The history of Baghdad in the second half of the eleventh century is dominated by the name of the great Saljūqid minister, Niẓām al-Mulk, a name linked to an extensive network of institutions founded by him throughout the lands of the eastern caliphate: the Niẓāmīya colleges. Most widely known among them was the college in Baghdad, founded in 457/1065 and inaugurated in 459/1067. The renown of the Niẓāmīya of Baghdad, both in medieval oriental sources as well as in studies undertaken by modern Oriental and Western scholars, is such that it is the first institution likely to come to the mind of a person familiar with the period's history. Whenever historians have put their efforts into the field of Muslim education in the Middle Ages, whether in a general or specialized way, they have seldom failed to mention the fame of the college. Efforts have been made to establish the list of its professors and the most famous among its students; approximations have been made as to the date of its disappearance; investigations have been pursued to determine its exact location on Baghdad's east side; causes of its decline have been proposed; a whole treatise and other learned articles have been devoted to the history of this college alone.

IN a previous article, we noted that by the time of the death of Shāh Isma'īl I (19 Rajab 930/23 May 1524) it is possible to observe certain trends in the development of the principal offices of the Ṣafawid state. During the last decade of the reign of Isma'īl I, there had been a movement away from the theocratic form of government which obtained at the time of the establishment of the Ṣafawid state, and this was reflected in changes both in the scope and function and in the relative importance of the principal offices of state: there was a tendency to lay less emphasis on the paramount position of the wakīl as the vicegerent of the Shāh (wakīl-i nafs-i nafīs-i humāyūn), and to regard him rather as the head of the bureaucracy; there was a decline in the power of the ṣadr; and Isma'īl himself took steps to curb the power of the amīr al-umarā.

The following story occurs on folios 26r. to 33r. of a MS in the British Museum, catalogued ‘Codex Additional 24048’ in the handwritten List of Oriental MSS, Vol. iii (1854–66). There is another copy in the Staatsbibliothek, Munich, which was noticed long ago by Wilhelm Geiger, who edited and translated from it parts of the story given here in full.

THE two ceremonial speeches which are given below were recorded for me in 1956 by an old Samoan talking-chief (tūlāfale) in the village of Amanave on the island of Tutuila. The text is an edited transcription made from those tapes.

Both speeches form part of a house-building ceremony known in Tutuila as le usuga i le fale (the visitation of the house), which commemorates the building by a matai (head of a family group) of a round-house (fale tele). The fale tele is used mainly as a meeting place for the village council and for the entertainment of travelling parties (malaga) from other villages. It is an expensive undertaking to build such a house as it involves the employment of a master-carpenter (matai tufuga, or, ceremonially, agai-o-tupu) and members of his guild (?āiga), who must be entertained lavishly during the work and paid with cash and fine-mats at a later ceremony (le umusāga). A Samoan who builds his village a fale tele is making a major contribution to their prestige, and the usuga ceremony is held as a mark of gratitude and respect.

In his phonemic analysis of Lhasa Tibetan in Love songs of the sixth Dalai Lama Jaw Yuanrenn (Y. R. Chao) notices ‘variations’ of some of the phonemes, and ascribes some of these ‘variations’ to differences in tempo or to chance: of the phoneme that he writes as ‘e’ he says ‘ i, 10 3 khrel gzhung tş'ilcuῃtş'ilcuŋ’ [it may sometimes change to l, e.g. in song 10, line 3, khrel gzhung tş'cuῃ is pronounced tş'ilcuῃ]; of the phoneme ‘a’, ‘ә 1 2 lam buhi lamp'ø lәmpø’ [it may change to ә in rapid speech, e.g. in song 4, line 2, lam buhi lamp'ø is pronounced lәmpø]; and of the phoneme ‘o’, ‘u, 36 3 rlung po luŋpo luŋbu’ [it may occasionally be pronounced u, e.g. in song 36, line 3, rlung po luŋpo is pronounced lunbu]; but a phonological analysis of the speech of Rinzin Wangpo (rig-'dzin dbang-po) (R.), a Lhasa-dialect-speaking Tibetan, overwhelmingly suggests that vowel alternations such as these should be attributed to vowel harmony.

The Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies has recently acquired an autograph MS by Aḥmad 'Urābī al-Miṣrī, the leader of the Egyptian revolt of 1881–2.