A new edition of the astronomical compilation MUL.APIN follows closely upon the recent publication of two sections of the large compendium of Babylonian astronomical omens known as Enūma Anu Enlil. The text of MUL.APIN likewise includes a section of astronomical omens, as well as a catalogue of stars, including the ‘fixed’ (ziqpu) stars, and information regarding the planets, heliacal risings, the path of the moon, calendrical intercalations, and a shadow table and water clock. This modern edition is clearly presented nd well-translated, and includes notes on both the philology and astronomy of the text.

Since the beginnings of Neo-Aramaic studies in the second half of the last century, with the work of pioneers such as Stoddard (1855), Sachau (1865) and Noldeke (1868) in East-Neo-Syriac, Prym and Socin (1883) in West-Neo-Syriac (Tur ‘Abdln) and Parisot (1898–9) in West-Aramaic of Ma'lūla and related dialects, research in the field of Neo-Aramaic dialectology has never known such an intensive upsurge as there has been in the second half of this century. Although harsh religious persecution by the Muslims and other unendurable hardships, particularly in this century, exterminated a large proportion of the speakers of these dialects or drove them from their original sites to Russia, America, various European countries and even Australia, where their idioms are likely to die within the next few generations, the interest in their more or less modest remnants is increasing. It is as if Aramaists had finally responded to an earnest last-moment appeal and understood the need to save this linguistic heritage before it disappears totally. However, it is symptomatic that researchers trying to record a dying dialect in situ (Krotkoff, Aradhin in Iraqi Kurdistan 1959, published 1982; Jastrow, Hertevin in East Turkey 1970, published 1988) were unable to find more than a single reliable informant on the dialects of the villages of their respective research

If there has been one dominant, quasi-official theory for Turkish classicalmusic in the second half of the twentieth century, it is that particularlyassociated with Ezgi and Arel. Their notational conventions have becomestandard, supplanting earlier norms, and the framework they developed is theone still employed in recent general accounts of the modal system, whether thesimplified introductory survey of Yilmaz (1983), for example, or the moredetailed and comprehensive coverage of Ozkan (1984). Both of these follow theanalytical models provided by their predecessors, and begin with an expositionofintervals and the various species of tetrachord and pentachord formed from them before moving on to describe the structure of the makams themselves. Thesequence interval, scale, mode, nevertheless forms a conceptual continuum: theintervals denned are restricted to those deemed to occur in Turkish classicalmusic, and the nomenclature of the various species, for all that they appear asabstract assemblages of intervals, identifies them with characteristic segments ofwell-known and important makams.

Zoroaster is said to have lived in the sixth century B.C. This has been a tradition, within Zoroastrianism itself, for around two thousand years. Up until recently in the West its accuracy was widely considered an established fact.

Western scholars came across the evidence for this tradition in the nineteenth century. Many immediately gave it a warm reception. After all, such a late dating was far better suited to the forward-looking, evolutionary spirit of the times than the much earlier one that had been favoured up until then, but which risked losing sight of Zoroaster in a suspiciously distant past. Also, as well as sounding eminently reasonable it seemed to have the pedigree of a genuine Zoroastrian tradition.

The subject of the Indianization of the Indian languages has occupied the thoughts of scholars for more than a century. But during the last four decades it has become a field of intensive investigation. The study of the process of convergence in the Indie area began with a hesitant study of common lexical items in Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Munda. The initial conviction was that grammatical traits may not travel across genetic boundaries. However, scholars like Kuiper and Emeneau not only proved the contrary but also laid the foundation for future research on the ‘unexpected’ structural similarities among the above–mentioned three major language families of the Indian subcontinent.

Many Kharoṣṭhī documents have been unearthed from the buried cities in the shifting sands of the Taklamakan Desert in the last thirty years. I went to the south of the Desert and conducted an archaeological survey along the Silk Road in the summer of 1986. A Kharoṣṭhī wooden tablet happened to be on display in the Khotan Museum when I visited there, but no serial number had been given to the new document. It was allegedly collected by Mr. Li Xuehua, an officer of the Min Feng county, when he explored the way to the Niya site for the shooting of a television programme on the Silk Road in 1981. However, he did not leave any further information on the exact place where the tablet was found in the vast area of Niya.

The Chin-so liu-chu yin is a text of twenty-nine fascicles preserved in the Taoist canon in the form of a revelation to Chang Tao-ling, the late Han founder of the Taoist religion, to which comments by Li Ch‘un-feng (602–670) are attached. Though scholars have not so far addressed the question of the origins of the text itself, a certain willingness to accept the attribution of the commentary has already been made manifest. Yet to the eye of the expert in Sung Taoism this attribution raises serious doubts: text and commentary display features much more reminiscent of Sung religion than that of the early T'ang. It has already been noticed that Li Ch'un-feng provides information on the cult of the city gods (ch'eng-huang shen) and on Thunder magic; the former religious development may be traced back before the T‘ang but only achieved prominence towards the end of the dynasty, while the latter is unattested in T‘ang Taoist literature. One might add that Li displays a detailed knowledge of the legend of Hsü Sun in a developed form—again a cult v with early origins hardly noticed until the late T‘ang. The text also provides information (though separately) on the Buddhist warrior-king Vaisravana (P‘isha-men PI) and on the seventh-century warrior-hero Li Ching (571–649): these two figures were eventually to merge.

This paper is a contribution to the study of the relations between science and technology in seventeenth-century China. I hope that its unusual perspective may help to illuminate the problem of how these two areas of human activity relate to each other in a more general context. Outside the small group of interested scholars the relations between science and technology are not seen as problematical. In the popular stereotype, scientists are trie people who make discoveries, while technologists simply find out how to use what they have discovered. This crude view has some support from historical fact. Over the last hundred years there has undoubtedly been a steady flow of useful ideas from (for instance) the physicist to the engineer and from the biochemist to the agronomist.

In my review of John Burton's edition of the work on abrogation (naskh) in the Qur'ān and the sunna by Abu ‘Ubaid (d. 224/839) in BSOAS, LII, 2, 1989, 346–7, I mentioned the existence of a fragment of this text found in the Türk ve Islâm Eserleri Müzesi, Istanbul; neither Burton nor Fuat Sezgin in his facsimile edition of the Topkapi Ahmet III manuscript of the text (Frankfurt am Main, 1985), mention this fragment or clarify its status.

The fragment appears to have been discovered and identified by Janine Sourdel-Thomine and Dominique Sourdel; it is mentioned in their article, ‘Nouveaux documents sur l'histoire religieuse et sociale de Damas au moyen age’, Revue des études islamiques, 32, 1964, 16. Sezgin cites this article and the existence of the fragment of the text in GAS, vm, 85, item V.

In my critical edition of the Yuga Purāṇa chapter of the Gārgīya Jyotiṣa—a text most noted for its mention of the Yavanas and Śakas in India—I mentioned that there were four known manuscripts of the Gārgīya Jyotiṣa which I had been unable to consult at that time. I was recently able to rectify this situation and discovered as a result that two of those manuscripts do indeed contain the Yuga Purāṇa chapter (together with the entire Gārgīya Jyotiṣa) while the other two do not. The first of the complete manuscripts of the work is in the library of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, catalogued as No. 345 of 1879–80; I have called this manuscript E, and its readings are very similar to those of manuscript H (currently in BHU, Varanasi). The second is No. 1433 in the Itccharam Suryaram Desai collection of Bombay University Library; this I have called manuscript M, and it is closly linked with manuscript B (in Banaras Sanskrit University), even omitting with B some three lines of the work (71a–d and 72a–b).