Although numerous Akkadian words and phrases referring to the anatomy of the human body have been discussed previously, many gaps still remain in our knowledge of this subject. A few of these still unidentified Akkadian words are discussed in this article, and tentative interpretations are supplied for them.

The first season of excavations at the medieval Islamic site of Ghubayrā in Kirmān Province took place between late March and the end of May 1971. The excavations were made possible by the kind permission of the Ministry of Art and Culture, and the Iranian Archaeological and Folkloric Services. The excavators record their sincere gratitude to H.E. Mr. Mehrdad Pahlbod, Minister of Art and Culture, and to Mr. A. Pourmand, Director-General of the Iranian Archaeological and Folkloric Services; to Mr. Khurramābādī and Dr. Na‘īmī of that service; and to Mr. Enayatullah Emirloo, who came to Ghubayrā as our Representative. We render thanks too to the local office of the Department of Ferhang va Honar at Kirmān, and especially to its Director, Mr. Mehdi Zamānī. To Mr. Muḥammad Sādeq Dānesh, District Commissioner of Bardsīr, our special acknowledgements are due for his constant thoughtfulness, and his readiness to give assistance in all moments of need.

The Ṛg-Vedic hymn X. 95, describing the story of Purūravas and Urvaśī is of considerable interest and obscurity. It has attracted the attention of priests and scholars alike from the days of the Brāhmaṇas, with the result that different versions of the story have come down to us with unrestricted freedom. Geldner has recorded eight sources of the story: (i) the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa; (ii) the Kaṭhakam; (iii) Ṣaḍguru-śiṣya's commentary on the Sarvānukramaṇī; (iv) the Harivaṃśa Purāṇa; (v) the Viṣṇu Purāṇa; (vi) the Bṛhaddevatā; (vii) the Kathāsaritsāgara; and (viii) the Mahābhārata. To the above a few more works, such as the Vāyu Purāṇa, the Mātsya Purāṇa, and the Rāmāyaṇa may be added to make the list more comprehensive. However, Kālidāsa made the story more popular through one of his finest plays, Vikramorvaśīyaṃ.

Professor A. B. Woodside's recent study of Vietnamese government and society in the first half of the nineteenth century is likely to become immediately a standard work for the teaching of South-East Asian history, as well as a point of departure for further research. It is the first attempt by a Western scholar to analyse the institutional developments of a period in which Viêt-Nam attained its greatest measure of “Confucianization” and also its greatest territorial extent as a unified country. The “Đại-Nam” of the later years of Minh-Mang (1820–41) included not only the whole of present-day Viêt-Nam, united for the first time in 1802, but also (after 1836) a large part of Cambodia as well as a portion of eastern Laos. The institutional changes of his reign included the reinvigoration of the examination system, the creation of new organs of central government, and a thorough overhaul of the machinery of provincial administration. In terms of its own previous history, it was by no means a weak or declining Viêt-Nam which found itself face to face with European power in the 1850's and 1860's. By offering a study of government and society in this period, Professor Woodside has gone some of the way towards filling a major gap in Western-language literature on Vietnamese history.