“The Turks will take control of Kūfa in southern Iraq and the Khazars the province of al-Jazīra in northern Iraq” runs a popular ḥadīth of the early ‘Abbāsid Caliphate. The patently false attribution to the Prophet notwithstanding, this ḥadīth suggests that the Khazars, a militarised semi-nomadic Turkic people securely established in their Khaganate north of the Caucasus Mountains, loomed menacing and large in the imagination – and fears – of their settled neighbours. This is hardly a surprise. The Khazars, who had emerged as the hegemonic regional power after the fragmentation of the Gök Turk Empire, had grown rich as intermediaries in a north-south trading network, and from the tributes derived from their 25 subject peoples. They employed a centralised fiscal administration which allowed them to maintain a standing army of at least ten thousand, whose ranks could probably swell two-or-three-fold with the retinues of their notables and contributions from their subject tribes, and were ensconced within a network of fortifications that provided them with a degree of internal stability and potential for aggressive campaigning highly unusual within other steppe polities.

This paper presents a new interpretation of the story of Sāvitrī as presented in the Mahābhārata. Sāvitrī is viewed as an intended putrikā, or lineal daughter, for her father, and the death of her husband and the misfortunes of her father-in-law are explained as corollaries of this circumstance; but at the last minute Sāvitrī switches her allegiance to her husband and his line, becoming a pativratā rather than a putrikā. Following a prompt in the Mahābhārata text, the paper concludes with an exploration, on the Sāvitrī model, of Draupadī's relationship to the Pāṇḍava line. The death of the Draupadeyas and the resuscitation of Parikṣit are viewed in terms of a symbolic switch from the putrikā to the pativratā mode of operation.

This paper considers the fact that many verbal Chinese idioms are defined in recent Chinese-English dictionaries with misleading parts of speech — they are generally described only as being nouns. This situation originates in the 1978 Hàn-Yīng cídiǎn 汉英词典 of Wú Jǐngróng 吴景荣, whose definitions have exerted overwhelming influence on the field since then. We document Wú's principal sources and the viewpoints that motivated him, including the heavy political pressure to which his lexicographic team were subjected in the late Cultural Revolution. In addition, we consider Wú's anomalous misreading of the purpose of the influential Giles and Mathews dictionaries, which had been to document the many senses of each character with multi-character words, rather than to document multi-character words per se.