The argument to be presented here proceeds from the analysis of a Sogdian word of uncertain orthography and disputed meaning. It first occurred, as by' / npšqty (apparently with word-division), in Soghd. Texte, I, 39.4, in a translation of Luke xii, 36, corresponding with Syriac bed meštūoā = (ÉK) Tŵv yáuwv; Müller gave ‘Gastmahl’, with an asterisk to denote his doubt. Later I published two Manichaean passages. One, hi the text I titled ‘A Job story’, speaks of a man who makes his way in the world and becomes rich and “takes to himself many wives and has by them many sons and daughters and gives wives to the sons and grooms to the daughters and makes a great By‘n’yšp / [']krty” : the context demands ‘marriage-feast’, in agreement with the Greek of Luke. The other is a Sogdian version of a Middle Persian verse, the original having been preserved by good fortune, ‘Hail to you, bridegroom, who hast made a marriage-feast for the sons’ : here By'ny / pškt'kw renders MPers. wdwdg'n ‘wedding’.

The remarkable group of five rock-cut temples at Māmallapuram or Māvalivaram, to the south of Madras, has often been described. Popular imagination has associated these wonderful shrines with the Pāṇḍvas; thus it has happened that the one which is smallest in size has become known as the rath of Draupadi. Evidently this temple was in reality dedicated to some form of the goddess Durga, whose effigy, standing on the severed head of the Buffalodemon, is found carved upon the outer wall, whereas her vehicle in the form of a well-conceived but unfinished lion-statue may be seen at no great distance.

Among the many unpublished works of the Shehu ‘Uthmān dan Fodio three have come to my notice which are of interest in that they illustrate the development of a tradition of reform which, having remote origins in the Almoravid movement of the eleventh century A.D. achieved literary expression in the Muslim empire of Songhay, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and which was continued in the Habe kingdoms almost three centuries later. They also illustrate the continuity of social custom in the Sudan over this period. The works are:

To the extent there is an African academic approach, it is comparative (showing that the African world has similarities with the biblical). There are some “post-colonial” and similar readings, but this academic study is in the main done by Western-trained academics and directed at Western readers. There has been relatively little study of the way the Bible is actually used in churches, especially at the very grassroots. In mainline churches, the Bible is generally taken (as in the West) as a book of revelation which the preacher must expound and apply. In the new fast-growing Pentecostal sector the Bible is conceived quite differently, and understood as a record of covenants, promises, pledges and commitments between God and his chosen. It is not just a record of covenants and commitments to others in the past. It is not primarily a historical document at all. It is a contemporary document; it tells of God's covenant with and commitment to me, and to me now. These promises in scripture are effected in believers' lives through proclamation. The major biblical motifs in this emerging Christianity are thus those stressing victory, success, hope, achievement. The texts that are dominant are therefore prophetic texts, and narratives of those who can be made to illustrate success.

The Shāhsevan tribes of Persia are a heterogeneous collection of groups brought together in a confederation of that name some time between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The question of how and when this confederation was formed is something of a riddle, which arises from the following considerations.

This study is mainly based on the writings of two authors: Ibn FaḍAllāh al-‘Umarī (d. 749/1349) and al-Qalqashandī (d. 821/1418). Al-‘Umarī has in the first part of his encyclopedia Maslik al-absār fī mamālik al-amṣār a section, the fifteenth,1 dealing with the Arab tribes of his time.

This essay takes for granted articles in the Encyclopaedia of Islam and papers by D. B. Macdonald and W. E. Calverley but a brief summary may be allowed. Nafs and rūh were used loosely to mean almost anything connected with life, but acquired new meanings as the years went by. Men differed about the nature and activity of all three constituents of man. ‘Soul’ is almost the equivalent of nafs in its precise sense though it may be hard at times to decide if ‘self’ is not more appropriate. It is easier to admit the existence of soul than to define it for it has neither genus nor proprium; any definition is imperfect and any description inadequate. It is part of the world soul as intellect is part of the world intellect, it is part of the spirit of God, torn off by the instrumentality of intellect, it is simple, incorruptible, and unchangeable. Many were the suggestions; it is a compound of constituents (rukn), union of elements('unsur), a self-moving accident, hot spirit, a nature in perpetual motion. It is a living substance(jawhar) but is not in the body in the same way as rūh is. Another idea is close to a Jewish view that all souls are one and are made different by the influences of the spheres and stars through or by which they pass on their journey to earth. The threefold division of soul into vegetal, animal, and rational was known and may have something to do with the religious division into the soul at rest in faith, the censorious soul, and the lusting soul. Instead of censorious the meaning ‘changeable’ is also given.8 A variant is that a believer has three souls while a hypocrite and an unbeliever have each one.

The relations within the suffixed forms of the Turkish word havt hitherto been treated as a series of unconnected statements as a result of the phonological and grammatical levels of analysis being made in phonemic terms. ‘Vowel Harmony’, which implies a separating out of the vowels from the rest of the word structure, ‘Consonant Alternance’, and ‘variant’ forms with the implication of consonants ‘changing’ from one form to another, all these are statements not related to the structure of the word, and bring in their train some irregularities in the grammatical statement where none need arise.

THE historians1 who take the death of Jihan-shah's son Hasan 'All in 873/1468 as the end of the Qara-qoyunlu dynasty disregard the fact that for some time the descendants of Qara-Yusuf survived in Hamadan and in the beginning of the 16th century rose to new honours as the Qutb-shahs of Golconda. Under Indian skies they kept up their family traditions, and their court historians summed up afresh the history of the Qara-qoyunlu and restored the missing links in the genealogy of the kings of Golconda. These links form the special subject of the present article.

Sculpture as an artistic medium was widely employed in the arts of Greece and the Hellenistic East, but played only a minor role in ancient East Asia. This changed dramatically with the First Emperor of China who marked his ascent to the throne in 221 bc with the erection of giant bronze sculptures outside his palace and the installation of thousands of terracotta figures in his tomb. The current text sets out to investigate the sudden and short-lived surge of sculpture making in third-century bc China and places it in the context of developments across Asia of the time. The text joins art historical, archaeological and textual evidence to investigate whether the First Emperor's extraordinary interest in sculpture may have been the result of contacts with the contemporary Hellenistic world.

The gibla, the south-west of Mauritania, is a monotonous region of gum acacia trees, baobabs, ‘dead’ dunes, and hillocks. This ‘backwood’ is the last refuge of Znāga Berber, once spoken far to the north in whole regions of the Western Sahara. A number of short poems, a cycle of folk-tales, and a handful of masterpieces of extended odes in praise of the Prophet—some 200 years old and written in Arabic script—this is the meagre literary legacy of a proud and cherished tradition.

The first major works of Sufism each systematically define the terms for drunkenness (sukr) and sobriety (sahw). This article attempts to trace the changes in the definitions of these terms in the tenth- and eleventh-century Sufi manuals, from the oldest example, Abū Nasr al-Sarrāj's (d. 378/988) Kitāb al-Luma‘ to ‘Alī Hujwīrī's (d. c. 467/1074) Kashf al-mahjūb, and to consider their implications. Hujwīrī provides an extensive debate about the relative value of the two experiences to which the terms refer, and associates arguments on either side with Abū Yazīd al-Bastāmī (d. 261/874–5?) and Abū l-Qāsim al-Junayd (d. 297/910), respectively. While the latter association stands out as innovative because previous commentators had not mentioned these individuals as exemplars of drunkenness and sobriety, it is argued here that Hujwīrī's choice was not entirely arbitrary, but a consequence of the dynamic nature of both biography and the definition of technical terminology.

The most detailed account of Mani's last days is contained in the Coptic “Narrative on the Crucifixion” (Polotsky, Man. Hom., pp. 42 sqq.). As I had occasion to point out before, this “Narrative” had been quoted by the Christian Jibrā'īl b. Nūḥ in his anti-Alanichaean book which was still available to al-Bērūnī (Chronology, 20819–22).

During the brief reign of King Hormizd Mani went to Babylonia, where he stayed until the accession of Bahram I. After some time he left Babylonia and slowly travelled down the River Tigris, visiting his communities on the way. He reached Hormizd-Ardašīr (Ahwāz, Sūq al-Ahwāz), one of the four chief towns of Susiana, from where he started on a journey to the north-eastern provinces of the Sasanian empire. But he was forbidden to go there and compelled to turn back to Susiana. From Hormizd-Ardašīr he journeyed to Mesene, thence up the River Tigris in a boat to Ctesiphon. From the capital he went to “the Pargalia”, where he was joined by Bαατ. He travelled to Kholassar, and from this town he reached Belapat, where he was destined to die. The route taken by him on the journey from Kholassar to Belapat is not known, as there is a gap in the manuscript. While the situation of “the Pargalia” remains unsettled, that of Kholassar (Khalasar) is well defined by a comparison of the itinerary given by Isidorus Kharacenus with the Arab geographers (journey from Ctesiphon to Holwan):—

Zoroaster is said to have lived in the sixth century B.C. This has been a tradition, within Zoroastrianism itself, for around two thousand years. Up until recently in the West its accuracy was widely considered an established fact.

Western scholars came across the evidence for this tradition in the nineteenth century. Many immediately gave it a warm reception. After all, such a late dating was far better suited to the forward-looking, evolutionary spirit of the times than the much earlier one that had been favoured up until then, but which risked losing sight of Zoroaster in a suspiciously distant past. Also, as well as sounding eminently reasonable it seemed to have the pedigree of a genuine Zoroastrian tradition.

The following is an account of the spoken Arabic of Mecca. The present work does not attempt a comprehensive description but is confined to the phonology of the syllable and the morphology of the verb and affixes; such a study is perhaps the most economical way of showing the character of the dialect and its relation to other dialects. My thanks are due to Mr. M. H. Bakalla, a post-graduate student of this school and a native of Mecca, for his constant help in the preparation of this article.

The first comprehensive survey of Geniza documents about the trade on the route to India was published by me in Speculum, A Journal of the American Medieval Academy, 29, 181–97, in April 1954. At that time I was able to give a report about 130 Geniza papers related in one way or another to the India trade. Soon after the article was published, a distinguished institution offered me the opportunity to publish the material in full. I accepted with enthusiasm and set feverishly to work. But slowly it dawned upon me that one should not try to solve problems by sagacity at a time when new sources that could provide factual answers to those problems might lurk around the corner

This paper attempts a periodization and dialectal attribution of Iranian loan words found in Tocharian A and B, two Indo-European languages attested in c. 10,000 fragments unearthed in Chinese Turkestan since 1892. More than 100 loan words are scritinized and classified in eight sections, according to their origin: Old Iranian (probably issued from the common ancestry of the ‘Sakan’ languages, Khotanese, Tumshuqese and Waxi), three different stages of Khotanese, ‘Śaka’, (the language of the Iranian invaders of northern India), Parthian, Bactrian and Sogdian. Tocharians had dealings with all neighbouring Iranian peoples, but Khotanese and its ancestors clearly exerted the most durable influence. No loan word from more remote dialects (e.g. Persian and Ossetic) can be evidenced. The predominance of war-related and political vocabulary among the loan words and the direction of borrowing, overwhelmingly from Iranian to Tocharian, both point to a political ascendancy of Sakan-speaking tribes, and later of Bactria, on Tocharians.

The Genizah of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat preserved dozens of petitions addressed to the Fatimid and Ayyubid chanceries in Cairo and decrees that they issued in response. This article provides an edition, translation, and discussion of a petition housed among the Genizah documents of the Bodleian Library directed to Sitt al-Mulk, half-sister of the caliph al-Ḥākim (386–411/996–1021) and head of the Fatimid state between his death and her own in 414/1023. Geoffrey Khan had previously identified two petitions to a Fatimid princess housed in Cambridge and New York; it is likely that they, too, were addressed to Sitt al-Mulk. Such documents elucidate Sitt al-Mulk's role in government after her brother's death and provide evidence for the chronicler al-Musabbiḥī's claim that she received and responded to petitions from subjects. The article offers possible explanations as to why petitions such as this one, which concerns an Ismaili mosque, should have found their way to the Jewish community of Fustat whose members reused and preserved them. It also suggests some broader conclusions about the dispersal, survival, or disappearance of pre-Ottoman Middle Eastern archives and documents.

He hunted the valley till it was midday. Moreover, there were with him two-and-thirty crowned kings, his vassals at that time. Not for the joy of hunting did the emperor hunt with them so long, but because he had been made a man of such high dignity that he was lord over all those kings.

‘The dream of Macsen Wledig’

That the three provinces which constituted Rāmaññadesa, the Mon kingdom in Lower Burma, were divided into 32 townships is one of those acknowledged crumbs of fact which, passed down from historian to historian, never seem to excite more specific inquiry. The institution has suggestive parallels and analogues elsewhere in South East Asia, to the study of which Sir Richard Winstedt, in the ‘History of Perak’ which he wrote with R. J. Wilkinson, himself contributed almost thirty years ago.

It was a common idea in the last century, and one which can be found even today,2 that Soma/Haoma was a drink which led to ecstasy, and drugs which produce such an extraordinary state of mind have always been objects of curiosity. Therefore, the search for the plant which was used by the Indo-Iranian peoples in their solemn rituals was never abandoned, although the variety of candidates brought forward made the question look unsolvable.Some of the strong drugs suggested for the original Soma had to meet with statements from the Rgveda or Avesta which ran contrary to their shapeor properties. The effects of others on the human mind are so unspectacular that it was difficult to accept them as the plant so highly praised in antiquity.