For almost a decade I have taught the ‘Constitution of Medina’ at Cambridge as the eight distinct documents it comprises, issued on various occasions over the first seven years or so, of Muḥammad's Medinan period, using a typescript text of these documents, designated A to H. My attention was first attracted to it when reviewing the late Professor A. Guillaume's translation of the Sīrah of Ibn Isḥāq/Ibn Hishām, because of the astonishingly close parallels with ḥawṭah treaties from Ḥaḍramawt upon which I was working about that time. Originally I had intended to publish a typical ḥawṭah agreement together with an analysis of the ‘Constitution’ which of course is not really a constitution at all. I still intend to publish my ḥawṭah corpus and demonstrate the similarity, but it has long been time to publish the analysis and identification of the separate documents contained in the ‘Constitution’, more particularly as it has important methodological and historical implications if anything approaching a definitive modern account of Muhammad's career is to be written.

If our present knowledge of the history of the Muslim Maghrib is in general unsatisfactory, few periods remain as obscure as the fifteenth century.

The extant sources are very scarce. Contemporary Maghribī historical writings are practically non-existent and, with few exceptions, this is still an epoch for which Christian chronicles are not yet really relevant. Only fragmentary and partial information can be extracted from the contemporary Spanish and Portuguese documents. Therefore, we have to rely for our knowledge on the so-called manāqib literature or hagiographic dictionaries which proliferated in Morocco during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These volumes—many of which were lithographed in Fās during the nineteenth century—cannot be considered a first-rate source. They are posterior to the period dealt with and appear as versions of a traditional history composed over the years by agglomeration, repetition, and revision from a series of original stories which may be doubtful, even though they are hallowed by time and usage, and fortified by the weight of respectability. Committed to writing, they have acquired the seal of authority and have seldom been challenged.

Publications by Weinreich, Chafe, Makkai, and Mitchell have put the problem of idiom formation in the focus of attention. Kuwaiti Arabic (KA) idioms, however, seem to have received very little attention or no serious attention from professional linguists. The majority of KA idioms are semantically specialized phrases that belong to a more informal or colloquial level of speech.

One of the chief fascinations exercised by words—especially by loan-words—derives from their dual function as markers of both linguistic and cultural change. For those interested in words from this historical view-point perhaps nothing is more tantalizing than the difficulty of reproducing, in the study of words as cultural markers, those types of clear and comprehensive classification which have been so successfully developed for the analysis of words in their formal aspects.

Puppetry in China has a long history. The modern remnants of a rich tradition testify to the wealth that was, and the art is being revived in various ways, and given new forms. Although there is more early literature and specific comment in ancient books on ancient Chinese puppets than there is for any other kind of puppetry in its early days, it is not absolutely clear when they originated. The words nearly always used to refer to puppets are mu-ou-hsi ‘wooden doll plays’ and k'uei-lei-tzu, k'u-lei-tzu, k'uei-lei, or k'uei-lei-hsi. The original meaning of the latter terms is tantalizingly elusive, but the k'u might possibly suggest a hole or aperture within which they were performed. These are historically the most common words used. The earliest mention of any of the terms is found in Feng-su t'ung by Ying Shao (fl. c.a.d. 178), but the origins of puppetry may either lie much before or after that book.

Awngi is a central Cushitic language, the southernmost representative of the Agaw group. It is spoken in the Provinces of Agawmǝdǝr and Mätäkkäl, Governorate General of Gojjam, Ethiopia, by at least 50,000 persons. This dialect group has been called by Conti Rossini ‘Awiya’. This is a misnomer; the word awíya means ‘Agaw man’ (literally: ‘son of Agaw’, see §3.4). The language itself is called by its speakers awῃi, with the derivative -ῃi (Amharic -iñña) used for languages. In my earlier publications, I simply called it Southern Agaw, but following the preference of several of my colleagues, I adopted the self-denomination ‘Awngi’.

The Dedanite-Minaean text R 3695 (= M 356) has received no treatment in extenso since the rendering initially proposed by Jaussen and Savignac, which in the light of present knowledge must be considered wholly unsatisfactory.