I could not say much of the Mamalucs, of whom I know no author that has written in particular: neither did they deserve that any should. For they were a base sort of people, a Colluvies of slaves, the scum of all the East, who, having treacherously destroyed the Jobidae, their Masters, reigned in their stead; and bating that they finished the expulsion of the Western Christians out of the East (where they barbarously destroyed Tripoli, and Antioch, and several other Cities) they scarce did anything worthy to be recorded in History.

To show how great were the profits in the medieval Levant trade may seem like bringing coals to Newcastle. The accounts of the strenuous efforts made to discover the sea route to India bear witness to the Europeans’ desire to get a greater share of these riches. Anybody passing by the old palaces along the Grand Canal of Venice becomes aware of the riches accumulated in the trade of the Indian spices. However, it goes without saying that the margin of profit changed in the course of time. Certainly they were very great in the period of the Crusades, both on the Red Sea and in the Mediterranean. In a Judaeo-Arabic letter written in 1134 in Aden by Abū; Zikrī Kōhēn, one reads: ‘If you would have come this year (to Aden), there would have been no need to journey to India. Youngsters came who had never travelled before, who have no knowledge of selling and buying, and those (of them) who had a hundred earned another hundred…and if he were a Muslim—a hundred and fifty’. The riches of the Kārim merchants, who specialized in the spice trade on the Red Sea, were fabulous, if one can believe the Arabic chroniclers. Judging from the Geniza documents, one would be bound to conclude that the profits in the spice trade were much greater than in other branches of trade. But in the later Middle Ages, when it had become a wholesale trade conducted on regular lines, did it still yield returns much greater than other branches of trade and industry? And if this was indeed so, how can one explain the fact that the Levant traders succeeded in maintaining high prices for the Indian commodities destined for mass consumption?

Sacrifices of animals at the various stages in the construction of a house are already reported from the country of the Subbaihah, Daw'an, and Tarīm. Ibn al-Mujāwir even records in the Middle Ages that when a road was being built between Mafālīs and Ta'izz, about 425/1033–4 up a mountain pass (naqīl) with 360 bends (malwīy), a head of cattle (rās baqar) was slaughtered at each bend as a sacrifice (fidyah); he calls a bend f rkah.

The existence of a Chinese-Vietnamese vocabulary (i-yü) of the sixteenth century was first brought to the attention of Western scholars by E. Denison Ross in 1908, p. 692, in his discussion of the R. G. Morrison Collection manuscript entitled Ko-huo i-yü, then in the library of University College, London, and now held in the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Kemant is spoken in the districts of Kärkär and Čəlga, to the north and west of the town of Gondar in north-west Ethiopia. The type of Kemant described in this paper is that of Kärkär only, collected in Gondar itself and in and around Təkəl Dangay, a little to the north of Gondar. Kemant belongs to the Agaw group of Cushitic languages.2 The material for this paper was collected in the field during the winter of 1973–4. Several informants were used, but principally Taddäsä Zäwdu of Təkəl Dəngay and Gäbrä ∃gziabəher Alämu of Gondar. It is not possible here to give any accurate figure for the number of Kemant speakers. However, Kemant does appear to be under heavy pressure from Amharic, and all my informants were bilingual in both Amharic and Kemant.

The text presented below has been transcribed from a verbal account given by the Mntwana (Princess) Constance Magogo kaDinuzulu, of the Zulu Royal family. The Princess is the sister of the late Paramount Chief Solomon Maphumuzana Nkayishana, and great-aunt to the present Paramount Chief of the Zulu. Her late husband was Chief Mathole Buthelezi, and her son, Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, is at present Chief Executive Councillor of the kwaZulu Government. Princess Magogo is widely acknowledged as the greatest living authority on the subject of Zulu music. As a performer, her musical repertoire is prodigious, encompassing traditional items dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and possibly earlier. Her reply, when asked how she came to learn so much of the Zulu musical repertoire, was as follows: ‘When I was a young girl, I slept in the huts of my grandmothers, the wives of King Cetshwayo, and one could not escape hearing a great deal of our traditional music’. Besides her accomplishment as a singer, the Princess is the last remaining player of the classic Zulu instrument for song-accompaniment, the ugubhu musical bow. The present discourse, on Zulu music and its role in traditional life,, provides insight of a kind that is beyond the reach of an outside observer, since the Princess has drawn on a lifetime of personal experience. To provide relevant illustrations, she frequently broke into song during her discourse. Musical transcriptions of these songs appear at the end of the present paper, in Appendix 1. The tonality of the music is briefly discussed in Appendix 2.

It would seem that the genealogy given in the fragment of the text of Sīdī Aḥmad al-Bakkāy might be more authentic than the one given in the Ghallāwiyya. While the importance given to ancestresses in the text of Sīdī Aḥmad al-Bakkāy and its attempt to explain an individual's origins in terms of diversity rather than by a single patriline descending from one important ancestor certainly set it apart from later western Saharan genealogies and from Arab and Muslim genealogies in general, it is obviously a more realistic picture of origins, as a person's ancestors double with each earlier generation rather than becoming fewer. Also, the text of Sīdī Ahmad al-Bakkāy, which is older than the Ghallāwiyya, does not take the genealogies back as far as the later work which, however, is not convincing because of many apparent errors and illogicalities.

This poem by a Macassar Malay describes the successful war of the Dutch against Macassar from 1666 to 1669. It was edited by Dr. C. Skinner for a London Ph.D. and published in 1963. The manuscript of the original poem is no longer available, but it is deduced that it must have been written between July 1669 and June 1670. The name of the author is recorded, an Enci' Amin; we learn from a comment in the poem itself that it was recorded on Chinese paper. It is unusual to know even this much about the original manuscripts of works in traditional Malay literature. Of the two extant manuscripts the earlier, preserved in Leiden, contains only part of the. poem. Although the name of the copyist is not given Dr. Skinner, continuing a fascinating piece of investigation by the Dutch scholar H. T. Damstè, is able to demonstrate with reasonable certainty that it was a Dutch lady, Cornelia Valentijn, wife of the famous Franςis; furthermore, that it would have been copied c. 1710 in Ambon.