In preparing a bibliography of the modern South Arabic languages I came across the only document of the dialect of Curia Muria. It is J. G. Hulton's article, “ Notice on the Curia Muria Island,” in the Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society, 3 (1840), 183–197.2 This article, in which the author gives a detailed description of the island and its inhabitants, contains a list of 103 words in English, Arabic, and in the dialect of Curia Muria.3

In the following 15 condensed analyses are published some of the many problems arising when the full Indo-Iranian field is considered. Only when all the Iranian evidence is studied together with the Old Indian will it be possible to survey Indo-Iranian as a whole, an indispensable preliminary to the history of the Indo-Iranian vocabulary, and the texts behind. The constant necessity of quoting elementary data indicates how little has yet been garnered into convenient reference books. The workers (and they, too, usually distracted by other tasks) have hitherto been very few.

In recent studies of the Tibetan epic, much effort has been spent on analysing the origins and types of material that make up the epic literature, but no study presents an overall view of Ling (Gling) society. In the paper I gave at the second Symposium on the Epic of King Gesar at Lhasa in 1991, I therefore discussed the theoretical basis upon which the whole of Tibetan epic literature is built. I demonstrated that the Tibetan epic reveals a basic principle as well as a ‘chronological order’ in its development. Without this theoretical basis, Tibetan epic literature appears as a tangled web of material which is moreover still growing in complexity.

The words to be treated in this paper show one common aspect in their etymologies. It is suggested that they have arisen through coalescence of their etymons with the suffix na “in”—or in the case of ẖam, with the negation ma (or mi)—and that after the coalescence the final vowel was lost. The latter assumption will have to be linked up with the enclitic, or in the case of yin, at least unstressed nature of the words. In this connection we may note that the separating shad, the Tibetan comma, will invariably be found after, never before . The same holds good of , though punctuation is much rarer after . In the case of and kyin, the enclisis is moreover strongly borne out by the phonetic changes which their initial consonants undergo in assimilation to the endings of the preceding words. For the assumed treatment of the final vowel, I may refer to my paper “Certain Tibetan Suffixes and their Combinations” (in vol. v of the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies (HJAS.), where the same change has been suggested for the instrumental suffix.

The frequent Vedic construction exemplified by ṚV 5, 31, 4 indram … arkaír évardhayann éhaye héntav u ‘they strengthened Indra with hymns to slay the serpent’ has since Delbriick's days been the subject of some discussion and difference of opinion. Whitney expressed the view that the frequent use of the dative beside a so-called infinitive dative to denote the subject or the object of the action constitutes a case of attraction: in the above sentence one would, in accordance with the implication of this term, expect the accusative ahint, whereas in ṚV 1, 24, 8 cakira sryāya pánthām ánvetav u ‘he made a track for the sun to follow’, the dative of the noun denoting the being on whose behalf the path is made is understandable at first sight. Hence no doubt the comment made by Whitney before quoting the latter line: the construction is in part a perfectly simple one, but is stretched beyond its natural boundaries by a kind of attraction.

Unlike most of the medical works of Maimonides (1135–1204), which enjoyed wide circulation both in their original Arabic form and in Hebrew or Latin translations, his Epitomes of Galen seem never to have become widespread or popular. Whereas his other medical compositions are usually extant in a good number of manuscripts, and in their original language are often available in both Hebrew and Arabic script, the manuscript attestation of Maimonides's Epitomes of Galen is rather meagre. Steinschneider, whose splendid works remain the basic tools of reference for all research in this field, devotes to the Arabic Epitomes a mere three lines and lists only three manuscripts containing them (in fact, containing only a small part of them); Hebrew translations are not known to have been made, and not one of the Epitomes appears to have found its way into Latin. In 1966 two further manuscripts, both of them fragments from the Taylor-Schechter collection in the hand of Maimonides himself, became available when S. M. Stern published his ‘Ten autographs by Maimonides—fragments of medical works, responsa, letters and prescriptions’ in Maimonidis Commentarius in Mischnam … Vol. III, Corpus Codicum Hebraicorum Medii Aevi, ed. R. Edelmann, Pars I (Hafniae, 1966),11–29. The first two of these ten autographs are fragments of the Epitomes of Galen, to the publication of which Stern prefixed a fine discussion of the contents of these Maimonidean Epitomes and a summary of what is known about them.

The subject to which I venture to invite your attention is not altogether new to the members of the Royal Asiatic Society. Three years ago, at a meeting of the Society on 14th March, 1916, with Sir Charles Lyall in the chair, when the Campbell Memorial Gold Medal was awarded to Professor Macdonell, of Oxford, the latter in his reply touched upon the desirability of creating, on behalf of British Sanskrit scholars, some opportunity of study and research in India. “The only remedy,” Professor Macdonell said, “seems to be the establishment of a school of research for Europeans at some centre of Sanskrit learning, preferably Benares, like the School of Classical Archæology at Athens or the French School at Hanoi in Indo-China. It will be a reproach to this country if we cannot establish something of this kind in India, with all our obligations to advance education and learning in connexion with the ancient civilization and literature of the vast Indian Empire.”

One of the fundamental innovations of the early Church was the abolition of an ancient, venerable institution—divorce, the practice of which was as widespread as marriage itself. The explicit ban on divorce found in the Gospels ran counter to legal systems of the known world, with one notable exception: among the sectarian group whose rules are enshrined in the Dead Sea Scrolls, a stance against divorce can be verified, implying that a legal innovation of early Christianity can be tracked back to its origins in Sectarian Judaism.

By the time Christianity was emerging, marriage and divorce had already co-existed for a long time; in Mesopotamia marriage contracts had for two millennia been anticipating the possibility of divorce, with litigation governing the dissolution of marriage and division of properties. The best evidence, however, for the precursors to late Hellenistic (i.e. pagan, Jewish, and Christian) legal practice derives from a group of Neo-Babylonian marriage contracts dating from the seventh to third centuries B.C.

The editions of Sanskrit dramas based entirely on manuscripts written in the local vernacular script, called Ārya Euttu, present interesting subjects for linguistic study. The Prakrit of many of these dramas, and especially the dramas wrongly assigned to Bhāsa, has been examined by various scholars, and the general conclusions derived thence have been utilized as one of the arguments in support of the Bhāsa-theory. But careful study of the original texts and the printed edition of them shows that in transforming the original Malayali script into Devanagari print some liberties have been taken by the local editors, including Mm. Dr. T. Ganapati Sastri, the late lamented editor of the Trivandrum Sanskrit Series. The first thing that arrests the attention of the student who examines the manuscripts is the presence of small circles written by the side of the letters, as for instance in: MUHUoTÅ, EoVĀ, etc. The general principle that has guided the editors has been to double the consonant following the small circle, when it stands by the side of the letter, and to treat it as an anusvāra when it stands above the letter. This procedure of giving two different values to the same symbol is, however, very much open to question.

Parmi la trentaine de manuscrits ou de fragments turcs en écriture ouïgoure provenant de la célèbre grotte de Touen-houang dont je prépare l'édition, il y en a deux, sans doute du Xe siècle, écrits à coup sûr par des habitants de Khotan. Il s'agit dans un cas d'une lettre à propos d'événements survenus ‘ici à Khotan’, et, dans l'autre, d'une série de notations écrites à Cha-tcheou (Touen-houang) au dos d'un rouleau de sûtra chinois par un envoyé de ‘l'État d'Or’ (altun el), expression désignant Khotan, bien attestée dans les manuscrits khotanais de Touen-houang.

Svetadvipa, “The White Island,” is the name of an island, situated in the far North, inhabited by Nārāyana and by pious White Men, who worship him. The description of their worship, which can be read in that part of the Śāntiparvan, the twelfth of the Mahābhārata books, devoted to Nārāyana is distinguishable to an obvious degree from the stories of other cults found in the Brahminical literature, and has led researchers of both earlier and more recent date to try certain more or less successful interpretations. The attempt at solving the problem of Śvetadvīpa, which has, during more recent times, attracted the greatest attention, is that of Garbe.

Having been in the first instance a classical scholar, Wilfred Whiteley well knew how important vernacular texts are for an understanding of a people's thought and values. He was also that rare combination of anthropologist and linguist and saw therefore in texts much more than phonetic, grammatical, lexicographical, and other purely linguistic problems, but also the semantic, which in effect means ethnographical, questions raised by them. He saw clearly that a people's whole way of life, and the way they see it, may be revealed in a single text. Consequently, and apart from their significance for the ethnographer who recorded vernacular texts among (generally) a pre-literate people, they can be, especially if presented in both vernacular and with a competent translation, of considerable pedagogic value, the student asking himself such questions as arise from their content.

Burmese music is a virgin field for research. Nobody can bewail this virginity more than myself. To help me there does not seem to exist a single western work on Burmese music though there are such classics as Fox Strangways' on Indian and J. H. Levis' on Chinese music. Many writers on Burma have passed remarks, kind or humorous, on Burmese music. But few have attempted a technical study of it. Nothing Burmese escaped the notice of Sir James George Scott, of course. But I know of only two who left some technical remarks on Burmese music: Paul Edmonds, the author of Peacocks and Pagodas; and P. A. Mariano, in an appendix on Burmese music to that most lovingly produced book Burma by Max and Bertha Ferrars.

Kukotay (K) and Bok Murun (BM) have epithets and formulae of greater or lesser elaborateness in common. Some of the more interesting of these will be adduced and compared, as will some of the more interesting discrepancies between K and BM on the way, since they throw light on the nature of their common source and of the Kirgiz epic tradition.

THE two ceremonial speeches which are given below were recorded for me in 1956 by an old Samoan talking-chief (tūlāfale) in the village of Amanave on the island of Tutuila. The text is an edited transcription made from those tapes.

Both speeches form part of a house-building ceremony known in Tutuila as le usuga i le fale (the visitation of the house), which commemorates the building by a matai (head of a family group) of a round-house (fale tele). The fale tele is used mainly as a meeting place for the village council and for the entertainment of travelling parties (malaga) from other villages. It is an expensive undertaking to build such a house as it involves the employment of a master-carpenter (matai tufuga, or, ceremonially, agai-o-tupu) and members of his guild (?āiga), who must be entertained lavishly during the work and paid with cash and fine-mats at a later ceremony (le umusāga). A Samoan who builds his village a fale tele is making a major contribution to their prestige, and the usuga ceremony is held as a mark of gratitude and respect.

As one reads through the Rigveda the āyú- stand out challenging attention. They are vīprās (8.12.13) and belong to the antiquity of the poets (9.10.6; 9.23.2 prtnasa āyávaḥ). Their activities are clearly to some extent identical with those of the kārú- officials. They even share one verse with these in RV 9.10.6 āpa dvrā matīnm pratn ṛṇvanti kārávaḥ hárasa āyávaḥ ‘the ancient kārú- officiants (and) the āyú- officiants have opened the gates of the formulae for the heat of the bull (soma)’. Both these types of officials thus assist in the production of mantras.