The purpose of these ‘SIMW’, as also of some papers which have appeared under different titles in this Bulletin and elsewhere, is to clear the ground for the preparation of a Handbook of early Islamic metal work. My aim is to broaden the basis on which the writing of such a handbook (covering the period from the rise of Islam to the end of the fourteenth century) can be attempted, by submitting unpublished and significant material in the form of brief, but detailed, monographs. I hope that readers will call my attention to errors and omissions. The supporting illustrations (which, unless otherwise stated, are my own) form an essential part of such an undertaking, and I am most grateful to the Editorial Board of BSOAS for allowing a generous number of plates and line-drawings to be reproduced in each issue.

Professor Guillaume's new translation of the Sīrah of Ibn Isḥāq (in the recension of Ibn Hishām) will stand as an enduring monument to his tenure of the Chair of Arabic at the University of London. The Arabic has been rendered into elegant classical English, very readable in style, with none of that awkwardness of English idiom which often besets translations attempting to present an Arabian setting and outlook so utterly different from those of the Occident as that portrayed in the Sīrah.

Although until recently no study had been undertaken to investigate the poetry included in Ibn Isḥāq's Sīra with a view to establishing on internal evidence the authenticity of such of it as may be genuine and revealing the spurious character of the forgeries, doubts as to the authenticity of this poetry in general or of certain poems in particular have been expressed by various writers, critics or other persons, since the time of Ibn Ishaq himself. Internal evidence attesting to the spurious character of the different poems varies widely from the immediately obvious, such as ascribing to a Himyarite king lines in simple plain Arabic or ascribing to a polytheist a poem allegedly attacking the Prophet and the Muslims which yet speaks of him in reverential terms and of his companions with respect, to the more subtle. The purpose of this article, however, is to survey and comment on some of the opinions which directly or indirectly stigmatize the poetry of the Sira in whole or in part as spurious.

During the course of my 1953–4 tour in Arabia, I was able to see a great many new MSS, mostly of specifically South Arabian content, amongst which for example was a rare early copy of Ibn Samurah's 1E6C;abaḳāt, the same MS also containing what appears to be an unknown treatise on the grammatical scholars of Basrah and Kūfah. A photocopy of this MS is now in the Library of the School, and a brief description is in the Madjallat al-Makhtūṭāt al-‘Arabīyah, n, 2, p. 341. Fu'ād Saiyid of the Dār al-Kutub has recently published an edition of the said Ṭabaḳāt.

Within four months of the battle of Uhud, two missions sent by the Prophet, the first to certain sections of al-Haun b. Khuzaima, the second to Banū ‘Āmir, were set upon and treacherously killed or captured.1 In the first case the emissaries were six in number. Four were killed, and two surrendered to the attackers, who belonged to the tribe of Hudhail, or properly to Liḥyān, a branch of the same, and were sold to the Maccans. One was killed in revenge for Umayya b. Khalaf and the other, Khubaib b. ‘Adiyy, was killed and crucified in revenge for al-Ḥārith b. ‘Amir, who, like Umayya, was also killed at Badr.2

A ‘Mirror for magistrates’ entitled ‘The manners of kings and advice to them’ (adab al-mulūk'iḥhum) precedes in MS Or. 9446 of the British Museum the suḥbat al-mulūk (commonly called kitāb al-tāj) which is ascribed to Jāḥiຓ. As the former names Saladin, the ascription to Jāḥiຓ, if meant to apply to it, is wrong. Each section begins with a line or two, ‘The prudent king will do this, will not do that’, followed by one or more examples from history.

Under the patronage of the enlightened Fatimid caliphs (A.D. 969–1171) there flourished in Egypt a vigorous and refined art. The sumptuous palaces with which they had adorned their capital Cairo have vanished without trace, but the remains of their religious architecture, the magnificent gateways of Cairo's Fatimid wall (which have escaped destruction), together with the enthusiastic descriptions of contemporary travellers enable us to imagine the splendour of their court.

On 29 June 1881 letters were despatched by a Dunqulāwī ascetic and religious teacher to various notables in the Egyptian Sudan. The writer, who had previously been known as Muḥammad Aḥmad b. ‘Abdallāh, announced in these letters what had for some time been an open secret among his followers, namely that he was the Expected Mahdi. Muḥammad Ahmad was by no means an unknown figure. He was at this time approaching 40 years of age. From childhood he had been profoundly devoted to the study of Islam, Ṣufī doctrine, and the ascetic life, although, unlike a number of other Sudanese, he had never proceeded to higher studies at al-Azhar. His experience of the world was limited to the northern and central parts of the Egyptian Sudan.

The land of the Ahiank‘ or Caucasian Albania, whose geography and customs already attracted the attention of Strabo and Pliny, represents the easternmost part of the Armenian sphere of influence. The historical events which took place in this region were described by the ancient Armenian historians P'awstos Biwzandai, Lazar P'arpei, Elišē Vardapet, Movsēs Xorenai, etc., and their works were subsequently drawn upon by Movsēs Kalankatuai or Dasxuranci for the compilation called the History of the Aluank' which remains our principal source of information on the country down to the tenth century.

In view of the scarcity of publications on the Turkic languages of the Soviet Union, especially the Turkic languages of Siberia, every contribution to this subject is highly welcome. One of these is C. G. Simpson's Some features of the morphology of the Oirot (Gorno-Altai) language (issued by the Central Asian Research Centre in association with St. Antony's College (Oxford) Soviet Affairs Study Group), 1955, which, in 68 pp. of typescript, tries to give the essentials of Oyrot morphology, being based, as the author says, mainly on Dyrenkova's Oyrot grammar (Γpaмматика ОЙротского ЯзьІ,ка Moscow, 1940, 302 pp.) and Baskakov's grammatical sketch of the Oyrot language in the little Oyrot dictionary, published by himself and T. M. Toščakova.

This study owes its inception to Sir Percival David, who possesses among the treasures in his private collection one of the few surviving copies of a large engraved map of the world, known to students of cartography as the Map of Hajji Ahmed. Invited by its owner to translate for him the legends in the map and especially the lengthy text accompanying it, which are written in Turkish, I became aware that a close analysis of this text yielded more information than has so far been obtained about the origin of the map.

In an earlier article I gathered up certain Indo-Iranian words to form a group connected with ‘seed’, ‘sowing’ and ‘planting’.

In Iranian these words were Avestan mīz- (Yasna 44.20), taken to mean ‘to sow (seeds)’, with the -ti- derivative mišti- in two passages of the later Avesta Yašt 5.120 and Yašt 7.4. Here in Yašt 7.4 mišti urvaranąm ‘with the sowing of seeds of plants’ was a striking phrase.

Professor G. Vernadsky, well-known as an historian of ancient Russia, recently published an Ossetic folktale, which he had obtained from a Mr. Dzambulat Dzanty, an Ossete by birth, who in his turn stated that he had heard it (and written it down) in his youth, ‘in the village of Great Iron (Bolshoe OsetinsJcoe) at the time of hay-making (xosgärdän), June, 1910’, from an ‘old white-bearded man’ by name of Khulyx [] ‘The Lame One’, who ‘was a poet himself and in some of his own works followed the pattern of the old Ossetian oral traditions’. As the old gentleman was ‘over seventy in 1910’, we cannot hope to consult him now about his sources or about the numerous strange words and expressions in the text presented, after an interval of 45 years, by Mr. Dzambulat Dzanty.

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.

Since the publication of Professor J. Takakusu's ‘Life of Vasubandhu by Paramārtha’ in the year 1904, several scholars have made attempts to determine the date and works of Vasubandhu. The problem is beset with several difficulties. Tradition gives three dates (A.N. 900, 1000, and 1100) based on different reckonings of the Nirvana era. Vasubandhu, himself a Sautrāntika, is the author of the celebrated Vaibhāsika work, viz., the Abhidharma-kox015B;a (and its Bhāṣya), and is at the same time credited with the authorship of several major works of the Vijñānavāda school. The problem is rendered more complex by the mention in Yaśoṁitra's Sphuṭārthā Abhidharma- kośa-vyākhyā of an elder (Vṛdāhacārya) Vasubandhu, leading to a recent theory of two Vasubandhus advocated by Professor E. Frauwallner.

The belief in immortality and the immeasurable life-span of a single existence is found in the earliest records of the Indian religions. The general trend of the Vedas, the epics, and the Purāṇas is towards immortalizing their devatās and deities. The avatāras of the Hindu Godhead, in spite of their earthly existence, were considered free from the laws of birth and death. In their case these incidents were spoken of as mere appearances, since such beings were but devices of the immortal God to work among mortals.

Many of the concepts of Indian music commonly prevalent in Bharata's time, and expressed quite succinctly in his Nāṭyaśāstra, have subsequently been confused by later writers. Even now, several modern writers are still in some doubt as to the nature of the ancient parent scales, the sa-grāma and the sa-grāma. The fundamental difficulty hinges around the location of the svara (note) in relation to its śrutis (component intervals). Contrary to Western practice, the interval is considered to precede the note, so that the four śrutis of sa are located between sa and the ni below it.