Every student of Rabbinic literature is aware of the formal argument known as qal va-ḥomer ‘the argument from the minor to the major’. There are numerous instances of the argument in Rabbinic literature, dating from pre-Tannaitic times down to the close of the Talmud. The argument runs: if A is so then B must surely be so; if the ‘minor’ has this or that property then the ‘major’ must undoubtedly have it. It is of interest to Old Testament scholars that the Rabbis purported to detect many examples of the use of this argument in Scripture. The Rabbis use the argument as one of their hermeneutical principles by means of which they expand and elaborate on the Biblical teachings. However, they rightly contend that they did not invent the argument but that it is found in the Bible itself. The purpose of this paper is to examine this contention more fully and to note possible implications for Old Testament studies.

The great majority of the Amharic letters which form the subject of this article are part of the papers left by the late Professor Eugen Mittwoch. Not all the letters published here were addressed to Mittwoch. A few were sent by their Ethiopian writers to members of the Rosen mission to Ethiopia in 1905 or to the German Chargé d'Affaires at Addis Ababa. They were later handed by their addressees to the man who represented Amharic studies in Germany at that time. Among those addressed to Mittwoch himself the letters by Həruy Waldä Səllase, the former Foreign Minister, and by Aläqa Tayyä, Mittwoch's informant and a minore figura in Amharic literature, are perhaps of the greatest interest. Nearly all the writers here represented have played some part in recent Ethiopian history, and their letters may therefore lay claim to some interest on those grounds alone.

Of the several commentaries on the Aṣṭasāhasrikā-prajñā-pāramitā-sūtra, the Abhisamayālaṅkāra-ālokā of Haribhadra (ninth century) and the Sāratamā of Ratnākaraśānti (eleventh century) are the only two works that have survived in the original Sanskrit. The Ālokā is well known through the editions of Tucci and Wogihara, and critical works in this field by Obermiller and Conze. The Sanskrit text of the Sāratamā is now awaiting publication in the Tibetan Sanskrit Works Series, Patna. It is based on two incomplete MSS photographed by the late Rāhula Sāṃkṛtyāyana in the year 1937 and preserved in the library of the Bihar Research Society, Patna.

The identification and assessment of his source materials are among the historian's most basic tasks. The purpose of the present discussion is to describe three versions of the Javanese chronicle called Babad tanah Djawi and to provide excerpts describing the familiar story of the fall of Madjapahit in order to show how the same story differs in these three versions. The texts will be compared with regard to date and origin, and their historical value will be considered. This is not an attempt to pronounce on the course of events surrounding the fall of Madjapahit, although scholars interested in that subject may find these texts to be of value. This is rather an attempt to identify and to compare these basic sources. In this consideration, the episode of Madjapahit's fall will be used as an example.

The Musabba'āt played an important part in the history of the Kordofan/Dār Fūr region in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This article attempts to define who they were and to examine the careers of three generations of Musabba'āt sultans, in particular that of the grandson, their most famous sultan, Hashim b. ‘Isāwī al-Musabba'āwī.

It is exactly 40 years ago that the Otani University, Kyoto, published its Comparative analytical catalogue of the Kanjur division of the Tibetan Tripitaka, edited in Peking during the K'ang-hsi era, this Kanjur division, together with the Tanjur division, being now available in reduced size as the Tibetan Tripitaka, Peking edition, edited by Daisetz T. Suzuki. Ever since that time it would have been possible to state that the Tibetan version of the Amoghapᾱśakalparᾱja (No. 365) has been listed as numbering 24 chapters (bam-po) as opposed to the 25 chapters of the Derge print, set out by the compiler on the same pages, together with references to the Chinese version (in vol. xx of the Taishō Tripitaka). It is easy to ascertain that the Narthang print (as well as the manuscript copy of the British Museum) also have 25 chapters. On the other hand the Cone print, though numbers of chapters are not indicated in Mibu's Comparative list, and the Mongolian Kanjur, as is evident from Professor Ligeti's catalogue, have only 24 chapters