The two Yemens are still that part of the Middle East which most vividly retains the manners and customs of ancient Arabia. The majestic mountain ridges, the barrenness of the desert, the torrid shores of the Red Sea, the proud Yemeni tribesmen with their traditional janbīya, the picturesque palaces and houses pitched on towering peaks, the lone columns of the temples of Saba' (Sheba) in forgotten sands, all this cannot fail to convey the image of timelessness, and, indeed, of Arabia's yesterworld. It does seem to many that the highlands (the central mountain ridge stretching from about 50 miles north of Aden far into Saudi Arabia) are the most stubbornly traditional part of Yemen.

In his pioneering article “The Patterning of Root Morphemes in Semitic” (1950), J. H. Greenberg tabulated the frequency of every possible pair of Arabic consonants in each possible position (I–II, I–III, II–III) over a total of 3775 triliteral verbal roots, alternative statistics, for positions I–II only, were presented by J. Kurytowicz (1973), who, unlike Greenberg, excluded weak roots (i.e. those containing semivowels or geminated consonants) and admitted denominative verbs in the simple stem. Tabulations for Hebrew were prepared by K. Koskinen (1964), who included nominal roots, and excluded weak roots. The analyses by these three scholars have won deserved renown, but still more patterns can be detected in the rich data. Despite the differences of approach, the data are used here without modification, so that the results can be readily verified.

The last two letters of Emperor Tewodros II of Ethiopia, which were among the most important he ever wrote, have long been a subject of speculation. They were dictated at his mountain fortress of Mäqdäla (Magdala) on April 11 and 12 1868, and despatched to Sir Robert Napier, leader of a British expeditionary force, immediately prior to its capture of the citadel and the Emperor's dramatic suicide on April 13.

The collections of oriental material in the Library of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine have been described in a previous issue of this journal. They include, among the Semitic language material, a few Syriac manuscript fragments which comprise nine leaves from the Ecclesiastical History of Socrates and a XlXth century letter.

The Ecclesiastical History of Socrates commences with the accession of Constantine in 306, following the cessation of Diocletian's persecution of Christians, and traces the history of the church through the reigns of the seven following eastern emperors, the seventh and final book covering the years of Theodosius the Younger (408–450) between his accession and his 17th consulate (439).

While I was conducting linguistic and ethnographic field research among the Pālu Kuṟumbas of the Nilgiri Hills, South India, in the spring of 1976, I managed – but not without some difficulty – to obtain a single mantra from one of my main informants. In general, the manduraga:ra-s or “black magicians”, the only persons in the tribe who know mantras and use them ritually, are extremely reluctant to reveal even a particle of their secret knowledge to outsiders. They fear that a magic formula or ritual loses its potency as soon as it is divulged to another person. Nevertheless, I pressed my informant Gïḍḍanu (born c. 1946), son of the headman of Toḍiki, who held the office of black magician, to communicate at least one mantra to me. It was only after long deliberation and hesitation that he finally consented to comply with my request.

In the Preface to the first edition of his essay On the Aborigines of India, B. H. Hodgson set out two main purposes of his research: to show when and why the pre-Aryan aboriginal population (“Tamulians”) were dispersed to their apparently scattered distribution; and to describe their “positive condition, moral and material” so as to show “the point of advancement which the aborigines have reached in thought and action”.

Tumshuqese is the name proposed by Emmerick, on the analogy of “Khotan: Khotanese”, for the language spoken in the region of Tumshuq, on the northern edge of the Tarim basin in the Xinjiang Uigur Autonomous Region of China. It is closely related to — though in many respects more archaic than — Khotanese, a Middle Iranian language (like Sogdian, Bactrian, Khwarezmian, Middle Persian and Parthian), the language of Khotan, a country and city on the southern border of the Tarim basin (see, e.g. Emmerick, 1979, 1–5).

The appearance of a new translation of the Itinerarium of William of Rubruck (1253–55) furnishes an opportunity to review the work done on this, possibly the most valuable of Western sources on the Mongols. By comparison with the mission of his fellow-Franciscan John of Plano Carpini some eight years before, that of Rubruck to the court of the Great Khan Möngke has been singularly unfortunate. An account of the earlier mission (the so-called “Tartar Relation”) was being drawn up in Poland even before Carpini had rejoined Innocent IV at Lyons, and at least two other variant recensions are known to exist, over and above the numerous manuscripts of the standard version. Rubruck's report, on the other hand, couched in the form of a long letter to St. Louis, languished for three and a half centuries before it was rescued around 1600 by Hakluyt; and there are only five manuscripts.