One of the interesting features of the Pahlavi Bundahišn, the great work on cosmogony and cosmology completed in the ninth century A.D., is the manner in which traditional, orthodox beliefs derived from the Zoroastrian scriptures appear side by side with later and even contemporary scientific opinions. While in some parts, notably the astronomical chapter II, the resulting incongruity is undisguised, in others there has been a conscious effort of syncretism. The astrological sections are a case in point.

The body of rules translated below was first discovered by a Park Ranger employed to restore the erstwhile gold-mining town of Barkerville, British Columbia, as an historical monument. Searching for authentic artefacts in an abandoned ‘Chinese Frėemason’ hall in the neighbouring town of Quesnel Forks, he came upon some tattered ceremonial robes, a Chinese book of codes and signs, and a board approximately 10 feet in length inscribed with Chinese characters. These (with some other items) were stored by the ranger at Barkerville, in a box marked ‘unidentified materials’, which was found by the authors in the summer of 1961, while carrying out field research on Chinese social organization in the Cariboo region of British Columbia. Mr. Ho identified the calligraphy on the board as a set of rules of the Chih-kung T'ang.

The ‘Song of Bagauda’ (WB) is apparently known to Joseph Greenberg, for he quotes two hemistichs from it in his article on Hausa prosody. He refers to the work briefly, among a list of unpublished Hausa poems as a ‘qaṣīda History of Kano’, but gives no further details of subject-matter or provenance.

The name of Aḥmad Bābā first became known to European scholarship through the articles of the French scholar M. A. Cherbonneau in the years 1854 and 1855. In 1857, when Heinrich Barth published his Travels and discoveries, Aḥmad Bābā achieved a spurious fame which lasted for over 40 years as the supposed author of the Ta'rīkh al-Sūdān. It was not until 1897 that the learned German's attribution was scornfully refuted by the French journalist Felix Dubois, in his Tombouctou la mystérieuse, and the work was correctly assigned to al-Sa'dī the Timbuctoo scholar who died in 1656. During the twentieth century the name of Aḥmad Bābā has frequently been mentioned by writers about the medieval Western Sudan, usually as the symbol of all that was finest in sub-Saharan Islamic learning in the Middle Ages.

The following paper does not set out to be a comprehensive comparison of tonal systems—it is rather an account of my own experiences with various methods, with special reference to tone-marking in dictionaries and vocabularies. For this reason a certain amount of biographical detail is inevitable.