In the archives of the Da'wat of the Yemen and India a collection of royal letters and decrees (sijillāt) issued by the Fātimid Khalīfa al-Mustanṣir bi'llāh (denoted in the following pages by the letter M.) (died A.H. 487 = A.D. 1094) to the Sulaihids of the Yemen has been preserved, and a manuscript containing this collection of documents has now been acquired by the Library of the School of Oriental Studies, London. The MS. is a modern copy, which belonged to an Ismā'īlī priest in India. I have searched in vain for other copies, but it is quite likely that we might find others in the collections of the Ismā'īlī in the Yemen and India. I give in the following pages a synopsis of the historical matter contained in these documents. Apart from their interesting literary style the letters furnish us with some useful historical data and contemporary evidence for the period covered by them, viz. the forty-four years from A.H. 445 = A.D. 1053 to A.H. 489 = A.D. 1095.

Previous studies of the Ying Wa College (英華書院) in early Hong Kong overlooked the role of the students. The scarcity of relevant sources could well justify such an oversight. This article aims at filling this gap through the careful use of London Missionary Society (LMS) materials. Not only does it aim to highlight significant aspects of the college, its unique history, its English education and its practice of Christian faith, it also discusses the careers of some graduates in Hong Kong, China and the world. This article argues that these Ying Wa boys formed a bridge that connected the Western and Chinese worlds. Their impact was felt through the spread of Christianity and global China business, on the one hand, and as a connection between the people and the government in colonial Hong Kong, Qing China and overseas Chinese communities in Singapore and Australia.

The Pahlavi text which has been recently re-edited and translated by J. M. Unvala, entitled Drakht i Asurik, has not to my knowledge received any attention from Assyriologists. In spite of the difficulties entailed in dealing with a province of which I am wholly ignorant, I have been tempted to put some suggestions on paper in the hope that the meaning of this little-known text may be viewed in a fresh relation.

As is well known, the Eastern (or Nestorian) vocalization of Syriac (henceforth ES) consistently distinguishes between ē and ī, whereas the Western (or Jacobite) tradition (henceforth WS), although having both e and i, also has in many cases (originally long) e coinciding with (originally long) i. The question arises of how it happened that in some cases (originally long) e was preserved, whereas in others it shifted to i. Brockelmann and Birkeland were, no doubt, correct in assuming that in Proto-Syriac (henceforth PS) there existed two long e sounds, ē and ē. In ES vocalization these two sounds were not differentiated, whereas in WS (originally long) ę was preserved, but ē shifted to i. Only the assumption of two different forms of ē in PS can account for the twofold representation of original ē in WS, by both ę and i.

For some time past the writer has been endeavouring to collect material for the writing of an Economic History of Persia from the earliest times to the present. He has found himself greatly handicapped by the lack of accurate information respecting the earlier epochs of Persian history, and his researches in this direction are by no means complete.

Whatever was the original meaning of IE *sneigwh-, it is clear that it already meant ‘snow’ in the time of Indo-European community. Words of that group are to be found in all branches of Indo-European except Hittite, Albanian, Armenian, and Tocharian (of which in any case the recorded vocabulary is small).

For the past fifty years, there has been a debate over whether the Umayyad caliph Muʿāwiya introduced a short-lived gold coinage in Syria. After reappraising the literary evidence, this study argues that an enigmatic phrase in a papyrus from this period constitutes evidence for state enforcement of the circulation of a new kind of gold coinage issued under Muʿāwiya. A die-study of the extant specimens of a peculiar imitation of Byzantine gold which has had its crosses effaced, and has been attributed to Muʿāwiya on the basis of the testimony of literary sources, confirms them to be the result of a large-scale, albeit ultimately unsuccessful, initiative. This demonstrates that, in addition to the east, there also existed a separate drive towards an expansion of the money supply in Syria-Egypt during the latter half of Muʿāwiya's caliphate, a development which testifies to a relatively substantial programme of state-building by the caliph.

This is a review article on Alwin Kloekhorst, Etymological Dictionary of the Hittite Inherited Lexicon (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 5. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008. $199. ISBN 978 90 04 16092 7). The article addresses issues arising from Kloekhorst's depiction of Hittite cuneiform spelling conventions in the context of the wider cuneiform world (Mesopotamia and Northern Syria). In particular the representation of a glottal stop in Hittite and relevant cuneiform writing is addressed. The second part of the article addresses further individual graphic and lexical issues arising throughout the etymological dictionary.

With a view to the necessities as well as the possible problems of a document-based administration, this paper approaches the area of conflict between standardization and flexibility in the production of administrative documents in ancient China. Recently published sources from the imperial Qin period (221–207 bce) have provided the opportunity to compare administrative documents excavated at Liye with standards regulating their production. With the help of two case studies, the paper explores to what extent official document standards were implemented in everyday practice or purposefully neglected in ancient Qianling county. It also discusses which standards were followed more closely than others, and what might be the reasons behind this. Shedding light on the large grey zone between faithful adherence and complete neglect, the paper suggests that officials chose a pragmatic way influenced by both economic considerations informed by the local circumstances and the requirements imposed by the central government.