The biographer al-Mālikī reports that, in the year A.H. 171, Rūh b. Hatam, the governor of the Maghrib, offered the post of qādī to ‘Abd Allāh b. Farūk, a scholar-jurist of Qairawān. ‘Ibn Farūk firmly refused the offer. The governor, however, forced him to take his seat in the mosque and ordered the litigants to address their pleas to him, Ibn Farūk weeping the while and crying to them: “Have mercy upon me, that Allah may have mercy upon you”. When he thus refused to judge, the governor ordered that he be bound and taken up to the roof of the mosque: if he should then still refuse he was to be thrown over the edge.

In 1955 the Sudan Government presented to the School of Oriental and African Studies photographs of several important documents connected with the Sudanese Mahdia (1881–98). Amongst these are three letter-books containing the text of communications from the Mahdi, Muhammad (Ahmad) b. ‘Abdallāhi, who led the movement until his death in 1885, and his successor, the Khalifah ‘Abdallāhi b. Muhammad al-Ta‘āīishl, who was defeated by Kitchener at the battle of Kararī (Omdurman) in September 1898. None of these MSS has yet been published, although extracts have been printed from one. The purpose of this article is to give a brief indication of their history and contents. They may be designated the letter-books of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Nujūmī, ‘Uthmān Diqnah, and Yūsuf Mikhā'īl, and the letters N, D, and M will be used for the respective short references.

PŪr-i BahĀ (probably Tāj al-dīn, son of Bahā al-dīn) was a contemporary of the Mongol il-khan Abaqa (663–80/1265–82), son of Hulagu, and was closely associated with the family of great statesmen, Juvaynī. He is now a forgotten poet and the information available hitherto has been scarce. Even the most accurate editor of the history of ‘Alā al-dīn Juvaynī forgot to mention Pūr-i Bahā, among the panegyrists of the Juvayni family. Yet Pūr-i Bahā enjoyed a considerable reputation in his day. According to Hamdullah Mustaufā (Tārīkh-i Guzīda, 816) his dīvān was well-known (mashhūr), and Waṣṣāf (see below) readily quoted his verses.

The story of Tepegöz is the eighth of the twelve surviving tales of the medieval Turkish cycle of Dede Korkut. In language and style it is uniform with the remainder of the cycle, but in character it differs considerably, being composed largely of incidents common to the folktales of many peoples. Its most striking feature, and the one which has attracted most attention, is the variant of the story of Polyphemus which it contains. But besides this the story has a peculiar interest of its own. It is not a mere chance retelling of an old tale. Its narrative has been based upon a traditional wording which goes back to a time before the various incidents, of independent origin, were welded together in the present complex story.

When the first volume of Otto Franke's great Geschichte des chinesischen Reiches was published in 1930 it bore the descriptive subtitle ‘An account of its origin, nature, and development up to most recent timesx2019;. But alas, in spite of the author's prodigious efforts, the times were unpropitious, and the great design was not, in the end, to be fully realized. The first volume (Das Altertum und das Werden des konfuzianischen Staates) took the story from the earliest age down to the fall of the Han. The second volume (Der konfuzianische Staat, I, Der Aufstieg zur Weltmacht) appeared in 1936 and carried the account of China's history on through the period of division between North and South (Universalismus und völkische Krafte) to the centuries of re-unification under the Sui and T'ang dynasties (Der Sieg des Universalismus: die konfuzianische Weltmacht). In the following year came volume three, with the notes and supplementary materials to the first two.

An Lu-shan's rebellion marks a turning point in practically every aspect of the history of the T'ang dynasty. The strong centralized empire which reached the apogee of its magnificence under the Emperor Hsiian Tsüng (713–56) was able, after seven years of exertion, to put down the rebellion. But in doing so it was forced to compromise with the very principle of provincial military autonomy of which An Lu-shan was the arch-representative. The empire which remained in the hands of the T'ang imperial family deteriorated by degrees into a state of provincial autonomy which differed from the actual subdivision of China during the ensuing Five Dynasties period more in name than in reality.

In an article ‘The Ōi river poems and preface’, Asia Major, N.S., III, 1, 1952, 65–106, 1 examined the Japanese preface written by Ki no Tsurayuki, and quoted (p. 74) a passage by Fujiwara no Kiyosuke which stated that the Ōi river poems had a Japanese preface written by Mibu no Tadamine.

In the notes here published an attempt is made to explore some of the peculiar linguistic problems involved in the interpretation of epigraphic texts. As a subject for study these have certain advantages for the linguist: the material on which he bases his conclusions is, at any given time, complete, reducing the chances of his being afterwards confronted with evidence which he has overlooked; its nature limits the directions which his inquiries can take; and since the text is irrevocably committed to stone, he is not delayed by the possibility of infinitely refining his phonetic and phonological observations. It is a cardinal principle of the present investigations that such texts in dead languages carry an implication of utterance; it is equally cardinal that what that implication is cannot be determined, and is not to be educed.

Baule is one of the most widely spoken languages in the French Ivory Coast; the Handbook of African Languages, Part II, gives the number of speakers as 373,000. It is, according to the Handbook classification, a member of the Anyi-Baule dialect cluster of the Akan language group. Because of its importance, and the fact that no description of it has so far appeared, it is considered worth while to bring forward the present phonological analysis even though it is only provisional; a more definitive statement must await further study in the field.