time. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to re-examine what the primary sources reveal about the catastrophic cultural and political eclipse of Khurāsān in the mid-twelfth century, in order to demonstrate that this catastrophe was not due to “climate, cotton and camels” – in fact, Khurāsān was doing very well until the 1150s – but to concrete human agency and action: namely, the province's destruction by the rampaging Oghuz Turkmens after Sultan Sanjar had been taken captive by them in 1153, thus leading directly to the downfall of the Great Seljuq Sultanate.

In two previous studies we have sought to advance the process of understanding the complex linguistic character of the Āḍi Granth (AG) by isolating and describing two special stylistic varieties of language, which significantly differ from the normal idiom of the book as a whole. These were shown to be based respectively on the extensive use of elements drawn from the dialects of the South-Western Panjab, and of loan-items from Persian: but it was further emphasized that they were stylistic varieties of the usual AG poetic language, and were in no sense to be regarded as straightforward examples of contemporary Multani or Indo-Persian.