This work is a truly splendid and remarkable achievement. It greatly enlarges and brings up to date the Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, 4 vols, 1975–8, edited by the late Michael Avi-Jonah and by Ephraim Stern, on whom the prophet's mantle has now fallen. It provides a detailed catalogue raisonne of all the archaeological excavations in the Holy Land. This is defined in a pragmatic way, that is to say, the ancient Palestine, and so modern Israel and Jordan, some parts of Lebanon and Syria under Israeli control, and a number of sites in the Sinai peninsula. Given that in Israel archaeology is a national hobby, and that numerous foreign agencies are likewise at work, British, French, German, Italian and United States as well as others, such an encyclopaedia can only mark a stage in Holy Land archaeology, for it is of its nature an on-going process.

Evidence about the ridda of Kinda is as mottled as it is for other events which Islamic historiography includes under the title of ridda. Tendentious writing and apologetics, contradictions and a complete lack of dates make the historian's task very hard indeed. Yet there is much that can be established (with varying degrees of probability) about those sanguinary events. Since no meaningful study of the short though eventful period of the ridda alone is possible, several related topics are also discussed below.

The number of Arabic papyri from the first two Islamic centuries that have been preserved is relatively small. Papyri from the third century A.H. are far more numerous and constitute the bulk of most collections. In this paper I publish an Arabic legal document from A.H. 77 (A.D. 707), which is in the Michaelides collection of papyri at Cambridge University Library. It is one of the earliest extant Arabic legal papyri. The document is a quittance (barā’a) drawn up by a certain Sa‘īd ibn Qays al-Dallālī to certify that Jamīla, the freedwoman of ’Umm Hunayda, is cleared of obligation to him after the payment of a sum of seven dīnārs. This sum was delivered as payment for a portion of a house.

dKor and sPu are twin villages, separated by a rivulet, situated on the right bank of the river Sutlej in Kinnaur. A stēle inscription in question was first noticed from dKor by A. H. Francke in 1909, and subsequently by Giuseppe Tucci, in 1933 (Fig. i). Unfortunately neither Francke nor Tucci translated it in extenso. Francke, however, has published its main contents and Tucci relied on Francke's translation. Fragmentary it may be, but it contains invaluable information about the activities of Ye-shes-'od, a well-known monk-king of Western Tibet (formerly of the Gu-ge kingdom). To our knowledge, this seems to be the only Tibetan inscription which can definitely be dated to Ye-shes-'od's times. Fortunately, it mentions a specific date, i.e. the dragon's year (‘brug gi lo). In the year A.D. 1042 his grand-nephew Byang-chub-'od indirectly recalls Ye-shes-'od's deeds in the very first line of an inscription at rTa-pho. Thus it runs: spre'u'i lo la sngon mes byang chub sons dpas/gtsug lag khang ‘di bzhengs … [before, in the monkey year this temple (vihāra) was constructed by the grandfather the bodhisattva]. It is quite clear that the grandfather referred to in the line is none other than Ye-shes-'od. Another inscription also at rTa-pho, belonging to a somewhat later period, again records his name along with Byang-chub-'od and Zhi-ba-'od.

The Huainanzi is a corporate work which was compiled at the court of the king of Huainan, being first presented to the imperial throne in 139 B.C., and possibly receiving certain additions between then and 122 B.C. For various reasons, however, the book did not meet with the same type of acclaim that had accompanied other texts. By the eleventh century at least, the comments of Xu Shen (c. 55–149) and Gao You (c. 168–212) had been fused together into a single set of notes. The book attracted the critical attention of Su Song (1020–1101), and then that of some of the most notable scholars of the Qing period, such as Wang Niansun (1744–1832), Huang Peilie (1763–1825) and Gu Guangqi (1776–1835). In the early days of western sinology the work evaded the attention of scholars such as Legge and Couvreur who necessarily followed the lead of their Chinese masters and fastened on what they regarded as the basic texts of traditional learning, i.e. mainly the classical texts and the Confucian teachers, and the Daode jing. It is only in the latter part of the twentieth century that western scholars have felt ready to examine, appraise and translate parts of the Huainanzi, and the results may be seen in the writings of Eva Kraft (1957–58), Benjamin Wallacker (1962), Roger Ames (1983), Charles Le Blanc (1985), Hal Roth (1992), Claude Larre (1993) and now John Major. Further research in the future will be immeasurably improved and brought to new standards thanks to the publication of the concordance to the text by D. C. Lau (1992).