The Leningrad branch of the Oriental Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. possesses a collection of nearly 150 Sogdian fragments recovered from various sites in Central Asia between 1893 and 1915. During the first three decades of this century a few texts were published by F. Rosenberg and C. Salemann. Thereafter the collection was for a long time ignored, while Russian Sogdianists turned their attention to the important archive of Sogdian documents discovered in 1933 at Mt. Mugh in Tajikistan. Everyone concerned with the languages and culture of medieval Central Asia will be deeply grateful to A. N. Ragoza, whose efforts have finally resulted in the complete publication of these interesting fragments. Her edition, reviewed here, includes texts, translations, commentary, glossary, and 69 pages of facsimiles.

Yosef Klausner may be considered a fair representative of the younger generation of Hebrew writers at the turn of the century, both in education and in his aspiration to modernize Hebrew language and literature and to bring Jewish life into harmony with culture in general. He adopted a compromise point of view between the old school of Hebrew writers represented by Ahad Ha-'Am, and the new trend in Hebrew literature championed by Berdyczewski, which was concerned with the widening of horizons.

The Christian physician Ibn al-Tilmīdh (d. 560/1165) was assisted by eminent doctors and philosophers of Baghdad in transcribing the five books of al-Qānūn fī 'l-ṭibb (Canon of medicine) by Ibn Sīnā, (d. 428/1037). Ibn al-Tilmīdh's own copy remained the definitive edition of this encyclopaedic work for centuries after his death.

In the second volume of his History of the Arabs in the Sudan, the late Sir Harold MacMichael gave summary translations of a number of genealogical works ranging in scope from simple pedigrees of individuals to elaborate treatises which purport to demonstrate the kinship of numerous tribes and clans. None of the manuscripts used by MacMichael was older than the nineteenth century, although some probably go back to seventeenth-century originals and reputedly contain even earlier material.

One of the major activities of the printing press established by the late Emperor Haile Selassie in the early 1920s was the printing of religious works in Geez which were provided with an accompanying Amharic translation in keeping with the then Regent's known desire that these religious texts be made accessible to the public. This tradition has been continued by the Tənsa'e zäGvba'e and Täsfa Gäbrä-sәllase presses of Addis Ababa, at least until they were nationalized in 1976. The latter press has devoted most of its output to reprinting religious works in Geez and Amharic in cheap editions intended for sale to the pious lay public. Works in Geez may or may not be provided with an accompanying Amharic translation. Sometimes the Geez original and the Amharic translation are published separately. Occasionally the Geez text appears without an Amharic translation, and very rarely the Amharic text (as is the case with the version appearing below) appears without the Geez original. This is undoubtedly owing to the fact that the original Geez text or the Amharic translation were not available to the publisher.

The ‘problem of myth’ for Western philosophers is a problem of interpreting the meaning of myths and explaining the phenomenon of myth making. The ‘problem of myth’ for the sinologist is one of finding any myths to interpret and explaining why there are so few—for myth-making is generally assumed to be a universal faculty of mankind. One explanation for the paucity of myth in the traditional sense of stories of the supernatural in ancient Chinese texts is the nature of Chinese religion. In China, gods, as well as ancestors and ghosts, were believed to be dead men, spirits who had lived in this world at a certain place and time and continued to need sustenance from the living and to exert influence over them. They related primarily to those who gave them ritual offerings and little thought was given to any possible interaction between them

The subject of this brief paper is one of the most widely known sung poems of the 'Afar people. Hitherto unwritten it is nevertheless revered, sung and recited throughout the 'Afar-speaking world. The present writers feel that its fame is not undeserved, a conclusion reached from a consideration of both its aesthetic appeal and the historical significance of its message.

The purpose of this paper is to show that one of the characteristics of the Chadic languages is the existence of two types of phonological rules affecting vowels. One type of rule operates on the vowels of the stem when a suffix is added and another type of rule operates on the vowel of the suffix itself. The latter type is triggered by the syllabic structure and/or the height of the vowels of the stem.