This article, the third in a series, focuses on the “living” preverbs used in the verbal system of contemporary Pashto. The verbs treated here belong to the “compound verbs with preverb” class or to the “mixed verbs with preverb” class: verbs that replace the wə́- of the simple verbs with another preverb. This class of verbs represents a closed set, and a complete list of these verbs can be investigated systematically and exhaustively. This subject is as yet unexamined and its implications for the interpretation of contemporary Pashto verbal morphology are particularly stimulating.

On the basis of textual scrutiny and intertextual comparisons, this study highlights that Vādidevasūri's attribution of a quotation to the Cārvāka/Lokāyata philosopher Udbhaṭabhaṭṭa in the Syādvādaratnākara is, in fact, part of a broader passage sourced from Arcaṭa's Hetubinduṭīkā and, consequently, its expungement from the corpus of source material attributed to the Cārvāka/Lokāyata authors is suggested.

This article opens with a mystery: why was Zizang 子臧 assassinated in the seventh century bce, and why was his assassination justified in the Zuozhuan by his fondness of snipe-feather caps? It is well established that feathers were a common item of clothing in early and medieval China, used to confer status, to flaunt wealth, to embellish rituals. This article argues that there may also have been accompanying beliefs surrounding their use; beliefs that feathers might bestow upon the wearer certain imagined characteristics of the birds from which they came. It uses case studies of soldiers and their relationship to brown-eared pheasants, dancers and their relationship to long-tailed pheasants, and immortals and their relationship to cranes and egrets. Finally, it returns to Zizang's snipe-feather cap, and suggests reasons for his fate.

The Thamudic D script is only partially deciphered. This article attempts to advance our understanding of the script by identifying all the Thamudic D glyphs and their phonemic values with varying degrees of certainty. It also discusses the major writing formulae associated with this script type and offers a few notes on the language it inscribes.

The past decade has seen an increase in attention to Tangut, an extinct Sino-Tibetan language spoken by the rulers of the Western Xia xīxià 西夏 empire. The question of its classification has become a subject of discussion especially since the documentation of its closest relatives came to light recently. The present paper builds on the study of the Tangut verb template by Jacques (2011) to question the place of Tangut with regard to the Horpa languages (Beaudouin 2023b). By doing so, it identifies a phenomenon of attraction encompassing synchronic and diachronic analysis and proposes that verbal templatic morphology in West Gyalrongic is nuclear.

This paper proposes new origins for tense vowels in Tangut by integrating textual analysis of Tangut texts with comparative data from both Gyalrongic and other Sino-Tibetan languages. It uncovers two previously unreported sources of vowel tensing in compounding: the collective prefix (*S-) and the compound linker (*-S-). Both morphemes left only a few traces, indicating their antiquity and productivity in earlier stages. The collective *S- could be an inherited morpheme which finds parallels in Tibetan, whereas the compound linker *-S- emerged as a stage of morphological merging in West Gyalrongic with (an) obscure origin(s). These findings not only advance our understanding of the origins of Tangut tense vowels but also offer insights into Sino-Tibetan nominal morphology.

In 1206 Chinggis Khan replaced the warring factions of Mongolia with a single polity, the Great Mongol Realm (Yeke Mongqol Ulus). The ulus was ruled by a khan, who allocated pastures, households and revenues to his relatives as shares (qubi). Chinggis granted the first allocation to his brothers and senior sons in 1207 but many more redistributions took place in the coming decades. Many of these appanages grew so large that their holders challenged the khan's dominance and even broke free of his control to form their own polities (uluses). This article will explore the fluidity of the Mongol appanage system by taking the qubi of Chinggis Khan's grandson Ariq Böke (d. 1266) as a case study. The Ariq Bökids established their own secondary ulus in Inner Asia, before fragmenting and lending their support to neighbouring khans in the fourteenth century.

This article presents the first complete biography in English of the early hadith critic al-Jūzjānī (d. 259/873?), in addition to a thorough analysis of his work Aḥwāl al-rijāl, the earliest Syngramma dedicated to the genre of al-jarḥ wa-l-taʿdīl. Through a detailed examination of al-Jūzjānī's engagement with the opinions of earlier hadith critics, his use of the terms of hadith criticism and his own remarks, this article delineates his conception of the function of hadith, methodological framework and approach to the appraisal of hadith transmitters, arguing that al-Jūzjānī may have been the first and only hadith scholar to methodically incorporate the consideration of transmitters’ conformity to the “correct” doctrines in hadith criticism. His methodological innovation, however, departs from existing convention among ahl al-ḥadīth. As a result, although al-Jūzjānī's authority as a hadith critic was well recognized, his approach failed to appeal to succeeding contributors to hadith criticism.

This paper examines the naming episode in the Quran's Adam story, in which God teaches Adam “the names, all of them”, to counter the angels' objection to the creation of the human creature on the basis that he will “spread corruption … and will shed blood”. I try to show that the traditional understanding of this narrative in Western scholarship, which connects it ultimately to the Genesis 2 episode in which Adam names all the creatures of the land and sky, fails to do justice to a close reading of the quranic text itself. Instead, I argue for an alternative reading of the passage already suggested by early Muslim exegetes, in which God's teaching Adam the “names” refers to Adam being introduced to his future offspring. This, in turn, is central to the Quran's engagement with the problem of theodicy.

This paper focuses on a group of Old Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang that are currently in the Stein and Pelliot Collections, some of which will be reordered and reunited. These texts were previously believed to concern the offering to the seven Tathāgatas or the texts about the former aspirations of the seven Buddhas. However, as my study shows, they actually pertain to liturgies for the seven Tathāgatas including Bhaiṣajyaguru. Based on earlier studies, this research seeks to establish a stronger connection between “pre-canonical” texts and canonical works in Tibetan and Chinese, and to establish a hitherto unknown link in the chain of the textual transmission of this liturgy. After revealing the structure of the liturgy, it seeks to fill the gap between the Bhaiṣajyaguru-sūtra itself and the religious practices of worshipping the seven Tathāgatas including Bhaiṣajyaguru. These are done through a two-dimensional textual analysis, i.e.: 1) identifying the connection between the Old Tibetan materials and the Tibetan canonical version; and 2) analysing the process of the liturgicalization of the sūtra.

The Anda manuscript and Haihun slips have revealed that there were several different stanza permutations for poems in the “Guo feng” 國風 in early China. As most repetitive stanzas are essentially nonlinear, there is no intrinsic sequence for many poems. Rather than finding a “superior” stanza order, I would like to consider how the various stanza orders might challenge traditional interpretations of references to stanza numbers in the Zuozhuan 左傳 and the hermeneutical rule of “orderly progression” in the Shijing. Just as establishing the order of stanzas took a long time, the development of this rule was gradual. The belief in there being an unalterable stanza order not only influences how rhymes are interpreted but also shapes how lines and verses are annotated. Therefore, reconsidering the theory of orderly progression is a step towards re-evaluating the tradition of Shijing interpretation.

Maura Dykstra's 2022 monograph Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State (Harvard Asia Center, 2022) has attracted controversy in the academic community. This paper analyses the book's use of documents from the Ba County Archive, held in the SIchuan Provincial Archive. While reviewing the monograph's arguments drawn from these materials, the paper also introduces the Ba Archives and the methodologies that may be employed to interpret them.