A new volume of literary texts from Nimrud has been in gestation for a very long time. Tablets were first found in Max Mallowan's excavations at Nimrud in 1949, with many more tablets found in subsequent seasons. In 1963 the decision was made to publish all the literary tablets from the Nabû Temple in hand copy, and this effort has finally culminated in the form of Literary texts from the Nabû temple, edited by J. A. Black and D. J. Wiseman (Cuneiform Texts from Nimrud 4, 1998). As is so often the case with the publication of new literary texts, these copies often solve many problems and create just as many new ones for editors of texts; many of the copies could benefit from collation. Furthermore, the catalogue describing the tablets is extremely sparse, and much more could have been done by the editors to identify the tablets and note published duplicates. Nevertheless, the volume makes a valuable contribution to the field of Assyriology by publishing a large number of literary texts in cuneiform copy.

Among revisionist works on the so-called ‘Abbāsid Revolution, which argue for an Arab ethnic character of the constituency of the revolution, M. A. Shaban's stands out as the most influential. Shaban's methodology and conclusions have been generally and specifically criticized. Patricia Crone aptly remarks: ‘Shaba's imaginative efforts are visible on every page [of] his books’; and, Elton Daniel, in his critique of Shaban's interpretation of the word taqādum, perceptively comments: ‘Instead of basing his theory on the meaning of the word, he seems to have simply invented a meaning on the basis of his theory.’ To these ‘imaginative efforts’ and ‘inventions’ also belongs Shaban's treatment of the source material on the ‘Battle of the Pass’ and its aftermath.

The higher-order subgrouping of Tibeto-Burman has been recently up for debate. The modern era of TB/Sino-Tibetan subgrouping began with Benedict 1972 (henceforth /STC), where that great comparativist refrained from offering a Stammbaum of the conventional type, leaving several individual languages and language groups unclassified, and placing Jingpho at the centre of diversity of the whole vast TB family (see Fig. 1.) Despite several peculiarities, notably the special position accorded Karenic and the lack of information on Baic (then called ‘Minjia’) or Qiangic, this scheme showed a healthily agnostic approach.

Although in Chinese culture surgery has not usually been seen as a major part of medical practice, during the Sui (A.D. 581–618) and the Tang dynasties (A.D. 618–907) it showed a marked flowering in the field of ophthalmology. There are indications that it was closely related to Indian medical and surgical ideas which were transmitted to China. The evidence is found in historical records, popular literature and also in medical works and compilations. Interestingly, the origins of this transmission are seen in Chinese Buddhist canonical literature which emerged during the introduction of Buddhism into China in the late Han period (A.D. 25–220) and the mutual contacts which followed immediately thereafter.

A passion for card games, like a delight in drinking tea, is something which nowadays unites China with the rest of the world; and, as with tea drinking, many have surmised that the pastime of playing cards arose in China and spread westwards. I begin this study with a consideration of the rules of card games, and suggest that the rules themselves may offer, in some cases, evidence of transmission from East to West. To those interested in past cultural contacts, this suggestion in itself illustrates the value of trying to reconstruct the regulations of early games long forgotten, quite apart from the value of such research to sinologists. But it is not just the rules of play which need to be considered in such a context. The format of the playing card as a physical object that is small, portable and suited to mass production has prompted the thought that cards may have been one of the easiest samples of Chinese printing technique to pass between East and West. For this reason, the main focus of my study in reconstruction is on a pastime, the yezi xi (game of leaves), which dates to about the same time as our earliest sources on the origins of printing, but which eventually died out, to be superseded by other amusements. Are the surviving materials sufficient to confirm or deny existing speculations about its form? And if this was not a card game, when precisely did such games develop? But before considering such sinological questions, let us start closer to home.

In terms of numbers of speakers, Wolaytta (hereafter to be referred to by the abbreviation ‘W’) is by far and away the most important variety of the Ometo linguistic cluster. According to Ethnologue: languages of the world (Grimes (ed.), 1996), there are two million mother-tongue speakers of the variety, and this number would have to be augmented by large numbers of speakers of other Ometo tongues who have some degree of second language command of W. It is surprising, therefore, how little scholarly attention has been focused on it. The present work goes some way towards rectifying the situation. The earlier literature (Cerulli, 1929; Chiomio, 1938; Padri Missionari, 1969; Ohman et al., 1976) represents a decidedly scanty resource for solid information on W grammar, and in their introductory review (13–14) Lamberti and Sottile (hereafter abbreviated to ‘L&S’) dispose of it in summary fashion, though it does appear that they draw rather more heavily on these sources for their account of cultural matters (15–19). One other work that L&S refer to in their introduction is the doctoral dissertation by Adams (1983), but one must assume that they had no access to it since, subsequently, it is never cited, and this is very unfortunate as in the present reviewer's opinion Adams's description of W is still the best available—but of this more will be discussed later.

In February 1999 I published a review article in the Bulletin (62/1) pointing to the difficulties encountered in trying to confirm the derivation of the Latin term ‘ Confucius’ from its supposed Chinese original, ‘ Kong Fuzi’. Briefly, the only general lexicographer to cite the Chinese term from premodern materials, Morohashi Tetsuji, does no more than quote a memorial inscription from the early nineteenth century, long after the Jesuit coinage of the Latin term, for a Mongol period figure from amongst the descendants of Confucius. Other earlier sources on this figure do not confirm the usage ‘ Kong Fuzi’ in his memorial materials, but only the more usual‘ Kong Zi’. Consequently, my own speculation was that ‘ Kong Fuzi’ could have represented a deliberate barbarism on the part of the nineteenth-century author, Cai Jinquan. The expression ‘Kong Fuzi’, therefore, remained unattested before the Jesuits, raising the suspicion that it might even be a back-formation from Latin rather than genuinely Chinese.