The Year 9 A.H. is known as 'ām al-wufūd, ‘the year of the delegations', on account of the many tribal delegations which came at that time to the Prophet at Medina. One of the most impressive was that of Tamīm. The accounts of its meeting with the Prophet are rich in detail, and involve both Qur'ānic verses and poems. As is often the case with our sources, there is a considerable amount of confusion between the various accounts. In this instance, however, the confusion is the result not merely of falsifications of failures of recall but also of the conception which guided the Muslim scholars in their redaction of the material. The compilers, rather than their primary sources, are responsible for the confusion which is the main subject of thispaper.

The medieval registers of the papal Chancery and of the royal Chanceries of Western Europe, which have preserved archival copies of outgoing documents, are an invaluable source for students of medieval European history and diplomatics. Analogous sources from medieval Islamic Chanceries are practically non-existent. We know from literary works, especially the handbooks for government secretaries, that the medieval Islamic Chanceries kept records of the documents they issued by meticulously copying them and filing them in an archive. Some of the surviving documents which emanated from the Egyptian chanceries also attest to this practice. These often contain annotations made by copyists certifying that the document had been copied in the Chancery and/or in other government offices. We also have a report by a clerk of the Ayyūbid Chancery concerning the search in the archives for the copy of a decree which had been issued several years previously. To this report is attached a reproduction of the archival copy. The original contents of the archives of the medieval Egyptian Chanceries, however, have perished almost without a trace.

It is widely held belief among bedouins that common linguistic characteristics point to a common genealogical origin. Bearing in mind the importance attached to racial origin amongst bedouins, it is not surprising that they should be keen observers of the dialect of their own and neighbouring tribes. My investigations of the bedouin dialects of the North and East of Arabia do indicate that a common geographical origin is often reflected in a uniform dialect. In this area many bedouin tribes seem to have left an original homeland in the west some 200 years ago, so that in the somewhat isolated conditions of bedouin life their dialect retains the characteristics of the speech of their homeland. A particularly striking case of this is the Rashāyida, a tribe which ‘Arab tradition allies to the Hutaim of north-western Arabia. At some time this tribe broke up and many of them moved east to become clients of the Muṭair. Many others however crossed by sea to the Sudan when they acquired new camels and resumed the nomadic way of life. At present, with the increasing prosperity of Saudi Arabia, many of these have returned as immigrant workers or have been repatriated. Their dialect, however, after a period of perhaps 150 years' separation, is still recognizably of the Najdī type. It would not be possible for dialectology to verify bedouin genealogies; nevertheless, it can be seen that it might support traditions about the earlier location of tribes, since historical sources are not very informative for the medieval period in the Arabian peninsula.

The Shāhsevan tribes of Azarbayjan were involved in various important events during the Constitutional period. In spring 1908, border incidents in Shāhsevan territory, between tribesmen and Russian frontier guards, provided the Russians with a pretext for military intervention in Azarbayjan on a scale which hastened the fall of the Constitutionalist government in Tehran. During the winter of 1908–9, there were some Shāhsevan among the reactionary forces which besieged Tabrīz. In late 1909 most of the Shāhsevan chiefs joined a Union of tribes of eastern Azarbayjan, which proclaimed opposition to the Constitution and the intention of marching on Tehran and restoring the deposed Muḥammad 'Alī Shāh. They plunde ed Ardabīl, receiving wide coverage in the European press, but were soon subdued by Nationalist forces during that winter and spring 1910. Subsequently the Shāhsevan were regarded as dangerous potential support for muḥammad 'Ali, while the main activity of their warriors was resistance to the occupying Russian forces.

The Vedic verb pávate occurs with great frequency in the ninth book of the Ṛgveda with reference to the preparation of the Soma drink. It is normally rendered in Sāyaṇa's commentary as Kṣarati ‘flows'. There is nothing in the contexts to suggest that this meaning is inappropriate, since the flowing of Soma is continually referred to, and by a variety of synonyms. Such are arṣati ‘flows', dhāvati ‘runs', yāti ‘goes', īyate ‘goes', and so forth. There is no contextual reason why we should not accept the authority of the commentator and regard this verb as yet another synonym describing the progress of the liquid during the course of its preparation.

The first manifestation of the regional cultures of India as we know them today was, in most cases, the literature produced by the medieval bhakti (devotional) movements. Composed in the regional languages, the bhakti literature provides evidence of early forms of these languages. Further, by its very existence, it marks the genesis of pride in the languages, of acceptance of them as appropriate vehicles for literary expression. Often addressed to local or regional deities (who are sometimes identified as local manifestations of gods worshipped throughout India), this literature clearly served to articulate and focus regional devotion to such deities. In addition, it is also possible that the bhakti literature provides evidence of the process by which people began to think of the regions as regions (i.e., their genesis as cognitive regions), began to identify themselves as belonging to the regions, and began to take pride, not just in the languages or deities of the regions, but in the regions themselves. This is the process which led ultimately, in very recent times, to the formation of the states of modern India.

When Kipling published that aptly-named poem ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’ in 1886 his use of the term ‘jezail’ was no more literary device, for the tribesmen of the north-western borderlands were then armed with locally made, muzzle-loading, smooth-bore muskets. A decade later a few European breech-loading rifles began to appear, and by 1907 the military intelligence department estimated that over a quarter of those tribesmen had acquired a modern weapon. It was the Government of India's wish to halt that flow of arms which led to a British naval blockade of the south-eastern coast of Persia from 1909, and the landing of troops in Makrāan during 1910 and 1911.

The famous British orientalist E. G. Browne, a physician by training, was interested in Turkish language and literataure long before he became Professor of Arabic at Cambridge. It was at Cambridge that he wrote most of the works in the field of Persian studies, which were to bring him recognition as an outstanding Iranologist. But Browne's sense of affinity with the Turks endured from the time of the Russian-Turkish war of 1877–78, when he was only 16, until the end of his life in 1926. In 1914 he wrote in his introduction to The press and poetry of modern Persia: ‘Curiously enough it was the Ottoman Turks, a people far less original and talented than either the Persians or the Arabs, who so far as the Near East is concerned, introduced the hitherto unknown ideas of ‘the Fatherland’ (watan), ‘the nation’ or ‘people’ (millat) and ‘liberty’ (hurriyyat) and who succeeded in giving to these old words this new and potent significance.’

The greatness of Tsong Khapa as a Mādhyamika philosopher lay in his daring originality (which, to the chagrin of his opponents, he traced to a revelation from Mañjuśrī, the bodhisattva of wisdom) and his stress on human reason as an integral factor in the path to enlightenment, a stress which made him value above all a form of Madhyamaka which was systematically coherent. Tsong Khapa's interpretation of Madhyamaka ranges across the entire Madhyamaka corpus, organizes, clarifies obscurities and, above all, makes sense (which is not the same thing as saying that it is true). Madhyamaka thought can be difficult, and in the hands of a scholastic thinker whose temperament and outlook was akin, I suspect, to Aquinas, so Madhyamaka thought becomes extremely difficult. Tsong Khapa moulded Tibetan into a language of considerable philosophical subtlety and sophistication. His writings are renowned for their difficulty among Tibetans, and they are despairingly difficult to translate.

Taking them one by one, it is generally agreed that [] are the allophones of /w r j/ occurring only before nasal vowels. Ward (1952) noticed the nasalization of these approximants before nasal vowels but was rather confused by their orthographic forms. We have observed that all instances of [ɲ] occur when [j] is followed by a nasal vowel. This non-syllabic palatal nasal is therefore an allophone of /j/ and it is different from the syllabic one which is homorganic with the following consonant. Examples of this non-syllabic [ɲ] can be seen in the following words:

Written Tibetan (WT) is unusual among Sino-Tibetan (ST) languages in possessing a relatively complex verb morphology which contains—apart from distinctive ‘prefixes' for intransitive/transitive verb pairs, a phenomenon found elsewhere in ST—prefixes and suffixes for certain tenses as well as a morphologically significant ablaut system, none of which can be found, or at least, none of which are common in other ST languages. The simplest ways of dealing with the problem of the origin and development of this system in the light of comparative ST researches are, firstly, ignoring it, and secondly, coming up with ad hoc theories about its independent development, thereby not affecting the apparently stable edifice of ST in any way.

Outstanding amongst the scholastic compendia of jurisprudence produced in the fifth/eleventh century are the Muhadhdhab of the Shāfi 'ī scholar Abū Ishāq al-Shīrāzī (d. 476) and the Mabsūt of the Ḥanafī scholar Shams al-Dīn al-Sarakhsī (d. 483). These works encoded three centuries of juristic speculation while confirming and promoting the distinctive patterns of their respective law schools. Both scholars, Sarakhsī in Qarakhanid Trasoxania, and shīrāzī in Saljūq Baghdad, were involved in the politics of their day, but produced no political theory seeparate from their large-scale works of furū' which followed the traditional pattern of furū' literature, established as early as Mālik. The holistic approach to divine law was the conformity to type of Sarakhsī's and shīrāzī's works helped to ensure them the classical status they acquired in the developing law-schools, and in the curricula of madrasas. The Kitāb al-Aḥkām al-sulṭāniyya of Māwardī (d.450)was in contrast, to a great extent, innovatory in subject matter and in structure, if not in juristic methodology. The difference between writers like Sarakhsī, on the one hand, and Māwardī, on the other, is not however simply formal: it includes a nicely distinguished approach to political power. The nature of this distinction might be demonstrated under a number of discrete headings selected from furū' literature. This essay is concerned with Friday Prayer (FP), a ritual generally recognized as having in some degree a political aspect.

In the reserve collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum at Battersea is a grey granite slab bearing three and a half lines of inscription in Persian, with thirteen lines of Tamil characters cut rather irregularly on two vacant spaces at the bottom (pl. I). Excluding those parts of the stone which are obviously intended to be concealed within a wall surface, its dimensions are 38 cm. in height by 58 cm. in lenght; it is in excellent condition except for a small piece of spalling at the top right of the stone, which does not affect the inscription.

Surely no one involved with comparative Dravidian, or Altaic, or Elamite, or even simply with historical linguistics in general, would question the exhortations to linguistic virtue laid down by K. V. Zvelebil (BSOAS, XLVIII, 1, 1985, 116–20): every scholar in the world who is interested in these questions at all will agree that, touching upon the genetic affiliation of Tamil and Japanese, ‘hypotheses have emerged that deserve more careful and sympathetic attention’ (p. 116), and also that ‘it would be premature, sweepingly to dismiss … a hypothesis [of non-accidental connexion between Japanese and Tamil (Dravidian)] as impossible and fantastic’ (p. 117). But over and above these unexceptionable generalities, Zvelebil's note reflects his tacit assumption that the Japanese linguistic forms and English glosses in Ōno Susumu's Sound correspondences between Tamil and Japanese (Tokyo, 1980) are valid, and reliable as evidence for the comparativist. Unfortunately, this is not true.

Poetry has traditionally been the major vehicle of literary expression in Việt-Nam. It has also been the principal means for the presentation of educational, social, political and other information, hence one may say that among its purposes it was, and is, used for the exhortation of patriotic, nationalist spirit, the warning to outsiders of the seriousness of consequence if they intruded and, during periods of unwanted foreign presence or, even worse, of foreign dominance, it was used for the expression of all varieties of political opinion.

The economic state of Ṣafavid Persia has not been extensively studied and much of that which is known is deived from European sources, British, Dutch, and Russian in particular and to a lesser extent from the French, Venetian, Turkish, and Portuguese archives. There is no doubt that among the buildings of the Court at Iṣfahān there were one or more registries (daftarkhāna) in which archives were kept and documentation recorded on a systematic basis. There is internal evidence from royal correspondence to earlier exchanges of letters and in some cases later decrees are modelled on earlier ones. Unfortunately, economic information from Persian sources has scarcley survived and it has to be presumed from circumstantial evidence that following the occupation of Iṣfahān by the Afghans the archives were destroyed or burnt.

The rise and development of Persian poetry in Transoxiana and Khurāsān coincided with the growth in influence of the Turkish element in the Sãmãnid state. Although Turks had alredy been living in these regions at the time of the Arab conquest, it was under the Sāmānids especially that emerged into political and military prominence, having risen form the status of slaves to the highest ranks of power. In the fragmentary survivals of the Persian poetry of this period we not only find mention of Turks but even the occasional word of Turkish origin:

‘This cloud is like a crazed Turk, shooting arrows; the lightning his shafts, and the rainbow his bow.’

In Johnson's Standard Swahili-English dictionary (1939) the meaning of the verb-Shika is described as follows:

hold fast, take hold of, keep hold on, seize, grasp, keep. A common word with a wide range of application, e.g. (1) get hold on, press hard on, be on the mind, put in difficulties; (2) keep a hold on, persevere in; (3) hold to, keep to, observe, remember, attend to, obey; (4) determine, resolve, make up the mind to; (5) also as Intrans. have a hold, prevail, be urgent.