The legal and social attitude towards delicts against individuals in the great settled states of South Arabia is a subject on which information is very scant. All that has survived in the case of homicide is a fragmentary legal prescription of uncertain import, a temple regulation on the subject of slaves, and two incidental communications gleaned from dedicatory inscriptions. To this may be added a general prohibition contained in a late Greek law code purporting to stem from the Homeritae. Moreover, this small corpus of information is geographically limited in the first case to Qatabān, and in the remainder to Saba', while each instance refers to a different stage in the social development of South Arabia.

The variety of spoken Arabic some aspects of which are discussed in this article is the dialect of 'Anaiza, a fairly large town of the Qaṣm province of Nejd.

Most of the work on this dialect I have done with Mr. Muḥammad al-Shmikh of 'Anaiza ('Unaizah).

The engraved gem which forms the subject of this note (plate I, Al, A2, and fig. 1) is part of the collection of Mr. Richard Falkiner of London. I am grateful to him for allowing me to publish it here, and for placing at my disposal the notes which result from his own inquiries. What is known of the history and provenance of the object may be stated in a few words. It was bought by its present owner from a London dealer who had obtained it at auction.

In the course of a visit to Urfa in south-eastern Turkey in 1961 I was able to re-examine and to photograph the short inscription at the bottom centre of the Tripod mosaic which I had discovered in 1956. The photographs are incorporated in the colour transcription of this mosaic by Mrs. Seton Lloyd, published with my article ‘The Sabian mysteries’, in E. Bacon (ed.), Vanished civilizations, 1963, 204. The revised text of this inscription, however, has not yet received detailed analysis; I venture to return to it here because it contains features that may be of interest to students of Semitic philology and religion.

It is customary to describe the Ṛavedic dialogue of Purūravas and Urvaśī (ṚV 10.95, referred to hereafter as D) either as the source ‘from which all the different versions have originated … an exaltation of a popular fairy-tale’ (H. D. Velankar, The Vikramorvaśīya, New Delhi, 1961, xxxxiii) or as ‘ein einheitliches festgefügtes Kunstwerk’ based on the fairy-tale narrated ‘im alten schlichten Märchenstil’ in Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, 11.5.1 (K. F. Geldner).

The problem of the transcription of Pahlavi, inherently difficult enough, has for so long been complicated by factors of personal taste and interest that it will probably see many more jubilees. Amid the welter of differing transcriptions to be found, however, one persistent thread is to be observed, namely that of archaism. Bartholomae's endeavour to reproduce the earliest Arsacid pronunciation of Pahlavi, that of the third century B.C., has more or less been followed by such leading scholars as Salemann, Pagliaro, Bailey, and Nyberg, and has had perhaps its most consistent exposition in the Pahlavi index of the last-named's recent Manual.

Interest in the Zoroastran religion is widespread among scholars, and knowledge of Zoroastrian practice has been diligently acquired. The main source of information has, however, been the Indian branch of the community; and a number of evidently ancient customs observed in the Persian homeland have passed almost, and sometimes indeed entirely, unnoticed in the West.

Among the Arabic documents preserved in the archives of Sicily is one relating to the affairs of the Jewish community in Siracusa at the end of thetwelfth century. Belonging by origin to the episcopal church of Cefalù, it isnow in the Archivio di Stato at Palermo (Tabulario della Chiesa Vescovile di Cefalù, Perg. no. 25), and was included in the collection published by S. Cusain 1868–82.

It is generally accepted that the system of social relations obtaining in Outer Mongolia during the period of Manchu domination (1691–1911) is best described as feudalistic, and that no substantial change was made in this system during the period of autonomy which followed (1911–19). Indeed, in some ways, particularly in the granting of secular titles of nobility to high lamas, and the allotment to them of the appropriate retainers, the system was reinforced during those years. Society was divided basically into two classes, the nobility, and the commoners, or albat, those liable to corvée.

Among the British Indian merchants engaged in trade with Persia in the first half of the nineteenth century was Hjj Nr al-Dn Muhammad b. Ahmad al-Dn Muhammad, a native of Masulipatam. He was a rich and highly respected merchant, holding at one time a position of influence at Shrz, where he had settled at the beginning of the century and married. He was a Sh' and reputed to be pious and well versed in the tenets of Sh'ism. He had intercourse with Husayn 'Al Mrz Farmn Farm (the son of Fath 'Al Shh and governor of Frs from 1214179980 to 12501834), Fath 'Al Shh, and Muhammad Shh; he also enjoyed the favour of the latter's prime minister Hjj Mrz Aqs, who referred to him in 1843 as his esteemed friend,2 but eventually forfeited this because of the partiality which Muhammad Shh showed him for many years.3 In due course Hjj Nr al-Dn acquired possession of two estates in Frs. His title to them was subsequently questioned and the dispute led to a long and complicated case with the Persian government.

One of the most striking phonetic characteristics of languages of the Austroasiatic family such as Mon, Khmer, and Vietnamese is the great variety of vowel qualities that appear to be kept apart by native speakers despite the fact that some of them differ from each other so slightly that it is hard for the foreign observer to believe that they can be functionally distinct in practice. Accompanying these minute quality distinctions there are frequently puzzling and seemingly non-systematic variations in the length of vowels and in their distribution.

The so-called ‘Anonymous Chronicles’ of the Ottoman dynasty and the closely related texts which pass under the name of Uruj present formidable problems to an editor, for they are not ‘histories’ in the classical sense, handed down in copies made for scholars by professional copyists, but rather storybooks of the genre of the Baṭṭāl-nāme and the Dānishmend-nāme, written for the edification and entertainment of the ordinary man, so that many a ‘copyist’ was in effect a redactor or even an author, freely paraphrasing his model, adding new stories or alternative versions of old ones, and occasionally stitching together two recensions to make a new and fuller version.

The establishment of a British political agent at Baghdad marked an important shift in British policy in the area of the Persian Gulf. It underlined the changing interest from trade to politics, the recognition of the strategic problem of Indian defence, and the assertion by the British Government in India of a policy towards the Ottoman Empire which was in contrast to that of the Government in England. During the period of office of the first Resident, Harford Jones, these changes were but dimly perceived through the fog of personal feuds which surrounded him. None the less these feuds did ultimately reflect significant divisions about policy.

The present notice is merely an annex to V. V. Barthold's article on Ḥfiẓ-i Abr which has stood the test of 70 years.

Ḥfiẓ-i Abr, a Khorsnian by birth, was a distinguished historian of Timrid times. He belonged to the class of those learned men whom rulers liked to attach to their courts. He studied in Hamadn, and worked under the patronage of Tmr, Shhrukh, and Prince Baysunqur. He died in Zanjn in 83414301.

‘Tone’, at least in the literature dealing with Far Eastern languages, is commonly used in several ways: for instance, in ‘the tones of the language’, or ‘Cantonese has seven tones’, reference is made to the tones as membersof a system, while in ‘such-and-such a word has tone X’ the reference is tothe assignment of an item to one of the members of the system. The differencein reference is made quite clear by the context, and no ambiguity ensues; theconcept of ‘tone’ remains precise, and difficulties arise only when no distinctionis made between ‘tone’ as used above and the realization of tones in particularenvironments. Far different is the use of expressions denoting ‘changes intone’, for which there is no agreed terminology. In diachronic work, ‘change’ usually refers to changes through time in the overall system of basic tones, and secondarily to changes in the assignment of items to members of this system, as, for instance, when it is said that in Standard Chinese, items with voicedplosive initials changed from the shăng tone to the qù tone by the Sung dynasty.

In the central and eastern inscriptions of Aoka (Kls, Dhauli, and Jaugaḍa, Pillar Edicts and Minor Rock Inscriptions) a long vowel of Sanskrit whenfollowed by a double consonant or a consonant-group is shortened (e.g. tt att) as generally in Pali and Prakrit. But the long vowel is retained in the Girnr inscription and in some of the Pillar Edicts and Minor Rock Inscriptions. In the Girnr forms the consonant following the long vowel still representeda geminate; whether or not it still did so in the other inscriptions atthat date cannot be ascertained. Although the distinction of length is not shownin Kharoṣṭh writing, the long vowel before geminates was certainly maintainedin the language of the Shhbzgaṛh and Mnsehr versions, for the longvowel in this position is still preserved in the North-Western languages: Sindh, Lahnd, Western Panjb, Kshmr (not so demonstrably in other Dardic languages) and some West Pahari dialects.

‘Les livres historiques sont rares en pays annamite: le climat et les guerres ont concouru a les de truire.’ When he wrote those words in 1904 Pelliot no doubt hoped that they would be true only of the past; but the troubled history of Việt-Nam in the middle decades of the twentieth century has made them also prophetic. Before modern methods for combating the climate could be brought to bear on the problem of archive preservation further wars occurred to destroy even more of the country's historical remains, as well as to disperse many of those which survived.