The many thousands of inscriptions conventionally classified under the headings of Dedanite, Lihyanite, Safaitic, and Thamudic, all share the characteristic of a definite article in the form h- or hn-. Pre-Islamic texts displaying the distinctively Arabic article al are a mere handful; among them, easily the most important is the funerary text of Umru' al-Qays at Nemara (RES 483). This very minuscule corpus has recently been enlarged by two inscriptions from Qaryat al-Faw (anciently Qaryat Dhāt Kāhil; near modern Sulayyil, on the trade route linking Nagrān with the eastern Arabian coast), publicized by Dr. Abdul Rahman al-Ansary in spring 1977 at the first International Symposium on Studies in the History of Arabia at Riyadh. These texts are particularly welcome in that they are written in fine monumental South Arabian script, and thus do not pose the acute problems of reading occasioned by the exceedingly ambiguous scripts of Nemara and the other northern texts.

It is well known that, according to Pliny, the originating terminal for caravans conveying frankincense from South Arabia to the Mediterranean was at Shabwa; and there has been much talk of an ‘incense road’ followed by those caravans. It is, however, very unlikely that there was any single ‘road’ invariably followed. More probably, there was a multiplicity of routes, any one of which might be chosen according to prevailing circumstances. One such route runs directly from Shabwa to the eastern end of the Wādī Jawf, across a gravel corridor bisecting the Sayhad sand-desert, surveyed by Philby in 1936. The possibility of this route has been disregarded mainly because of a widely prevalent but tendentious translation of Pliny's remark, ‘evehi non potest nisi per Gebbanitas’, as ‘[the frankincense] cannot be exported [from Shabwa] except through the land of the Gebbanites’, where the text says nothing about a ‘land’ but merely ‘by the Gebbanites’. Other possible routes are one skirting the southern edge of the sand-desert and passing through Tumna', and one reaching the upper Wādī Bayḥān by way of Nisab and the Wadi Markha. West of Bayhan, the passes of Nagd. Marqad and Mablaqa clearly represent alternative routes.

The studies of Sūra CXI 1 have not yet arrived at satisfactory results, hence the meaning of this sūra is still obscure. The present study tries to present a better basis for its understanding.

1. The date and background of the sῡra

Sūra CXI deals with Abū Lahab, whom all the Muslim sources identify as Muḥammad's paternal uncle, 'Abd al-'Uzzā b. 'Abd al-Muṭṭalib of the clan of Hāshim.

This paper, by means of original Bedouin documents relating to matters of personal status, attempts to disclose interaction between custom and sharī'a and to illuminate some of the mechanisms tending to complete the islamization of a tribal society in process of sedentarization. The Bedouin dealt with here are a group of tribes in the Jerusalem-Bethlehem region: al-Sawāhira (c. 6,000 persons now) east of Jerusalem, al-'Ubaydiyya (c. 5,500) east of Bayt Saḥūr, the 13 al-Ta'āmira tribes (c. 20,000) extending over a sector east of Bayt Saḥūr in the north to Bayt Fajjār in the south, and al-Rashā'ida (c. 500) south-east of Taqū'a. Most of these tribes originate from Ḥijaz and Najd. They appeared in the region in small groups from the sixteenth century and in time developed into tribes, while absorbing local fallāḥs. Their main numerical increase took place in the twentieth century.

By the treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of 1774, which marked a disastrous defeat of the Ottoman empire by Russia, the Russians were accorded the right to build a church in Istanbul, in the Galata quarter. The treaty further specified that the church was to be under the protection of the Russian minister, who could make representations concerning it to the Sublime Porte. This church, and the Russian right to protect it and to make representations about it, furnished much of the basis on which Russian governments, in later years, built a claim to a broader right to protect the Greek Orthodox Church, even the Greek Orthodox people, in the Sultan's domains. The claims were exaggerated, but since the church in Istanbul was to be ‘of the Greek ritual’, as article 14 of the treaty said, the connexion seemed logical. The Turkish text of the treaty, however, as Cevdet Pasa reproduces it in his history, makes no mention of a church ‘of the Greek ritual’. Instead, his article 14 specifies that this church is to be called the dusugrafa or dosografa church ().

Tibetan orthography looks phonetically challenging, to say the least; and one may well wonder whether such tongue-twisting combinations as the brj of brjes, the blt- of bltas, or the bst- of bstan ever did twist a Tibetan tongue, or whether the significance of these and other such orthographic forms might not have been morphophonemic in origin, with the letters r, l, and s in the syllable initial of forms such as these serving to associate these past-tense forms lexically with their corresponding present-tense forms; e.g. Viewed in relation to Tibetan orthography the past-tense forms of a class of verbs in the Golok dialect seem to support this hypothesis. Table 1, below, contains a number of examples of Golok verbs in their past-tense and present-tense forms to illustrate a type of phonological analysis suited to that view of the r syllable-initial unit in the Golok examples, and, indirectly, in the WT examples too (the symbols b and b will be accounted for in section (B) below).

In the autumn of 1977, sometime after my paper on salt production in Otoγ had been published, while searching for something of an entirely different nature, unexpectedly I discovered tucked away in a book from the library formerly belonging to the late Antoine Mostaert, another letter dealing with the same question of salt. It consists of one sheet of Chinese paper measuring 443 X 248 mm., with 25 lines of text: the copy of a letter of one of the ministers of the Banner of Otoγ addressed to another Banner functionary; the very last line evidently is not part of the letter but is a note whereby the addressee forwards this copy to somebody who remains unidentified, perhaps the resident priest of Boro-Balyasun; the church indeed had been involved in the salt negotiations and is also mentioned in the letter.

Among the philosophical schools of ancient China, the Nung-chia ‘School of the Tillers’ is the one of which we know least. The surviving information has been assembled by Feng Yu-lan , who identifies it as the one school which reflects the aspirations of the peasants. He finds only one recognizable spokesman, Hsü Hsing, the teacher of ‘the words of Shen-nung’ who came with his followers to settle in the small state of T‘eng , probably about 315 B.C. A disciple named Ch‘en Hsiang visited Mencius, and we have a report of the conversation from the Confucian point of view. Ch‘en Hsiang says of the Duke of T‘eng:

‘A worthy ruler feeds himself by ploughing side by side with the people, and rules while cooking his own meals. Now T‘eng on the contrary possesses granaries and treasuries, so the ruler is supporting himself by oppressing the people’.

3.0. The nominal system

The description of the nominal system will be divided into three sections, the first, two dealing with nouns and pronouns, and the last with categories of items which are dependent upon nouns.

The existence of M Sogd. prqyš- ‘to imprison’, past stem prkšṯ-, and the meaning of the associated B Sogd. noun prk'š ‘imprisonment’ were first established by Henning in 1936. Later he recognized also the equivalent Parth. verb prg'c- ‘to incarcerate’. For the alternation between š and č he compared NP āγōš: Parth. 'gwc (‘side’) and MP āgustan <*ākuštan: Sogd. ākōč-/ākuγd- (‘to suspend’), remarking that ‘the discrepancy is found only in syllables that begin with k- and is therefore probably due to assimilation or dissimilation’.

Since the publication of my review of To acquire wisdom by Julia Ching in BSOAS, XL, 2, 1977, 419–20, my attention has been drawn to the fact that the unusual number of printing errors cannot be laid at the door of the author but are, in fact, exclusively the fault of the printers. This has been acknowledged in writing by the publishers.