It appears from those who have written the history of Russia that neither native nor European authorities know anything about it before the latter half of the ninth century, and that the tenth century is nearing its end before anything like firm ground is reached. Their name is by this time quite familiar to the Arabic chroniclers, and Ibn al-Athir even takes the trouble to record the commencement of the conversion of the Russians to Christianity; according to him in the year 375, i.e. 985–6 a.d., the Byzantine emperors being besieged found it necessary to invoke the aid of the king of the Russians, and offered him their sister in marriage. She declined to marry one who was not of her religion, whence this Russian king adopted Christianity, and that was how the religion began to be propagated in his country. The date of the first conversion of a Russian king given by Morfill on the authority of a Russian chronicle is within two years of that assigned by Ibn al-Athir; the former 988, the latter apparently 986; and Ibn al-Athir is here following a contemporary record. The name Rūs, i.e. Russians, was already familiar to Ibn al-Athir's readers and indeed those of the authority whom he excerpts owing to their being mentioned by the popular poet Mutanabbi in his most celebrated poem, describing the victory won by the Hamdanide Saif al-daulah in 954 over a force mustered by the Byzantine general called the Domesticus, wherein according to the poet so many tribes and tongues were represented that a staff of interpreters was required.

The great South-East Asian linguist and epigrapher, Gordon H. Luce, devoted many decades of his long life to the decipherment and analysis of the inscriptions of Old Burma. He had long intended to draw on the unparalleled wealth of materials in his files to produce a comparative lexicon of ‘prestandard Old Burmese’ (OB). As Professor Henderson explains in her moving introduction, Luce's advancing years and failing eyesight caused A comparative word-list of Old Burmese, Chinese and Tibetan (CWL) to be less ambitious in scope or polished in format than Luce would have wished. Even so, the CWL is a mine of fascinating comparative material, not only for OB, where Luce's first-hand expertise was second to none, but also for Archaic Chinese (AC) and Written Tibetan (WT), where he had to rely for his data on Karlgren's reconstructions and Jäschke's dictionary.

A Passage in the Sogdian edition of the Manichæan Book of the Giants relates what punishment the angels meted out to the γίγανтες (Sogd. kwyšt, cf. βγyšt, etc.). They apply” ṯr nfṯṯ'ṯ[yy l–2]wqṯṯ “fire, naphtha, and?” It is a priori obvious that the third, damaged word is “sulphur”, and further confirmation (although not necessary) can be found in a similar sentence of the Middle Persian Kawān where we read: pd 'dwr npt' wd gwgyrd “with fire, naphtha, and sulphur” (both fragments are unpublished).

THE island of the Northern New Hebrides which the French explorer Bougainville named Isle of Lepers is uow usually known as Oba (Omba), and to this the locative preposition a is prefixed, Aoba. One is inclined, however, to question the accuracy of the name Oba as applied to Lepers’ Island, since on Raga, the nearest island eastward, the name given to the island is Bai, A Bai. Also on Atchin and its neighbouring islets to the westward, off the coast of Malekula, places that had a considerable connection with Lepers’ Island for ceremonial as well as for trading purposes, Ba and Bai are the names by which it is known. Bishop Patteson, of the MM., who frequently visited the island, always wrote of it as Lepers’ Island. The later name of Opa given to it by members of the MM. would seem to be due to mission scholars from the island of Mota further north, where p replaces b, and the article o precedes the names of islands. This would point to Ba (Mba) being the name of the island.

Dr. R. H. Codrington published a grammar of the Oba language, using the dialect of that portion of the north coast of the island which is known as Walurigi. This grammar was founded principally on information derived from scholars from that part of the island in the MM. school at Norfolk Island.

Sībawayhi, the founder of the Arabic grammatical tradition, was said to have died in Persia of sorrow after losing to Kufan rivals in a competition in Baghdad. The first part of this article demonstrates the artifice of Sībawayhi's biography, his death tradition in particular, and the stakes involved in its elaboration in early Islamic culture. The second part argues that the tradition of his death was based on the model of Homer's death, which can be shown to have circulated and been creatively adapted in contemporary Syriac historiography. The third part considers the consequences of Sībawayhi's Greek death for the old question of the influence of Greek on early Arabic grammar.

Three bilingual Chinese and Sogdian epitaphs have been discovered and published in recent years. The first of these forms part of the tomb of Wirkakk, alias Shi Jun 史君 “Mr Shi”, and his wife Wiyusi, who were buried in 580 ce in Chang'an, the capital of the Northern Zhou. This article provides some corrections to the previous editions of the Sogdian version and attempts to elucidate points which have so far appeared obscure.