For too long study of ancient Near Eastern representational art and study of possibly related texts have been entirely separate disciplines, the one a branch of archaeology, the other of philology. This accounts for the very scanty results obtained and their frequently questionable character. In the case of Classical Greece and Rome art historians ordinarily command Greek and Latin so as to use written sources at first hand, but Near Eastern archaeologists have commonly been illiterate in their fields of study, while philologists often have limited knowledge of art and use that very amateurishly. Thus it is an occasion for rejoicing that a serious attempt has just been made on some very difficult material from Syria and Anatolia, and that one major break-through has resulted which opens up prospects of fuller understanding of certain aspects of ancient art. The author, E. Williams-Forte, is primarily an art historian with a speciality in ancient Near Eastern seals, and she has taken an interest in Ugaritic to be able to exploit that material. Her Columbia Ph.D. thesis: Mythic cycles: the iconography of the gods of water and weather in Syria and Anatolia during the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 2000–1600 B.C.) has not been published, but a lengthy article derived from parts of it has recently appeared. This starts from the tree and snake in the garden of Eden and investigates their possible Canaanite background. The original observation of major importance is that the storm god of Syria and Anatolia of the first half of the second millennium B.C., Anatolian Tarhunna, Syrian Hadad or Baal, Mesopotamian Adad, occasionally holds up a plant, branch or tree as a symbol.

The story of the exegesis of Q. 2: 106 cannot be told briefly, on account of the quite appaling degree of muddle which has bedevilled the Muslim discusions of this verse. The greatest imaginable confusion regins as the definition of the term naskh and as to its supposed meaning(s). For that reason, it may be convenient first to set out the following formulae which represent the classical theories of naksh. There are, in fact, two such theories.

Scholars conversant with the history of the Yogācāra/Vijñnavāda school are familiar with the names of Vasubandhu and his renowned commentator, Sthiramati; the Buddhist logicians Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, who are also associated with that school, are equally well known for their scholastic achievements. A later commentator important in both schools is Vinītadeva (c. 645–715), who has received a great deal of attention in recent years. No less than a dozen of his commentaries, most of them called ṭīkās, are preserved in Tibetan translation. Sylvain Levi's publication in 1925 of Sthiramati's Triṃśikāvijñaptibhāṣya first aroused scholarly interest in Vinītadeva's commentaries. The eminent buddhologist, Theodore Stcherbatsky, was probably the first scholar to study Vinītadeva's work in depth; Stcherbatsky utilized the Tibetan translation of Vinītadeva's Nyāyabinduṭīkā; in his pioneering translation of the Nyāyabindu which appeared in 1930 in his massive two-volume publication, Buddhist logic. The first complete translation of the Tibetan rendering of two of Vinītadeva's ṭīkās, namely, the Viṃśatikā-ṭikā and the Triṃśikā-ṭīkā. was undertaken by Yamaguchi Susumu and Nozawa Josho, respectively; this appeared in Japanese in 1953. More recently, in 1971, M. Gangopadhyaya published a Sanskrit reconstruction with English translation of Vinītadeva's Nyāyabindu-Ṡīkā. A still more recent work appears in the 1975 Ph.D. thesis of Dr. Leslie Kawamura of the University of Saskatchewan.

In ch.127 of the Shih chi, the chapter on the ‘Diviners’, we find a line cited from ch. 01 of the Lao tzu, Tao te ching as follows: ‘the nameless is the beginning of the myriad creatures’. As nearly everyone who has any familiarity with the text will recognize, this is a variation from the line as it is now konwn from the Lao tzu text itself, where we have ‘the nameless, the beginning of Heaven and Earth ’, and the Shih chi has been looked upon as the purveyor of sloppy and careless scholarship for nearly tow millennia. With the discovery about ten years ago of the Ma wang tui (abbreviated MWT) silk manuscripts of the Lao tzu dating from around 200 B.C. we are able to see that thisShih chi rendering of the line was neither sloppy nor careless, because in fact it matches in its essential features the MWT version, both the A and B manuscripts of which have Given the evidence of the MWT MSS coupled with the Shih chi form of the line we are inclined to suppose that this was the prevalent Han version of the text, and that the form with the instead of is a later innovation. I will not go into the philosophical significance of the substitution of the former for the latter here, save to say that it is clear that the scope of ch. 01 with ‘myriad creatures’ in this line is restricted to considerations of the terrestrial domain alone, whereas the introduction of the expression ‘Heaven and Earth’ expande the scope to matters terrestrial and celestial both, and the relation between the two. This is a shift of no small consequence and deserves the attention of scholars well versed in the details of Han and Weichin speculative thought.

The Grand Council (Chün-chi ch'u ) of the Ch'ing dynasty was an efficient, autocratic institution. It operated under direct imperial supervision, outside the regular administrative channels, performing its function in swift and confidential ways. Its operations enabled the Ch'ing rulers to expand their powers, strengthen their control and, most important, perpetuate their autocratic rules. Because of its versatile performance, the Grand Council enjoyed the monarch's trust, and a long existance.

Voici une dizaine d'années encore, bien peu de travaux avaient été consacrés à la poésie en Mauritanie ou du moins au ġne, la poésie en dialecte hassāniyya. Nous n'avons toujours pas I'équivalent pour le ġne du fameux al-Wasīt que le mauritanien Sid Ahmed Ould Alamīn publia en Egypte au début du siècle et qui comporte une anthologie du ši'r, la poésie mauritanienne en arabe classique. Cependant, ces dernières années, beaucoup de poésies dialectales ont été recueillies et transcrites, quelques-unes sont publiées, d'autres devraient I'être ou ont fait I'objet de mémoires À I'École Normale Supérieure de Nouakchott (cf. bibliographic).

‘Notre siècle a donné naissance, sous le nom de “romans”, à des ceuvres qui sont des monstres sacrés, et qui dépassent le roman en tant que genre’. R. M. Albérès, Metamorphoses du roman, Paris, 1966, 244–5.