Every student of Rabbinic literature is aware of the formal argument known as qal va-ḥomer ‘the argument from the minor to the major’. There are numerous instances of the argument in Rabbinic literature, dating from pre-Tannaitic times down to the close of the Talmud. The argument runs: if A is so then B must surely be so; if the ‘minor’ has this or that property then the ‘major’ must undoubtedly have it. It is of interest to Old Testament scholars that the Rabbis purported to detect many examples of the use of this argument in Scripture. The Rabbis use the argument as one of their hermeneutical principles by means of which they expand and elaborate on the Biblical teachings. However, they rightly contend that they did not invent the argument but that it is found in the Bible itself. The purpose of this paper is to examine this contention more fully and to note possible implications for Old Testament studies.

The Ma-wang-tui texts of Lao-tzu have seemingly confirmed two points long held to be true by many scholars: (1) that the text from an early date, if not right from the outset, was divided into two parts; and (2) that—while it is not claimed that the Ma-wang-tui texts represent the original text—it was not originally divided into chapters. This latter conclusion is open to debate since, although there are neither chapter numbers nor names in the Ma-wang-tui texts, there are punctuation dots (·) in part II of text A, often placed at the beginning of one of our present chapters. However, absence of punctuation elsewhere, and the failure of what there is to completely coincide with present chapter divisions, would seem to indicate at least that the present eighty-one chapter divisions—thirty-seven in part I and forty-four in part II—were not yet (c. 180 B.C.) uniformly observed.

The hill of Ramtek (21°.28´N, 79°.28´E), c. 45 km. NE of Nagpur (Maharashtra), merits special attention because it appears to be one of the very few places in India where an uninterrupted historical development from the fourth century A.D. to the present day can be investigated through a series of archaeological monuments which, although partly restored or built over in later periods, seem never to have been exposed to destructive and iconoclastic forces. From at least the fifth century onwards the hill, also known as Rāmagiri, Sindūragiri, or Tapamgiri (Tapogiri), served as a regional centre of religious activity and probably, also had a more secular function as an outstanding strategic base controlling the highway that connected, and still connects, the central and eastern part of the basin of the Ganges with the northern Deccan. This could possibly explain, at least in part, why the religious structures on top of the hill have attracted the attention and care of the rulers of the area from a very early date.

In recent years a number of scholars have proposed more or less detailed schemas of the formation of the Zoroastrian ritual. These schemas offer accounts of the arrangement of the texts in the liturgy, the process of its formation, and even its function from an endogenous perspective. One way or another, they argue that the official Zoroastrian liturgy is an integrated ritual with a coherent text, and that the function of the ritual and the intention behind the arrangement of the texts can be determined by means of philological, literary and comparative analyses. The questions of formation and meaning of the Zoroastrian liturgy these scholars have placed on the agenda are important not only for the study of Zoroastrianism but also for the history of religions and ritual theory. I consider their accounts with respect to the texts they invoke and the methods they use, and show that their arguments suffer from fatal flaws.

The eighth/fourteenth-century chronicle known as Ta'rīkh al-Malik al-Nāṣir Muḥammad b. Qal¯wūn wa-awlādihi was edited from the unique exemplar (Berlin, MS Ar. 9833 We. 7) and published with a German translation by Dr. Barbara Schäfer, who had already produced a full preliminary study of the work. The name of the chronicler appears in a single place in the manuscript (f. 116a) as Shams b. al-Shujā'ī. Schäfer regards the correct form of the name as being Shams al-Dīn al-Shujā'ī, as it is given in Ḥājjī Khalīfa's Kashf al-zunūn. The chronicler's only other personal reference (f. 21 Ob) is to his participation in the Pilgrimage of 745/1345, while a textual reference (f. 124b) indicates that he was alive in 756/1355–6. Schāfer found no references to al-Shujā'ī in contemporary sources, although he was mentioned by the later chronicler, Ibn Qāḍī Shuhba (779–851/1377–1448), who actually possessed this manuscript.

In the 1994 season of the excavations in Ramla, archaeologist Don Glick, digging on behalf of Israel Antiquities Authority, exposed in a field on the eastern part of the city, some 600 m. to the south east of Birkat al-ՙAnaziyya, a complex of water installations consisting of two small basins or troughs (one 1.00 × 1.50 m. and the other 0.50 × 0.62 m.), and water canals and pipes. One of the canals was covered with a slab of marble, with an Arabic inscription, in a secondary usage. In the course of fitting the stone to its new purpose, it was cut and a few lines from the top and bottom of the inscription were lost. From the contents of the inscription, as we shall soon see, it can be learnt that the field and the water installations continued to be in use, long after the inscription ceased to serve its purpose, for it was utilized in the repairs of the water installations in the field at some later date.

This paper describes attribution in Old Babylonian. The principles drawn upon are the traditional view of Akkadian syntax, modern Semitic syntax, and the principles of European structuralism. Bringing all these together, while exemplifying and proving previous unexplained statements by using Old Babylonian material, renders the whole issue tangible for every linguistically-oriented reader. ša syntagms are described, each component separately, as a pronominal construct nucleus with an attribute; this attribute is either a nominal or a clause. ša syntagms, being appositive to a referent substantive (when occurring), are in the same paradigm with adjectives, which are shown to have the same components as ša syntagms: a pronominal nucleus, an attribute and the attributive link between them.

There is one important respect in which әW differs from yW and wW. For these last it was sufficient to state exponents of ‘ y ’ and ‘ w ’; the exponents of ‘ ә ’ however can be stated only by introducing a further prosodic system, of the initial syllable, y/w, i.e. ‘ y neutral words ’ (yәW) and ‘ w neutral words ’ (wәW). The prosodic and phonematic systems of yәW resemble those stated above for the initial syllable of yW, and those of wәW resemble the systems stated for the initial syllable of wW, i.e.

The two-term y/w system (yә/wә) is stated for the initial syllable of the (ә) word, and is not to be confused with the two-term prosodic system of the syllable initial (y/wl). The exponents of y and w in the initial syllable (CVC) of әW comprise:—

Me trouvant pour quelques jours à Londres à, la fin de Juillet 1936, j'ai voulu vérifier sur les manuscrits sogdiens du British Museum certains endroits où la lecture de M. Reichelt, bonne en général, mais établie sur des photographies, me semblait sujette à caution. Puis, constatant que l'examen des originaux fournissait plusieurs corrections au texte de l'édition, je me suis décidé à une révision plus large. Mais comme le temps me manquait pour la faire complète, j'ai dû me limiter: j'ai intègralement contrôlé tous les fragments bouddhiques et révisé partiellement (premières et dernières lignes assez endommagées et divers passages au milieu) les trois grands textes: Vimalakīrtinirdeśasūtra, Dhyānasūtra et Dhūtasūtra.

This article uses the World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840, and the way in which it was represented in Benjamin Robert Haydon's painting of it, to reflect on the ways in which Britons thought of themselves as an ’imperial people’, ’lords of humankind’, fit to rule over others. The Whig reforms of the 1830s had brought the enfranchisement of large numbers of middle-class men, and the emancipation of the enslaved across the British Empire. Excavating the assumptions of the abolitionists who gathered at the Convention allows us to see how new hierarchies of difference were encoded by 1840, placing freed black men, middle-class women and Irish Catholics on the margins of the new body politic.

In BSOAS, XXXVIII, 1, 1975, at p. 92 I noted the anomaly in the Achinese and Mainland reflexes of the PAN base reconstructed by Dyen as *[tT]ahan: Ach. thön, töhön ‘to endure’, Cham tha:n ‘to draw back, restrain’, Röglai that ‘to set [trap]’, which imply rather *-q-. Dyen's *-h- rested on the comparison of Malay tahan ‘to restrain, to endure strain, to set [traps]’ with Tagalog tahán ‘cessation’, Samar-Leyte Bisayan táhan ‘to detain’, Bikol táhan ‘to endure more than another’. It required the assumption that Javanese tahan ‘to restrain, endure’, which also prima facie implies *-q-, was a loan ‘perhaps from Malay’.

In 1782, the year of King Badon's coronation, someone close to the Burmese palace wrote a legal manuscript. This paper gives a translation of and commentary on that section of the manuscript dealing with kingship. By tracing the sources of the material used, it contributes to the debate about the sources of Burmese political philosophy. Was precolonial Burmese political thought primarily Hindu, primarily Buddhist, primarily Indian or none of the above?

The literary form and rhetorical structure of ancient Chinese poems have not been sufficiently studied. The “Jiu zhang” 九章 (Nine Avowals) attributed to Qu Yuan 屈原 contain distinctive formal features which are highly suggestive for interpretations of Qu Yuan's life and works. At the level of rhetoric, the protagonist frequently describes his own mental state using metaphors of knots and entanglement. At the level of form, the internal structure of the poems, and “Chou si” 抽思 (Unravelled Yearnings) in particular, involves series of overlapping, cross-referencing units that recall the “strange loop” discussed by Douglas Hofstadter as a model of human consciousness. Reading these poems is not just a matter of reconstructing their historical contexts but also of understanding their intended effects on the reader, who is effectively transported into a simulation of Qu Yuan's mind.

Original Dravidian k-is palatalized to c- in Tamil Malayalam and Telugu when follwed by the front vowelsi, ī, e, ē. This change takes place in the following words:-

Ta. citar to scatter, also citaṟ, Ma. citaruka, Te, cedaru; Ka. kedaru, kedaṟu, Tu. kedaruni; Ka. also cadaṟu, cedaṟu, Tu. also cadaruni.

Students of ancient China learn early on the story of Yao and Shun . The great emperor Yao (traditional reign dates, 2356–2255 B.C.) chose the virtuous Shun as his replacement over his own son Tan Chu . Shun was the model of filial piety: when his parents and brother tried to kill him a number of times, he saw the fault as his own and tried all the harder to win their love and approval.

Many Kharoṣṭhī documents have been unearthed from the buried cities in the shifting sands of the Taklamakan Desert in the last thirty years. I went to the south of the Desert and conducted an archaeological survey along the Silk Road in the summer of 1986. A Kharoṣṭhī wooden tablet happened to be on display in the Khotan Museum when I visited there, but no serial number had been given to the new document. It was allegedly collected by Mr. Li Xuehua, an officer of the Min Feng county, when he explored the way to the Niya site for the shooting of a television programme on the Silk Road in 1981. However, he did not leave any further information on the exact place where the tablet was found in the vast area of Niya.

The text-historical problems surrounding the medical works attributed to Vāgbhaṭa are well known and have been excellently outlined by Vogel (1965: introduction) and again briefly by Meulenbeld (1974: 423–5). From the published colophons of both the Aṣṭāṅgasaṅgraha (As.) and the Aṣṭāṅgahṛdayasaṃhitā (Ah.) we learn that Vāgbhaṭa was the son of Siṃhagupta. This is stated again in the text of the As. (VI.50, end) where it is further stated that the author's grandfather was also called Vāgbhaṭa, and was also a doctor. We are in addition told that the author was born in the Sindhu region and that his teachers were Avalokita and, to a greater extent, his father Siṃhagupta. Thus we have the following family tree.

In the central and eastern inscriptions of Aoka (Kls, Dhauli, and Jaugaḍa, Pillar Edicts and Minor Rock Inscriptions) a long vowel of Sanskrit whenfollowed by a double consonant or a consonant-group is shortened (e.g. tt att) as generally in Pali and Prakrit. But the long vowel is retained in the Girnr inscription and in some of the Pillar Edicts and Minor Rock Inscriptions. In the Girnr forms the consonant following the long vowel still representeda geminate; whether or not it still did so in the other inscriptions atthat date cannot be ascertained. Although the distinction of length is not shownin Kharoṣṭh writing, the long vowel before geminates was certainly maintainedin the language of the Shhbzgaṛh and Mnsehr versions, for the longvowel in this position is still preserved in the North-Western languages: Sindh, Lahnd, Western Panjb, Kshmr (not so demonstrably in other Dardic languages) and some West Pahari dialects.