Vast quantities of ceramic shards of the Ayyubid-Mamluk period have been recovered from excavations of major urban sites such as Fusṭāṭ and Ḥamā, as well as from numerous smaller settlements in the Levant. Knowledge of the range of glazed and decorated wares has been supplemented by the publication of complete vessels in museum collections. As a result of archaeological and art historical research some production sites have been identified and broad chronological divisions established within the ceramic repertoire. Less well understood, however, is the social and economic environment within which pottery was produced and utilized. In addition, analysis of the objects themselves reveals little about the value ascribed to ceramics in relation to the other craft media of the period. This paper will attempt to provide further insights into the manufacture, trade and consumption of pottery in the Levant in the Ayyubid-Mamluk period (including some comments concerning the Crusader states in Palestine) by using contemporary Arabic and Western written sources.

The article reconstructs a debate between Hanafi jurists who operated throughout Ottoman Greater Syria (and beyond) from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries concerning the evidentiary status of the Ottoman imperial registers (defters). At the centre of the jurists’ debate is the permissibility of using imperial registers as independent, uncorroborated evidence. It was a debate about who had the right to regulate and determine what constituted an authentic evidential document: while some jurists argued that it was almost exclusively the privilege of the jurists, others were willing to concede this authority, at least in part, to the Ottoman dynasty and its bureaucracy. Furthermore, the article contends that the debate about the evidentiary validity of the defters captures the complex relationship between Ottoman dynastic law and the Hanafi fiqh discourse. Finally, the debate sheds light on the legal “defterization” of other types of documents and texts, such as a chronicle (taʾrīkh) and court records (sijill).

In 1883 Hervey de Saint-Denys translated a passage from Ma Tuan-lin's Wên-hsien t'ung-k'ao, which mentions missions to China from Sêng-kaoWu-ling, Chia-chaand Chiu-mi. Ma Tuan-lin states that these countries were conquered by Chên-la (Cambodia) after the yung-hui reign period (650–6).

Pre-twentieth century Sikh tradition says that Bhāī Gurdās, the scribe of Guru Arjanās text of the Adi Granth, was troubled by a major doubt as he wrote the words the Guru dictated to him: faced with poems attributed to figures like Kabīr and Nāmdev (collectively known as bhagats in the tradition), Gurdās began to wonder whether Guru Arjan was not composing the poems himself and ascribing them to the bhagats. Realizing what was troubling Bhāī Gurdās, the Guru instructed the scribe to rise early the next morning and wait outside the tent where the dictation of the Granth took place every day. When he did, Gurdās was surprised to see the Guru conversing with a number of the ībhagats in ‘spiritual form’. The bhagats, it turned out, came to the tent every morning to ensure that their compositions were included in Guru Arjan's Granth. Gurdās was suitably impressed by the display and acknowledged without further question the authenticity of their compositions.

The history of the Zaydiyya and the growth of Zaydī thought, law, and doctrine have become increasingly well known as a result of studies by R. Strothmann, E. Griffini, C. van Arendonk, W. Madelung, and others. As Madelung has convincingly shown in his book on al-Qāsim b. Ibrāhīm, Zaydī doctrine, which initially differed appreciably from that of the Mu'tazila on many issues, eventually adopted all of the principal tenets of Mu'tazilism. At the same time, the various Zaydī branches retained the essential Shī'ī belief in an Imām descended from ‘Alī and Fāṭima. Yet the Zaydī doctrine of the imāmate differs from the doctrine of Imāmī (or Twelver) Shī'ism in some important respects: the Zaydī Imām is not infallible, sinless, and omniscient, and, according to the Batrī Zaydīs, he need not even always be the most excellent person of his generation. Most Zaydīs maintained instead that the Imām had to prove his leadership by fighting for the faith (jihād). The Imāmī claim that all the Imāms had been personally designated by God and His Prophet was restricted by the Zaydīs to ‘Alī, al-Ḥasan, and al-Ḥusayn.

This article argues that the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti constituted the kernel of a ritual text recited during the Yasna ceremony. Zaraθušhtra's Gathas were arranged around it, and so were the holy prayers and later additions in Younger Avestan. The arrangement of the extant Older Avesta is probably the original one, and may go back to the composer himself. Its compositional principle is that of parallelism and ring composition, a pattern which can be found both in individual Gathic hymns, two of which (Y 28 and 43) are analysed, and in the structure of the entire Yasna.

Most people are born with the natural ability to see and distinguish the colours of objects and things in everyday life, but to explain in words what colour is, is a more complicated matter. Scientists have generally accepted that, physically, colour is the visual aspect of electromagnetic radiant energy having a spectral composition ranging in wavelength from about 380 to about 720 nanometres. From the psychological point of view, it is a sensation produced on the eye and in the brain by rays of light when resolved by selective reflection. The problems raised by the study of colour use are thus interdisciplinary.

The letters of the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologos, studied and exploited by Byzantinists since they were published for the first time by E. Legrand in 1893, are now available in a new edition by G. Dennis, in which they are translated, accompanied by the appropriate comments and, in most cases, accurately dated. These letters constitute a most valuable contemporary source for the years 1382–1417 because they help to fill one part of the much deplored ‘gap’ in Byzantine historiography. Moreover, they include evidence which sheds light on some details of early Ottoman history, as will appear from the following analysis of Manuel's material dealing with the conflict between the sultan Bāyezīd I and the ruler of Sivas, ḲāḲi Burhān al-Dīn Aḥmad in 1391.

It is not too much to describe the Ṣaffārids of S‚stān as an archetypal military dynasty. In the later years of the third/ninth century, their empire covered the greater part of the non-Arab eastern Islamic world. In the west, Ya'qūb. al-Laith's army was only halted at Dair al-'Āqūl, 50 miles from Baghdad; in the north, Ya'qūb and his brother 'Arm campaigned in the Caspian coastlands against the local 'Alids, and 'Amr made serious attempts to extend his power into Khwārazm and Transoxania; in the east, the two brothers pushed forward the frontiers of the Dār al-Islām into the pagan borderlands of what are now eastern Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier region of West Pakistan; and in the south, Ṣaffārid authority was acknowledged even across the persion Gulf in ‘Umān. This impressive achievement was the work of two soldiers of genius, Ya'qūub and 'Amr, and lasted for little more than a quarter of a century. It began to crumble when in 287/900 the Sāmānid Amīr Ismā'īl b. Aḥmad defeated arid captured ‘Amr b. al-Laith, and 11 years later, the core of the empire, Sīstān itself, was in Sāmānid hands. Yet such was the effect in Sīstān of the Ṣaffārid brothers’ achievement, and the stimulus to local pride and feeling which resulted from it, that the Ṣaffārids returned to power there in a very short time. For several more centuries they endured and survived successive waves of invaders of Sīstān—the Ghaznavids, the Seljūqs, the Mongols—and persisted down to the establishment of the Ṣafavid state in Persia.

According to Muslim tradition, some time after the spring of Zamzam had been caused by God to gush forth for Hagar and Ishmael following their expulsion into the wilderness by Abraham, it disappeared. Because of the sins of the tribe of Jurhum, which until then had possessed Mecca and the control of its sanctuary (wilāyat al-bayt), Zamzam, the well of the sanctuary, dis-appeared or was hidden, and Jurhum was driven out of Mecca and lost the wilāyat al-bayt. The rediscovery of the well is associated with the grandfather of the Prophet, 'Abd al-Muttahb. At a much later, but unspecified date, we are told, he experienced a dream in which the place of Zamzam was revealed to him. From this time on the well, according to tradition, enjoyed a continuous existence, it being one of the features of the Meccan sanctuary which were taken over when Muhammad adopted the sanctuary for Islam. Zamzam, however, is not the only well associated with the Meccan sanctuary. Muslim tradition knows too of a dry pit inside the Ka'ba which is sometimes referred to as the ‘well of the Ka'ba’.

The first manifestation of the regional cultures of India as we know them today was, in most cases, the literature produced by the medieval bhakti (devotional) movements. Composed in the regional languages, the bhakti literature provides evidence of early forms of these languages. Further, by its very existence, it marks the genesis of pride in the languages, of acceptance of them as appropriate vehicles for literary expression. Often addressed to local or regional deities (who are sometimes identified as local manifestations of gods worshipped throughout India), this literature clearly served to articulate and focus regional devotion to such deities. In addition, it is also possible that the bhakti literature provides evidence of the process by which people began to think of the regions as regions (i.e., their genesis as cognitive regions), began to identify themselves as belonging to the regions, and began to take pride, not just in the languages or deities of the regions, but in the regions themselves. This is the process which led ultimately, in very recent times, to the formation of the states of modern India.

In light of the recent discovery of Warring States period bamboo slips, now in the collection of Tsinghua University, inscribed with texts described as shu, “documents” or “similar to shu”, this article explores the question of “what were shu?” It suggests that shu can be understood as a literary form apart from the history of the Confucian classic, the Shang shu 尚書 (Ancient Documents) or Shu jing 書經 (Book of Documents) and the Yi Zhou shu 逸周書. Formal characteristics include: shu were – or pretended to be – contemporaneous records; and shu include formal speeches by model kings and ministers from ancient times. Many shu include the expression wang ruo yue 王若曰, which is also found in bronze inscriptions, where it indicates that a royal speech was read aloud by an official. Thus, the literary form originated with the practice of composing speeches in writing before they were read out in formal ceremonies, with a bamboo slip copy presented to the officials addressed. Later shu were fictional compositions, written in the style of these ancient documents.

This article aims to contribute to an understanding of the evaluation of musical artistry in Africa, through Mali as a case study. The discussion focuses on the informal discourses of the occupational group of Mande artisan-musicians known as jeli (pl. jeliw, jalilu), concerning the ideal of musical greatness, signified by the polysemic term ngaraya; while there is consensus about the ideal, there is much debate about who qualifies. Drawing on extensive interviews and fieldwork with leading jeliw over the past twenty years, it pays special attention to the views of and about Malian women singers, who since the 1980s have – somewhat controversially, as explored here – been the “stars” on the home scene. The article shows how local discourses challenge the widely accepted view that only men are the true masters (ngaraw). Many women jeli singers (jelimusow) have a special claim to ngaraya, and some also seek to position themselves within the canon, as they increasingly move into centre-stage of Malian popular culture. The importance of learning directly from senior master jeliw remains a core issue in the evaluation of ngaraya for both men and women, encapsulated in the phrase “the true ngaraw are all at home”.

‘Standard Chinese’ is here offered as a translation of Gwoyeu and is defined, for the purpose of this paper, as ‘polite Peking speech’, i.e. the language spoken by a youngish man, born and brought up in Peking, when he avoids any features which he himself would describe as tuuhuah or local—i.e. Peking—dialect. The grammatical features described are based exclusively on the speech system of Mr. James Liou, and may therefore include personal idiosyncrasies which other Gwoyeu speakers would not recognize as ‘standard’. Mr. Liou was born in Peking in 1927 and lived there until 1950. His family come from a village within 30 miles of Peking, and have lived in the capital for the last three generations. He has not therefore been subject to ‘non-Pekinese’ linguistic influences to any great extent.

For the hisory of religions the rise of Marduk, city god of Babylon, is one of the most striking phenomena known from ancient Mesopotamia. From being an utterly insignificant god in third-millennium Sumer, he had risen to be head of the Babylonian pantheon by the first millennium. The Münster thesis of Walter Sommerfeld, written under W. von Soden, is the first book-length treatment of this topic. As the subtitle indicates, it is largely restricted to the second millennium, the significant period because the rise took place within it. In fact third millennium evidence is dealt with briefly, but the first millennium is omitted. This is unfortunate because most of the religious literature dealing with Marduk is known from first-millennium copies only, though much of it was presumably composed during the second. In view of this uncertainty most of the religious texts about Marduk cannot be used within precise chronological frameworks.

The aim of this article is to present a new edition, translation and commentary of the treaty concluded in 1387 between the Ottoman ruler Murād I (1362–1389) and the Comune of Genoa. As the only known extant fourteenth-century treaty between the Ottomans and a western city state, the treaty is of considerable importance for early Ottoman history, a period for which contemporary Turkish sources are scant.

Mīrzā Mahdī the biographer of Nādir Shāh, gives but little information on the subject of the Iranian campaigns in 'Omān during the period 1737 to 1744, probably because 'Omān was, relatively speaking, merely a secondary theatre of war and because Nādir did not go there in person. Fasa'I, in his Fārsnāma-yi-Nāsirī, also devotes but little space to the subject, notwithstanding the fact that Muhammad Taqī Khān Shīrāzī, the Beglarbegi of Fārs, played a prominent part in the campaigns.

The variety of spoken Arabic some aspects of which are discussed in this article is the dialect of 'Anaiza, a fairly large town of the Qaṣm province of Nejd.

Most of the work on this dialect I have done with Mr. Muḥammad al-Shmikh of 'Anaiza ('Unaizah).

It is possible to distinguish broadly four types of Swahili poetry in East Africa today.

The first type, mashairi (lit.) ‘poems’, is characterized in form by symmetrical verses which have an equal number of lines (usually not exceeding six) in each verse, and an equal number of syllables (usually not more than sixteen) in each line. This type is extremely popular with the people and with the majority of the poets: mashairi appear regularly in Swahili newspapers—Baraza, Kiongozi, Uhuru, etc.—and weekly radio programmes in Tanzania and Kenya are devoted to them. It is thus not surprising that almost every Swahili scholar is familiar with this form, and the bulk of the publications on Swahili poetry both in English and in Kiswahili are on it. Since much has been written on its prosody, I shall not discuss it further here.

Le 28 juin 1245, à l'ouverture du Concile de Lyon, le pape Innocent IV groupa sous cinq chefs ses principaux soucis. Parmi ceux-ci figurent les ravages des Tatares qui, terram Christianorum intraverant et Ungariam occupaverant non parcentes sexui vel etati quin omnes interficerent.