It is scarcely an exaggeration to say, that of the various important contributions made by Sir William Jones to the initiation and development of Persian studies in Europe, none was more felicitous, or more far-reaching in its consequences, than his early labours with the lyrics of Ḥāfiẓ; and of these labours, none bore sweeter fruit than his making of the immortal “Shīrāzī Turk” into A Persian Song.

The problem of the transcription of Pahlavi, inherently difficult enough, has for so long been complicated by factors of personal taste and interest that it will probably see many more jubilees. Amid the welter of differing transcriptions to be found, however, one persistent thread is to be observed, namely that of archaism. Bartholomae's endeavour to reproduce the earliest Arsacid pronunciation of Pahlavi, that of the third century B.C., has more or less been followed by such leading scholars as Salemann, Pagliaro, Bailey, and Nyberg, and has had perhaps its most consistent exposition in the Pahlavi index of the last-named's recent Manual.

Few phenomena in the modern history of Asia can have been so completely misunderstood by Westerners as the Vietnamese religious (and political) movement known in European languages as ‘Caodaism’. Based upon a syncretic approach to religion, in which a key role is played by spirit-séances, it has inevitably been regarded by Christian writers with the same suspicion (if not contempt) as occidental ‘spiritualism’; and this initial lack of sympathy is compounded by the fact that the spirits who have revealed themselves at Caodaist séances include such familiar figures as Victor Hugo and Jeanne d'Arc. Then there is the show-piece temple of the Caodaists at Tây-Ninh, which drew forth Mr. Graham Greene's description of ‘Christ and Buddha looking down from the roof of the Cathedral on a Walt Disney fantasia of the East, dragons and snakes in Technicolor’. This superficial notion of the religious element in Caodaism fitted in very well with the cynicism of political observers, notably Bernard Fall, who saw in Caodaism no more than a political movement anxious to preserve its private armies and local power, using its religious ideas merely to dupe a credulous peasantry. In these circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that the real nature and origins of Caodaism have been lost from view, and even its history has never been adequately summarized in any Western language. The present article will attempt to fill the historical gap, by tracing the history of the religion from 1925 to 1936, and then looking at its origins and antecedents. A subsequent article (to appear in BSOAS, XXXIII, 3, 1970) will analyse the various beliefs which have been incorporated into this essentially syncretic cult.

It is now established practice in descriptive linguistics to treat the subject-matter at separate, and definably separate, levels of analysis. Indeed the traditional categories of Phonology and Grammar represent such an employment of two different levels. Present-day linguists in Great Britain and America recognize the setting up and denning of the various levels of analysis as a basic procedure in handling the utterances of the speakers whose language is being studied.

In the Bahman Yašt, ii, 49, there is an interesting list of geographical names. The readings of two MSS. of the Pahlavi Text as well as the Pāzand version (unhappily Pāzand far inferior to that of the Mēnōkē χrat) are available, the Pahlavi in the facsimile of K 20 (fol. 135 recto, 1. 4 et seq.) published by the University of Copenhagen, 1931, and the edition of Dastūr Nosherwān Kaikobād Ādarbād, The Pahlvi Zand i Vôhûman Yasht, 1899, a copy of a MS. dated 554 A.Y., and the Pāzand in Antia, Pazend Texts, p. 339 seq. Translations of ii, 49, have been attempted by West, SBE., v, p. 209, by Dastūr Nosherwān in his edition, and also by Markwart in Caucasica, vi, 1, 54, and in A Catalogue of the Provincial Capitals of Eranshahr, p. 69, an edition of the šahrīhā i Ērān. But as finality in the translation of Pahlavi texts is hard to attain, yet another attempt is here offered. The text is as follows:—

The argument to be presented here proceeds from the analysis of a Sogdian word of uncertain orthography and disputed meaning. It first occurred, as by' / npšqty (apparently with word-division), in Soghd. Texte, I, 39.4, in a translation of Luke xii, 36, corresponding with Syriac bed meštūoā = (ÉK) Tŵv yáuwv; Müller gave ‘Gastmahl’, with an asterisk to denote his doubt. Later I published two Manichaean passages. One, hi the text I titled ‘A Job story’, speaks of a man who makes his way in the world and becomes rich and “takes to himself many wives and has by them many sons and daughters and gives wives to the sons and grooms to the daughters and makes a great By‘n’yšp / [']krty” : the context demands ‘marriage-feast’, in agreement with the Greek of Luke. The other is a Sogdian version of a Middle Persian verse, the original having been preserved by good fortune, ‘Hail to you, bridegroom, who hast made a marriage-feast for the sons’ : here By'ny / pškt'kw renders MPers. wdwdg'n ‘wedding’.

The first text of al-Bīrūnī (A.D. 973-C. 1050) published in Europe which contains a reference to his translation of Patañjali's Yogasūtra is his Risāla fī fihrist kutub Muḥammad ibn Zakarīya' al-Rāzī, the relevant part of which was published by E. Sachau, Leipzig, 1876ndash;8.1 In his list of his own works, which is included in this Risāla, al-Bīrūnī states that this list comprises the works he has written up to the end of 427/1037.2 Several years later Sachau published al-Bīrūnī's India (London, 1887), in which al-Bīrūnī not only refers to his having translated this work of Patañjali, 3 but also quotes from it copiously.4

Through the kindness of Professor F. W. Cleaves I am in possession of an offprint of his important article ‘ The Mongolian documents in the Musée de Téhéran ’.

The first two documents are only insignificant fragments, but Document III, which consists of eight pieces and two endorsements, is nearly complete and full of personal and geographical names. It is a decree issued in the name of the last ilkhan of Persia, Abū-Said (716–36/1316–35), and bearing the date 720/1320 (according to Pelliot: September 1320).

Here is Professor Cleaves's summary of its contents:

‘ It had been reported by the šiγ Badaradin Abul Maqmad Maqmud that, although, by virtue of an edict, he had, in the place of his father the šiγ ǁamaladin, sat on the sujada of the šiγ šaqid Ibrayim and had been appointed over the qaγas-a-yin waγb-ud, his elder brother, Šamsadin Maqmad, not letting him approach, took his edicts and writs and let the foundation go to wrack and ruin.

The ‘appendix’ to a mid- to late seventh-century East Syriac history includes a detailed account of the conquest of Khu¯zista¯n by Muslim armies between c. 635 and 642. This article translates this section of the ‘appendix’ (along with another dealing with the conquest of Egypt), subjects it to detailed analysis and criticism, and compares it with Arabic accounts of the conquest of Khu¯zista¯n that survive in the much later historical and legal traditions. The results of this exercise—using an early and local source to control the Islamic tradition—is in some measure mixed, but some striking agreement suggests that the transmission of conquest history in early Islam was not as discontinuous as has been previously argued.

The relationship between the traditional biographical material on Muḥammad (maghāzī- or sīra-material) and the narrations of his words and deeds (ḥadīth-material) has long been debated in Islamic studies. While some scholars have argued that the biographical material is fundamentally ḥadīth material arranged chronologically, others have argued the opposite: that ḥadīth material originally consists of narrative reports about the life of Muḥammad which were later deprived of their historical context to produce normative texts. This article argues that both views are untenable and that maghāzī and ḥadīth emerged as separate fields; each influenced the other but they preserved their distinctive features. While traditions that originated and were shaped in one field were sometimes transferred to the other, the transfer of traditions from one field to the other apparently did not as a rule involve any deliberate changes to the text.

As a good missionary and teacher Mani knew the value of repetition. With endless pains he had elaborated a story of the world, which was to explain all phenomena, of nature and the mind, that came within reach of his knowledge. Its comprehensiveness made it so complicated that it required—and still requiresa strong effort to remember all its details. t All the greater was the need to force it, by ceaseless repetition, into the minds of those who were ready to listen to the new prophet. No doubt every one of his books and longer epistles opened with this story, which may have been the sole subject of several of them. It is therefore useless to try to identify the various accounts before us either with each other or with one of the books of which we know merely the title.

The Tārīkhi Qumm was originally written in Arabic by Hasan b. Muhammad b. Hasan Qumml in the year A.H. 378 (A.D. 988–9). No copy of this is known to exist. A Persian translation was made in the year A.H. 805–6 (A.D. 1402–3) by Hasan b. Alī b. Hasan b. Abd al–Malik Qummī for Ibrāhīm b. Mahmūd b. Muhammad b. Alī as–Safī. The translator states that the original contained twenty chapters and fifty sections. None of the known manuscripts, however, contains more than the first five chapters.

Any attempt to write about the Ibāḍī imāma is faced with the same kind of problem which besets all efforts to provide a generalized account of an Islamic institution: how far to concentrate on the abstract theory and how far to describe the actual practices observed in different places at various times. In this paper the writer has tried to strike a balance between these two approaches by taking as his theme an aspect of the Ibāḍi imāmate that involves basic principles about the nature of the contract which the Ibadi community enters into when it elects an Imām, and to study it specifically from the Omani point of view, through the writings of the local ‘ulamā’ and the way elections have been conducted in that country from the second/eighth down to the fourteenth/twentieth centuries. No attempts will be made to compare this material with the parallel sources from the Maghrib, nor to contrast the Ibāḍī concepts of the imāma with those of other Islamic systems.

Among the many texts and manuscripts that Sir Aurel Stein brought to London from the Grottoes of the Thousand Buddhas at Tun-huang early in this century was a text of the first half of the Lao tzu (chapters 1–37 of the standard, received version of the text) with a commentary known as the Hsiang erh chu (Stein MS 6825 in the British Museum). This document has attracted considerable scholarly interest because of its ostensible connexion with the origins and early history of Celestial Master (t'ien shih ) Taoism in the Later Han dynasty. Lu Te-ming (c. 550–c. 630) listed the Hsiang erh chu as a commentary to the Lao tzu in his Ching tien shih wen, and said that accordingto one tradition it was written by Chang Lu (d. 216). This is the earliest known suggestion that the Hsiang erh chu is a text of the Celestial Master school.

One of the few Old Persian words whose precise meaning has not yet been established is yakā-, the name of a material which was used in the building of Darius' palace at Susa. In the Great King's own words ‘it was brought (to Susa) from Gandara and Karmāna’.1 That a timber was meant appears from the Akkadian version (the corresponding Elamite sentence is missing), in which yakā- is translated by GIšMlŠ-MA-KAN-NA. Admittedly the Akkadian word is partly restored; V. Scheil, in his edition,2 printed it as [miš]-má-kan-na. However, both E. Herzfeld3 and F. W. Konig4 thought they could see the determinative GlŠ and a trace of MlŠ; at all events the preserved part of the word leaves scarcely any doubt as to the correctness of the restoration.

The fifteenth-century Cypriot chronicler Leontios Machaeras, whose Recital concerning the sweet land of Cyprus concludes in 1432, first mentions locusts thus: ‘And in 1351 the locust, with God's blessing, began to come to Cyprus (and did great damage).’ Strange as it may seem, this may have been the first visit of locusts to the island in numbers sufficient to be destructive. Soon other local chroniclers, as well as travellers, pilgrims, and merchants, joined Machaeras in recording such invasions. They may have been no surprise to the Cypriot chronicler, writing a little under a century later, but in 1351 they could well have been the cause of surprise, even terror, on the island.

The sīra authorities provide a mass of contradictory data on the chronology of the Prophet's raids and the task of fitting these inconsistencies into a cogent chronological pattern is beset with difficulties. In the main sources, for example, Mūsā b. ‘Uqba, Ibn Isḥaq, and al-Wāqidī, we find noticeable divergencies in the dating of a specific event. This is so even with important incidents such as the expulsion of Banu Qaynuqā‘and a comparatively late event such as the attack on Khaybar. A textual collation of the chronological material does suggest, however, that in some cases it may be possibleto win through to a safer position.

The study of Muslim institutions in Persia is made difficult by a lack of documents, nor is this lack due wholly to the destruction of those that once existed. Many of the legal contracts and procedures, especially those relating to customary as opposed to shar‘ī law, were unwritten. Moreover so far as local matters were concerned the process of recording was a laborious one in Persia as elsewhere; and it must have seemed unnecessary to record what every village elder knew. Another difficulty which faces us in the study of Muslim institutions in Persia is the fact that the sources often use terms imprecisely. Some are used in both a general and a technical sense. The same term may be used to denote a number of different institutions and the meaning of any term may vary according to both time and place.

Sculpture as an artistic medium was widely employed in the arts of Greece and the Hellenistic East, but played only a minor role in ancient East Asia. This changed dramatically with the First Emperor of China who marked his ascent to the throne in 221 bc with the erection of giant bronze sculptures outside his palace and the installation of thousands of terracotta figures in his tomb. The current text sets out to investigate the sudden and short-lived surge of sculpture making in third-century bc China and places it in the context of developments across Asia of the time. The text joins art historical, archaeological and textual evidence to investigate whether the First Emperor's extraordinary interest in sculpture may have been the result of contacts with the contemporary Hellenistic world.

Perhaps the most exotic among the many strange kings and rulers mentioned in the inscription of Paikuli is the Khagan of the Aq-Aqatärān or ‘White Khazars’. This is the meaning which the late E. Herzfeld, in his edition of that inscription, attributed to a group of words in the Middle Persian version which he read as ḥ'k'n ZY 'kka'n. As the inscription dates from the last decade of the 3rd century (probably from A.d. 293), his interpretation seems to involve a double anachronism: in the title, and in the national name.