The Islamic system of succession is destructive of family property in that it causes its division among a great number of heirs and into uneconomic units. Succession involves a great number of participants; qur'ānic and agnatic heirs participate simultaneously (not successively)—subject, of course, to the rules of priorities and exclusions—and this increases the fragmentation of the property and the shrinking of the shares of the participants ad infinitum. Islamic law does not know the principle of primogeniture. Succession is not limited to direct descendants but includes relatives of different parentelas and different degrees of kinship to the deceased.

Shaykh Khaḍir al-Mihrānī, the Ṣ؛fī guide and soothsayer of the Maml؛k sultan al-Ẓāhir Baybars (regn. 658–76/1260–77), was the subject of an article by Louis Pouzet, ‘Haḍir ibn Abî Bakr al-Mihrānî’ (Bulletin d'Études Orientales, XXX, 1978, 173–83), which is based almost entirely on the account of Shaykh Khaḍir in al-Nahj al-sadīd by the Coptic chronicler al-Mufaḍḍal b. Abi'l-Faḍā'il. Pouzet was apparently unaware that an almost identical account of Shaykh Khaḍir appears in the eighth volume of Ibn al-Dawādārī's Kanz al-durar wa-jāmi' al-ghurara. The editor of this volume, Ulrich Haarmann, discusses at length in his introduciton (pp.24–9) the relationship between the works of Ibn al-Dawādārī and Ibn Abi'l-Faḍā'il, and demonstrates that they drew independently on a source derived at one or two removes form the still largely unpublished Ḥawādith al-zamān of the Syrian chronicler al-Jazarī (658–739/1260–1338). Since Ibn al-Dawādārī completed this volume, according to the colophon, in 734/1334, while the unique (and probably autography) MS of al-Nahj al-sadīd is dated 759/1358, the version in Kanz al-durar may reasonably be assumed to be the older. A collation of the two versions, however reveals that they agree almost entirely, both verbally and in content. Two points of detail regarding Blochet's edition and translation of Ibn Abi'l-Faḍā'il, as used by Pouzet, may be noted in passing. Blochet, p. 459, line 2, reads kanīsat al-fuh؛d (tr. ‘l'église des Panthères’), a textual error for kanīsat al-Yah؛d, Șthe synagogue of the Jews’. Pouzet here tacitly corrects his source (p. 178). On the other hand, he accepts Blochet's curious rendering of bābā as ‘intendant’ (Pouzet, pp. 174–5 and n. 9), whereas it is surely obvious from the context that it has here, as often, a dervish connotation.

The appearance of Sir Harold Bailey's Dictionary of Khotan Saka brings to completion a project conceived as long ago as 1934 and initiated in 1945 with the publication ofKhotanese texts, I. The next two decades saw the appearance of five further volumes of texts (Khotanese Buddhist texts, 1951, and Khotanese texts, II–v, 1954–63) as well as of a much-admired volume of lexical commentary, Khotanese texts, VI: Prolexis to the Book of Zambasta (1967). In style and method the Dictionary closely resembles the Prolexis, demonstrating once again its author's extraordinary erudition and ingenuity, this time on a truly monumental scale.

For many years after its publication in 1912 Berthold Laufer's book Jade: a study in Chinese archaeologh and religion remained a standard reference work for Western scholars. In his third chapter Laufer discusses certain three-lobed jade discs (pl. I); he is in general agreement with the theories of the late-nineteenth-century Chinese scholar Wu Ta-ch'eng , who named the discs hsüan chi and suggested that they were originally intended to be used for astronomical purposes. After Laufer the discussion was taken up by other writers on jade, and was carried a stage further in a series of papers by Henri Michel, beginning in 1947, in which he presented a considerable amount of literary and scientific evidence in support of his interpretation of the astronomical purpose of the discs. Michel's theories were lent additional weight and given a wide circulation by their inclusion in Joseph Needham's survey of Chinese astronomy. Since Michel, those writers who have doubted the astronomical connexions of the discs have nevertheless tended to retain the name huüan chi, which now seems to have become established as the standard term for this particular jade form on museum labels and in archaeological reports in China as well as in the West.

Zimbabwean Ndebele and Zulu might be likened, in a very broad sense, to American English and British English, in their relationship. Mzilikazi and his few followers left Zululand in 1822, and in the 1840s founded a new nation, over 1,000 km. to the north. There are certain differences in pronunciation and tone. Divergence is likely to have been bilateral: while Ndebele shows clear signs of non-Zulu influence in certain respects, Zulu on the other hand is probably not quite the same today as it was in 1822

In current Tibetan Nepal is Bal-po, Bal-po'i yul or Bal-yul. Bal-yul is found in early MSS from Tun-huang: in Choix de documents tibétains conservés à la Bibliothéque Nationals, Pelliot Tibétain (Pell T.), no. 44, mentions Padmasambhava in Bal-yul which may reasonably be seen as Nepal; Bal-yul is named also in Pell T. 1040 and 1285 in an apparently mythical setting Bal-po meaning Nepal appears in the Tibetan Annals in Documents de Touenhouang relatifs à I'histoire du Tibet by Bacot, Thomas and Toussaint (DTH), p. 13, 1. 2, and also, in my opinion, on p. 19, 1. 23. But in other instances, of which there are fourteen between the years A.D. 600 and 723, Professor Tucci considers the identification untenable because of the improbability that Tibetans, who liked to spend the summer and to hunt in high cool places, would choose to spend that time of year in Nepal (Minor Buddhist texts, II, 34, 35). That argument assumes that Bal-po implied only the valley of Kathmandu, but Hsuan Tsang, travelling about A.D. 630, attributed a much larger area—4,000 li—to Nepal and one specific place name in Bal-po—'Bri-'u-tang— mentioned in the years 699 and 725 appears to have been in reach of Zhangzhung which is generally held to be in Western Tibet around Lake Manasarowar. The possibility that all references to Bal-po are to Nepal cannot, therefore, be dismissed too readily.