Aramaic-speaking Jewish communities used to be found in various towns and villages throughout north-eastern Iraq, north-western Iran and southern Turkey before the mass exodus of Iraqi Jewry to the state of Israel in 1950–51. In Iraq, the Aramaic speakers were found in an area that may be denned as the land lying above a line drawn on a map across the country through the towns of Musil and Kirkuk. Aramaic was not the first language of all Jews of the area. In the large towns of Musil, Kirkuk, Aqra, as well as Arbel, Arabic was the Jewish vernacular. In some villages the Jews spoke Kurdish as their first language. In Iran, Aramaic-speaking Jewish communities were found as far south as Kerend. The northern limits of the Jewish Aramaic area were formed by communities in the region of lake Van in southern Turkey and those around lake Urmia in north-west Iran (Hopkins, 1993: 62–4).

Immediately after his successful conquest of Muslim Sicily (1060–92), Roger de Hauteville set about dividing the spoils amongst the small band of Norman, French and Italian knights who were his closest followers. This distribution of the land of Sicily and its inhabitants was in part based upon the fiscal documents of the Muslim administration, which were salvaged and adapted to post-conquest circumstances by a small cadre of Greek bureaucrats imported from Calabria. The documents were of two types: lists of tax-payers, known in Arabic as jarā 'id (sg. jarīda; Greek plateia; Latin plated); and descriptions of estate boundaries, known as hudud (sg. hadd; Greek periorismos; Latin divisa). These were the foundations of the Arabic administration of Norman Sicily.

From the medieval confrontation between the Muslim world and Christendom to the present day, the moral and social institutions of the respective “ other” have been the subject of close cross-cultural attention. In particular, questions related to sexual morality, including the issue of homosexuality, were, and still are, used as a polemical focus for mutual denigration.

Scholars working in the field of oral epic all have a particular form of words committed to memory—Milman Parry's celebrated definition of the formula. The definition in fact appears in two slightly differing forms in Parry's writing. In 1928 he wrote, ‘In the diction of bardic poetry, the formula can be defined as an expression regularly used, under the same metrical conditions, to express an essential idea’ (Parry, 1971: 13). Two years later came the more familiar version: ‘The formula in the Homeric poems may be defined as a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea’ (Parry, 1971: 272). The differences between the two forms of the definition are negligible, and Parry made no further attempt to refine or modify it during the five years of life that remained to him. For Albert Lord, too, the definition was clearly adequate as it stood: in ch. iii of The singer of tales he simply quotes it verbatim (Lord, 1960: 30), and proceeds directly to a consideration of the function of formulaic diction.

Allusions to Indian medicine appear in Chinese literature from the fifth century A.D. onwards. At first through translated Buddhist texts, and then through the incorporation of material by later Chinese authors in the form of medical theories, diagnostic, surgical methods and prescriptions, a substantial element of Indian medical knowledge permeated into Chinese medicine. Ophthalmology held a unique position in these transmissions. It was invariably associated with the famous name of Nāgārjuna, which is connected with almost all kinds of protoscientific activity in early medieval India. This has given rise to a longstanding debate among scholars regarding the origin of this material, as well as the credibility of its attribution to Nāgārjuna.

Being engaged in the preparation of an edition of the Old Persian inscriptions of Naqš-i Rustam and Persepolis for the Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum (CII), the present author was given the privilege of looking through the relevant material collected by Émile Benveniste (1902–76), who had been entrusted by the Council of the CII in August 1954 with the task of preparing the edition of the cuneiform inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings. In this collection there were found photographs of two minor Old Persian texts of King Xerxes I, previously documented only in the form of drawings by Ernst Herzfeld. These photographs are presented for the first time in this short paper.