In the of the Fuad I University, vol. 9, part 1, May, 1947, pp. 25–27, Dr. K. Y. Nami has published an interesting boundary inscription now in the possession of that University. In his treatment of the inscription, however, he has overlooked the fact that a parallel text is to be found in the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, iv, 949. This is unfortunate, since a correlation of the two texts is most helpful in understanding the formula contained in them.

The following are the two texts, with the renderings proposed by Nami for his inscription and by Rhodokanakis for the Corpus text.

The Cairo Geniza is surely the most important manuscript source for the study of Judaeo-Arabic texts, that is to say, texts whose language is Arabic written in Hebrew characters. This paper is an overall survey of the Judaeo-Arabic material in the 54 Arabic boxes of the Old Series in the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection. This collection which is housed in the Cambridge University Library is the largest collection of Geniza pieces to be found in any one place, with some 140,000 fragments. The Judaeo-Arabic material we are specifically dealing with here comprises some 7,000 manuscript fragments, research on which is now being prepared for publication. The discussion is limited to present research; it does not include references to other oriental collections such as the Firkovitch in St. Petersburg, which comprises not only fragments but codices (some almost complete) and a much wider range of Karaite Arabic material. As the Firkovitch collection is at last becoming more accessible, its contents will obviously need to be studied at a later stage in relation to the Cambridge Geniza material.

Nankingese is today classed as a Jiānghuái Mandarin dialect. As recently reported (Liú, 1994), velar initials do not occur before high front vowels in this language except in the two vernacular words ki11 ‘give’ and k ′ i ‘go’. There is, however, a series of palatal initials, , which appear exclusively before high front vowels; and in certain instances these consonants correspond to the gutturals k-, k′-, and h- in more conservative dialect groups such as Cantonese, Hakka, and Min. This suggests that the Nanking palatals in these instances have developed from earlier velars through a process of palatalization. The present paper will attempt to trace and date this process.

The Kitāb Sulaym ibn Qays, a collection of sayings attributed to ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, was supposedly collected by the (otherwise unknown) Sulaym b. Qays al-Hilālī (d. 76/678); the work is generally recognized as an important source for early Shīʿī thought. There has been much debate, both within the Shīʿī tradition and outside of it, over when its contents reached their current form and how representative they were of Shīʿī views in the early centuries of Islam. Here, I take one passage from the Kitāb Sulaym and set it against the development of early Muslim hermeneutics in an attempt to establish a tentative dating for this passage. The result is a dating between late eighth century ce (second century ah) and the early ninth century ce (early third century ah), roughly contemporary with, and perhaps postdating the revolutionary hermeneutic work of Muḥammad b. Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī (d. 204/820). This conclusion tallies, to some extent, with an analysis of the report's various isnāds.

The poem discussed has long been regarded as a “nonsense” poem that was extemporized as part of some kind of poetry game at Court. This article presents evidence to demonstrate that through the use of puns and double entendre the poet in fact ingeniously devised a witty scatological verse. Rather than “nonsense”, the poem is discovered to offer covertly a deeply satirical social commentary on the contemporaneous relationships between men and women, aristocrats and outcastes.

Among the Ethiopic manuscripts in the British Museum, which originate from the Emperor Theodore's Magdala collection, were two copies of the Kebra Nagast ‘Glory of the Kings’, the Ethiopian national saga, catalogued as Orient. 818 and 819 (=Wright, Catalogue of the Ethiopic MSS in the BM, NO. CCXCI). But Orient. 819, written during the reign of the Emperor Iyasu I (1682–1706), was returned to Ethiopia in circumstances which throw a dramatic light on the paramount importance of this work. In August 1872, the Emperor Yohannes of Ethiopia wrote to Queen Victoria and to Earl Granville, the British Foreign Secretary, and requested the return of the Kebra Nagast which had been taken to England by the Napier expedition in 1868.

The period from the late sixteenth century has been characterized in Ottoman historiography as one of fundamental change in the composition of the army. One of the features of this change was the gradual replacement of the tīmār-based cavalry force, to whom were awarded benefices in return for military service, by provincial levies able to use muskets (tüfenk), often hired only for the duration of a single campaign. Although the extent to which such changes were directly prompted by the supposedly superior technology which the Ottomans encountered when fighting the Habsburgs on their western borders remains open to further research, that there was a radical transformation which relied on the greatly increased use of firearms is beyond doubt.

This article analyses Shakespeare and Molière's enduring appeal in various African countries and the diversity of their plays’ adaptations. The starting point is the discrepancy between the two playwrights, Shakespeare in Africa being an artistic phenomenon (a controversial one in some quarters), while the adaptation of Molière remains mainly the domain of school curricula. This article will first provide a historical overview of activities related to the introduction of Shakespeare and Molière's works in Africa. Second, it will set out to analyse the varied adaptation and “Africanization” of both playwrights’ work. It will shed light on the political and scholarly disputes over the incorporation of these authors in school curricula after independence and examine the ways in which these classical European texts were domesticated in Africa.

This article will discuss the dating formula in the Dadanitic inscriptions. So far, some of these have been interpreted to refer not only to the reign of the local king (mlk lḥyn), but also to another political official called rʾy. The article will discuss the merit of this interpretation based on both the questionable etymology of the term rʾy and the problematic interpretation of the terms following this word as personal names. Instead, a new interpretation of this formula as a reference to a local calendar will be explored in light of the occurrence of a similar word rʾy in Safaitic dating formula, and comparison to other ancient methods of time reckoning in the region.

This article traces the metamorphoses of Scheherazade, the heroine of The Thousand and One Nights' frame-tale, in modern fiction and film. It examines these metamorphoses in the context of a discussion of the function of narrative across cultures and disciplines. It looks more particularly at the role of genre ideologies—paradigms of knowledge implicit in generic expectations, ideologies external to genre, and subjectivities in narrative transformation—in transforming the story as it travels in time and across media of expression and cultures. Analysis of the Nights frame-tale, the story of Scheherazade, and its transformations, is further informed by an interrogation of the process of reading ‘texts’ critically. Do genre, ideology and subjectivity inform our readings of ‘texts’? In what ways do paradigms of knowledge perceived as inherent in these categories in turn affect our understanding of story and narrative?

The following study contains a translation of al-Bīrūnī’s rendering into Arabic of the fourth and last chapter of Patañjali’s Yogasūtra cum commentary. Our translation of the three preceding chapters was published in BSOAS, xxix, 2, 1966, 302–25 (henceforth abbreviated as BSOAS ch. I); BSOAS, XL, 3, 1977, 522–49 (henceforth abbreviated as BSOAS, ch. II); BSOAS, XLVI, 2, 1983, 258–304 (henceforth abbreviated as BSOAS, ch. III). This translation is based on Ritter’s edition of the Arabic text. Comparison has been made with the unique MS of Ritters Text: Kopriilii, 1589, fols. 412a–419a (written on the margins). We have also compared the text with parallel passages and expressions in al-Birunl's India.

During a renaissance of Hindu mythology in the late colonial period, the Mahābhārata in particular was embraced as the essential account of the nation's ancient past. In the many literary retellings of the period, epic history is often recast as national history, even as the epic narratives themselves are inscribed with allegorical significance. Such is the case in the many poems and plays on the subject of Abhimanyu and his nemesis Jayadrath, including the most famous example in Hindi, Maithilisharan Gupta's narrative poem, Jayadrath-vadh (The slaying of Jayadrath, 1910). In this essay I situate Gupta's poem within the genre of paurāṇik or mythological literature and read the poem against the Abhimanyu-Jayadrath episode as found in the critical edition of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata to illustrate how Gupta both modernizes the poem and imbues it with nationalist ideology. I ultimately argue that Gupta's Abhimanyu is like a freedom fighter battling an imperial goliath, and his wife, Subhadra, a model for women dedicated to the cause. I also discuss some of the subsequent literature on Abhimanyu which was inspired by Gupta's classic work, and which also re-envisions the story in terms of contemporary political circumstances.

In four Chinese texts almost certainly written before the middle of the sixth century a.d., of which two have been attributed to the Tsin period (265–420), there were references to two ‘Po-Ssῠ pine resins ’ to a ‘Po-Ssῠ resin’ subsequently likened to ‘pine resin’, and to a resin subsequently attributed to the ‘Po-Ssῠ’ and also likened to ‘pine resin’. They were ‘ju t'ou perfume ’, the ‘mo drug ’, ‘An-hsi perfume ’, and lung nao or ‘P'o-lü perfume ’. An-hsi perfume became the name for benjamin gum (Styrax benzoin Dryander) which, with lung nao or tree camphor (Dryobalanops aromatica Gaertn. f ), were in later times famous trade-products of northern Sumatra. To-day ju, the abbreviated form of ju t'ou, is identified with species of Pistacia (a mastic) or with frankincense (Boswellia spp.) and mo with myrrh (Commiphora spp.). These are products of Somaliland, the Middle East, and India. In the sixteenth century, however, and long before then, Chinese herbalists believed that ju and mo also came from South East Asia. The text which first mentioned ju in fact ascribed it to the ‘Southern Ocean Po-Ssῠ’, a definition indicating a South East Asian origin.

The biblical figure of Samson (Judges 13: 1–16: 31) is not mentioned by name in the Quran. He was, however, incorporated by medieval Muslims such as al-Ṭabarī and Tha‘labī into the quranic prophetic world. How and why that was accomplished is the initial focus of this paper. While the medieval ability to find Samson in the text of scripture was admittedly limited, the attempt does illustrate the process of fitting scripture into a pre-existing world view itself composed on the basis of a variety of competing priorities. That world view does not always agree with the biblical text, nor with the full dimension of the living traditions of Judaism and Christianity; rather, the overall cultural framework of the Islamic tradition necessitated a range of interpretive strategies, dictated by the demands of the interpretive situation. Putting this medieval interpretive process in focus provides a context for discussing some modern Muslim views of Samson, about whom it is sometimes proclaimed proudly that he is not to be found in scripture. Why that position should be taken proves revealing of the process and the priorities of modern quranic interpretation. Marked by the abandonment of the value of tradition, contemporary interpretive strategies involve the same hermeneutical processes found in the medieval approach – the fitting of world views to the text of scripture – with the primary difference to be located in the rejection of the accumulative nature of the interpretive enterprise. Finally, the role of modern “secular” scholarship interacts with Muslim tradition by its focus on the boundaries of a strict scriptural text as the source of Islam. The scholarly focus on the textual is seen in a world view not of confessional dogma but one that still supports a confessional position that is also textually focused. It pretends to an appearance of being “scientific”. Scholarship plays its own political role within the process of modern interpretation.

This vocabulary has been collected from the words found in a small Prayer Book in the Longgu language, published by the Melanesian Mission Press in 1916. The book is of 79 pages, 8vo, and contains a translation of some of the services of the Book of Common Prayer, viz. Mattins and Evensong, the Litany, certain prayers, seven liturgical collects, twenty-four Psalms, the Church Catechism, and nineteen hymns.

The problems posed by the interpretation of the Ṥvetāṥvatara Upaniṣad are almost as interesting as is the Upaniṣad itself. There are both in the West and in India two clearly discernible trends in the method of such interpretation. One follows quite strictly the line of the monistic, advaita doctrine, involving frequent disregard of the text itself. The other shows a realistic appreciation of a largely deistic philosophy of the Upaniṣad, which leans towards soteriological concepts of the Sāṃkhya or rather the Sāṃkhya-Yoga syncretism. The Upaniṣad presents, in fact, a triadic combination of (I) Īṥvara = puruṣa, (2) Brahman, whose role as that of a creator is idenfield with the role of the prakṛti, pradhāna, or buddhi, and who is the intermediary between the Īṥvara, and (3) āman = jīva.

Cette description se fonde sur des observations faites en plusieurs points du Territoire français des Afars et des Issas (Goda, Mabla, ‘Àlta, Gamàrri notamment), de 1973 à 1975, et sur le témoignage d'informateurs originaires, pour certains, de l'Àwsa. Ceux-ci nous ont permis d'acquérir la certitude qu'un même dialecte était parlé dans la zone comprise entre le delta lacustre de l'Awash (Kalo) et le golfe de Tadjoura. Il semble aussi que l'afar méridional s'étende en amont même de Ba'àdu et jusqu'au piémont éthiopien, (Dòk'a, Dawwe et Awra); d'autre part, il est attesté au nord, à Baylūl, mouillage au delà duquel commence l'afar septentrional. Si nous n'avons pu encore enquêter personnellement dans ces régions, la classification proposée par Mahafly nous paraît toutefois approximative. Il est hasardeux d'isoler l'Awsa des régions côtières. De nombreux faits historiques (comme en témoignent les traditions orales) et sociologiques fournissent la preuve du contraire. Les tribus ‘asayammàra établies au nord et à l'ouest du Territoire français atteignent le Kalo au cours de leurs migrations saisonnières. Les Debne de la plaine du Gōba'ad, en transhumant par Anḍaḍkàlu au sud du lac Abḥe, touchent le pays gal'êla qui, au début de ce siècle, s'étendait à la majeure partie du Gōba'ad. De plus, les famines, les affaires de sang ont souvent été jusqu'à un passé récent à l'origine de l'exode de tout ou partie d'un groupe tribal. Les guerres pour la conquête de la vallée de l'Awash ont également opéré des bouleversements démographiques importants. Le déplacement vers l'ouest des Mōdayto ou des Badoyta-m mēla en est une illustration. On pourrait aussi mentionner les relations commerciales, occasions d'une dissémination de plusieurs tribus spécialisées dans les opérations de transit, tels les Ḥasōba que l'on retrouve tout au long d'une piste caravanière allant de Bāte à Ambabbo, près de Tadjoura.