Unfortunately very little is known about the life and personality of the author of the Kitâb al-muḥabbar. Abû Ja‘far Muḥammad b. Ḥabîb, al-Hâshimî al-Baghdâdî as he is usually called, was a mawlâ of the family of Muḥammad b. 'Abbâs b. Muḥammad al-Hâshimi. Ḥabîb is stated to be the name of his mother, a freed woman of the Hâshimite family, his father's name being unknown. However, in the Fihrist and by Yâqût who quotes the Fihrist he is called Muḥammad b. Ḥabîb b. Umaiya b. 'Amr. The date and the place of his birth are equally unknown and the only date we know for certain is that of his death, which occurred in Sâmarrâa in the year a.h. 245 (a.d. 859/860) in the reign of al-Mutawakkil. All the sources agree about this date, some adding the month, Dhu'l-Ḥijja, and the day, namely the 23rd of this month.

The tablets published here for the first time belong to the British Museum and to the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. I am indebted to Mr. Sidney Smith for permission to publish the British Museum tablets and to Dr. L. Legrain for permission to publish the tablet in the Pennsylvania University Museum.

The most popular instrument of music with both the Arabs and the Persians during what we term the Middle Ages was the lute. It was to them what the lyre and cithara were to the Greeks of old. At the same time it was not an instrument of the people. It was the instrument of the professional musician and all music theory was made conformable to its technique.

In the 38th section of his Itqān the polygraph Suyūṭī furnishes a summary of a monograph called al-Muhadhdhab fī mā waqa‘a fi'l-Qur'ān min al-mu‘arrab, in which he dealt with the question whether the Qur'an contained any foreign words, and if so, to what language they belonged. The orthodox felt some difficulty about admitting the existence of such an element in the language of the Sacred Book, which claims to be in perspicuous Arabic; it was, however, difficult to maintain that the proper names which occur in the volume were all of Arabic origin, and certain other words have an obviously foreign appearance. Suyūtī himself compromises by admitting in such cases the foreign etymology, but maintaining that the words had received Arabic naturalization.

THE origin of this note is to be found in a passage in Mr. C. N. Parkinson's Trade in the Eastern Seas (Cambridge, 1937), where, in connection with the Portuguese enterprise in the East, the suggestion is made that Asiatic seamen were deterred from rounding the Cape by want of courage rather than technical equipment. The passage is as follows (p. 6).