The Mishnah, a philosophical treatise in the form of a law-code produced by sages of Judaism in the Land of Israel at c. A.D. 200, works out in acute detail a set of philosophical principles expressed in general principles in other writings of the same age. These principles emerge only in the medium of practical logic and applied reason, rather than in the philosophical idiom of abstraction and generalization. For example, principles of political economics familiar from Aristotle's writings make their appearance in sustained inquiries into such matters as the nature of profit or interest, the principles of distributive economics enforced in the markets, and profound speculation on the nature of true value. Along these same lines, as I shall show here, the interests of natural philosophy in questions of the physics of mixtures come to expression in the Mishnah's authorship's treatment of the problem of mixtures. True, the facts that require explanation take an odd and even egregious form. While Stoic physics asked about mixtures in the abstract, the Mishnah's authorities addressed the same questions in quite concrete terms, the one speaking of things in general, the other of meat and gravy, water, flour and dough. But the principles of physics that tell us how to differentiate one kind of mixture from another and how, therefore, to draw consequences from the different traits of things that fuse, affect one another in some ways but not in others, or are merely juxtaposed with no mutual affect, are not merely parallel; they are in fact identical.

In Muslim law one of the topics of dispute which is traced back to some of the earliest authorities, and which persists as a difference between the various madhhabs and sects, concerns the obligations owed by her former husband towards a wife who has been divorced. Schacht attempted a summary of the positions taken in the dispute together with an explanation for them:

The Medinese hold that the definitely divorced wife who is not pregnant, can claim from her former husband only lodging during her period of waiting {‘idda); the Iraqians give her also the right to board. The two doctrines are based on two variants of Koran lxv.6, the Medinese on the textus receptus, the Iraqian on the reading of Ibn Mas‘ūd. When the text of Ibn Mas'ūd was superseded in Iraq by the textus receptus during the reign of the Umaiyad caliph ‘Abdalmalik (A.H. 65–86), this basis of the Iraqian doctrine was forgotten, and Abū Ḥanīfa was reduced to justifying it by an arbitrary interpretation of the textus receptus and by a tradition from ‘Umar.

This study presents some new observations on selected features of the phonology and morphology of the Omani Arabic dialects, and attempts to place them in a peninsula-wide typological framework. The paper is based on the results of an analysis of tape-recorded conversational data gathered in more than thirty, mainly rural locations in northern Oman between 1985 and 1987. Most of the speakers were men and women aged 35 and above with little or no formal education who, if not retired, were engaged in traditional occupations such as farming, fishing, pottery and animal husbandry. Much of the data was gathered in the context of a study of the epidemiology of rheumatic diseases conducted on a random sample of 2,000 Omanis adults by my wife for the Omani Ministry of Health, during which the subjects were interviewed by me at length in their homes or places of work.

The importance of poetry as the chief aesthetic experience of the Arabs as well as the principal repository of materials on their life and thought had long been recognized by the Arab and, following them, non-Arab students of Arabic culture. The fact that all the technical terminologies of Arabic verse which were formalized in ‘ilm al- ‘aruḍ (Prosody) are derived from the components of the bedouin tent—a highly prized possession—indicates the significance of the art to the Arab mind. The pride of place enjoyed by poetry in Arabic literary thought derives primarily from the hieratic idiom associated with it, as well as from its structural coherence, which relies on the harmony of prosodic factors (al-‘awāmilal-‘arūūiyya) associated with poetic praxis.

The hill of Ramtek (21°.28´N, 79°.28´E), c. 45 km. NE of Nagpur (Maharashtra), merits special attention because it appears to be one of the very few places in India where an uninterrupted historical development from the fourth century A.D. to the present day can be investigated through a series of archaeological monuments which, although partly restored or built over in later periods, seem never to have been exposed to destructive and iconoclastic forces. From at least the fifth century onwards the hill, also known as Rāmagiri, Sindūragiri, or Tapamgiri (Tapogiri), served as a regional centre of religious activity and probably, also had a more secular function as an outstanding strategic base controlling the highway that connected, and still connects, the central and eastern part of the basin of the Ganges with the northern Deccan. This could possibly explain, at least in part, why the religious structures on top of the hill have attracted the attention and care of the rulers of the area from a very early date.

The book which passes under the name of Ho-kuan-tzu, ‘Master of the pheasant cap’, an otherwise unknown teacher supposedly of the third century B.C., expounds a variety of syncretism which roots the fa decreed by the ruler in a Yin-Yang cosmological scheme. It is remarkable for presenting no less than three contradictory programmes for ideal government, two of them described at length and ascribed to sage emperors missing in orthodox historiography; one is roughly classifiable as Legalist, one as Yin-Yang, the third as Taoist anarchist. It attracted little attention until recently because of lack of evidence as to its date. But with the discovery in 1973 of the Ma-wang-tui manuscripts of Laotzu it was noticed that the ‘Yellow Emperor’ documents attached to manuscript B are closely related to it; and Wu Kuang has since pointed out that the first two chapters observe the taboo on the personal name of the Ch'in First Emperor.

Some eight years ago, I wrote a degree thesis on the wars that took place during the reign of King Wu Ding , Shang dynasty, in which I made a comprehensive study of the military campaign inscriptions dated by most oracle-bone scholars to the first period. Since quite a number of these inscriptions were discovered in pit YH 127 at Yinxu , these formed a vital part of the sources for my study.