Most of the available specimens of Paiśācī are recorded in Lacote′s Essai sur Gunādhya et la Brhaikathā, pp. 201 f., and in my article “ The Mysterious Paiśācī”, JRAS., 1943, 217 f. They comprise about a hundred words. I am now able, by the courtesy of Muni Punyavijayajī of the Svetambara Jaina Dharmasala, Baroda, who has sent me photostats of an early MS., to publish the longest extract extant in Paisaci from an unpublished portion of the Kuvalayamālā.

This paper, by means of original Bedouin documents relating to matters of personal status, attempts to disclose interaction between custom and sharī'a and to illuminate some of the mechanisms tending to complete the islamization of a tribal society in process of sedentarization. The Bedouin dealt with here are a group of tribes in the Jerusalem-Bethlehem region: al-Sawāhira (c. 6,000 persons now) east of Jerusalem, al-'Ubaydiyya (c. 5,500) east of Bayt Saḥūr, the 13 al-Ta'āmira tribes (c. 20,000) extending over a sector east of Bayt Saḥūr in the north to Bayt Fajjār in the south, and al-Rashā'ida (c. 500) south-east of Taqū'a. Most of these tribes originate from Ḥijaz and Najd. They appeared in the region in small groups from the sixteenth century and in time developed into tribes, while absorbing local fallāḥs. Their main numerical increase took place in the twentieth century.

The vocabulary of Khotan Saka of ancient Khotan, Gostana-deśa of Buddhist Sanskrit, has a large fund of basic words; for the philosophy of Buddhism too they made full use of the Buddhist Sanskrit vocabulary, beside a number of north-western Prakrit forms. Many words, however, stand isolated. Their meanings are indeed often assured by bilingual texts or parallel passages in Buddhist literature, but other words are translated speculatively from contexts.

It has long been recognized that the establishment of the Office of Music (Yüeh fu) as one of the agencies of state in Han imperial government played an important role in the development of Chinese poetry and nurtured the growth of particular genres of literature; and the precedent that was set at this time was followed at later stages of China's literary development with highly important results. Less attention, however, has been paid to the work of the office in arranging musical performances; or to the circumstances in which the office was established and in which its activities were several times curtailed, prior to its eventual abolition. In addition historians have not always appreciated the connexion that may be traced between the rise and fall of this office and other changes which occurred in the intellectual history of Han China.

The purpose of these notes is to review the Vedic and Avestic data relating to Yama and the Gandharva and to consider the possibility of connecting them with the Glaucus-saga. Without neglecting the works of predecessors in this field, I have re-examined to the best of my ability the Vedic and Avestic material, but have abstained from drawing to any great extent upon the later literatures.

In his article ‘Lecture de la Fātiḥa’ Muhammad Arkoun develops principles for a contemporary rereading of scripture which differ markedly from those of classical exegesis. The latter rests upon the dogmatic certainty that scripture constitutes the only truth and the whole truth; hence it sees its task as rendering this truth accessible by recourse to a wide range of explanatory techniques. Arkoun's principles, on the other hand, are based upon the realization that in the present circumstances man's understanding of himself must be acquired not by remaining within the fold of one assumed source of truth but by transcending the panoply of ‘biophysical, economic, political, linguistic constraints’ which delimit his condition. As result, such knowledge must consist in repeated and risky forays ‘beyond the enclosures which all cultural traditions tend to erect after a phase of intensive elaboration’ (Arkoun, 1982: 50).

§ 1. The Sanskrit MS. Oxford 1442, inaccurately described in the catalogue, contains the larger part of the Bhiksunīkarmavācanā. This text is interesting (1) as one of the most important parts of the Sanskrit Vinaya hitherto discovered, and (2) because the rules concerning the Nuns have not been much studied even from Pali sources. As far as we know no Bhikkhunlkammavakya has been published. The MS. is incomplete;

Al-Qādī al-nu'mān (d. 363/974) holds a unique position in the history of Ismā'īlī/Fāṭimid literature. He was a voluminous author and headed a family of distinguished judges; his sons and grandsons held the office of chief judge in the Fāṭimid empire in Cairo for approximately half a century, except for brief intermissions.

The study of Muslim rule and its vestiges in medieval Sicily has a long and distinguished pedigree. In the nineteenth century the impetus was both scholarly and political, to which the monumental works of Amari and De Mas Latrie bear eloquent witness. In more recent times the motive has been simple and straightforward curiosity about a remarkable instance of cultural symbiosis. The parameters are now either linguistic or historical or both, and the gain is substantial. With the reprint exactly a century after its original publication in Palermo of Salvatore Cusa's I Diplomi greci ed Arabi di Sicilia one might be permitted to suppose that a reassessment of the earlier scholarship is underway. But the commemoration is itself curiously unhelpful: we are offered a typographically reduced replica of the original innocent of comment save for two pages of very general observations by Albrecht Noth on the significance of Cusa's compilation for students of Islamic history. Neither reference to subsequent work nor indication of a present project is included, a circumstance that only with generosity could be regarded as tantalizing.

The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan has, in recent years, attracted an ever-growing volume of research. In part, this may be attributed to the easier access to archival sources, both in England and—to a lesser extent—in the Nile Valley. In addition, there has evolved an increasing interest in bilateral relations between Egypt and the Sudan, prompted in part by the political outlook of Presidents Sadat and Numayri, and even more important, by the apparent decline in the Nile waters, especially in the 1980s. The Integration Charter {takamut), first announced by Presidents. Sadat and Numayri in 1974 and signed by Egypt and the Sudan in 1981, sought to establish co-operation, in a wide variety of spheres, which would—so it was hoped—ultimately lead to unity. These anticipations failed to materialize following the chatige of regime in the Sudan in 1985, and seem even less realistic under the present Sudanese fundamentalist dictatorship.

A Mong many mythological beings mentioned in Zoroastrian literature and enumerated by the late Professor Louis Casartelli in his La Philosophie religieuse du Mazdéisme, Paris, 1884, p. 120, Gõpatšōh deserves our special mention. He is the man-bull of the ancient Babylonians, adopted into the mythology of the later Zoroastrian period most probably through the intermediary of the Elamites saturated with Babylonian culture. Gōpatšōh is the name given to him in Pahlavi literature, and is said to be another name for Aγēraθ, son of Pašang and brother of Afrāsiāb, king of Turan. He resides in the country called Sōkapastān or Saukavastān, which is situated between Chinistan and Turkistan (Bundahišn, 29, 5; for the legend of Aγrēraθ, cf. Darmesteter, Zend–Avesta, ii, p. 436, No. 23). Dātistān-i-Dēnīk 90, 4, explains the name Gōpatšāh by “ king of Gōpat”, and says that Gōpat is a country coterminous with Ērān–Vej on the bank of the river Dāitīk.

Iran was preeminently and agricultural country until recent times. Growth of oil production, exports and revenues during the course of the twentieth century led increasingly to it playing an expanded but rather geographically and economically restricted role in the structures of both employment and national income. As late as the 1960s, more than half of all Iranians in gainful employment were to be found in agriculture or related activities and most Iranians were essentially rural dwellers. Only with the advent of land reform and other upheavals in the countryside from 1961 was there a marked change in the situation. Whatever its other merits, land reform overthrew a form of equilibrium in rural areas that had previously fostered conservatism, isolation and immobility. Among the changes brought in the train of reforms enforced by the central authorities beginning in the early 1960s were displacement of population at an accelerating rate. Rural People left agricultural employment and, as soon as opportunity presented itself, moved from the villages to the towns.

The Melanesian and non-MN languages alike belong to the group known as agglutinating, i.e. they are able to form compound words out of a number of elements, many of which are incapable of independent existence. In this they are not entirely different from the MN languages to the east of them, and yet there is a difference, and that not merely of degree but of kind. Prefixes and suffixes play their parts in these languages, as they do in SEP, but the power of adding indefinitely suffix to suffix is much more limited in insular MN than in SEP. Such a compound word as Suau ‘ita-komakomani-uyo-i-miu, take care of yourselves again, is hardly to be thought of, say, in Mota, Fiji, or Samoa.

It is too well known to need more than a formal repetition here that two of the Rock Edicts of Aśoka mention as his contemporaries a number of kings of the West, the foremost of which is a certain Antiochus. The most important passage is that of the Edict XIII (P–Q), which I quote from the only version that is here wholly preserved, viz. that of Shāhbāzgaṛhī:—

ayi ca mukhamutavijaye Devanaṃpriyasa yo dhramavijayo ║ so ca puna ladho Devanaṃpriyasa iha ca sareṣu ca aṃteṣu[a] ṣaṣu pi yojanaśateṣu yatra Aṃtiyoko nama Yonaraja paraṃ ca tena Atiyokena cature 4 rajani Turamaye nama Aṃtikini nama Maka nama Alikasudaro nama ║

I. Tuḷuva, a Dravidian speech spoken by about 400,000 people within a comparatively small area in the district of south Kanara, on the west coast of Madras Presidency, has preserved its individuality from a very early time, despite its being an uncultivated dialect with no literature of its own. The Mangalore missionaries were the first to reduce this unwritten language to writing, and they published in the closing decades of the last century a grammar and a dictionary of this speech, besides a few scriptural texts. An attempt is now being made by educated Tuḵuvas to cultivate their mother tongue as a literary speech through the composition of essays, stories, and poems.

Figures of repetition occur very early in Sanskrit literature. In the oldest stratum, the hymns of the Rgveda, this phenomenon seems to be restricted to the repetition of words with the same meaning, its function being either to express continuation or regularity, i.e. in the case when a single word, normally an adverb, is duplicated (āmreḍita, e.g. dive-dive), or to give a special emphasis to a phrase, preferably at the end of a number of stanzas of a hymn (refrain type). Both kinds of repetition continue to be used in later literature, such as the Pāli Jātakas and the two epics, Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa.

The Chin-so liu-chu yin is a text of twenty-nine fascicles preserved in the Taoist canon in the form of a revelation to Chang Tao-ling, the late Han founder of the Taoist religion, to which comments by Li Ch‘un-feng (602–670) are attached. Though scholars have not so far addressed the question of the origins of the text itself, a certain willingness to accept the attribution of the commentary has already been made manifest. Yet to the eye of the expert in Sung Taoism this attribution raises serious doubts: text and commentary display features much more reminiscent of Sung religion than that of the early T'ang. It has already been noticed that Li Ch'un-feng provides information on the cult of the city gods (ch'eng-huang shen) and on Thunder magic; the former religious development may be traced back before the T‘ang but only achieved prominence towards the end of the dynasty, while the latter is unattested in T‘ang Taoist literature. One might add that Li displays a detailed knowledge of the legend of Hsü Sun in a developed form—again a cult v with early origins hardly noticed until the late T‘ang. The text also provides information (though separately) on the Buddhist warrior-king Vaisravana (P‘isha-men PI) and on the seventh-century warrior-hero Li Ching (571–649): these two figures were eventually to merge.