The appearance of Sir Harold Bailey's Dictionary of Khotan Saka brings to completion a project conceived as long ago as 1934 and initiated in 1945 with the publication ofKhotanese texts, I. The next two decades saw the appearance of five further volumes of texts (Khotanese Buddhist texts, 1951, and Khotanese texts, II–v, 1954–63) as well as of a much-admired volume of lexical commentary, Khotanese texts, VI: Prolexis to the Book of Zambasta (1967). In style and method the Dictionary closely resembles the Prolexis, demonstrating once again its author's extraordinary erudition and ingenuity, this time on a truly monumental scale.

This article examines the transformation of the sacred landscape in the cities of Syria and Palestine from late antiquity to early Islam. This phase of urban and architectural history, often obscured by the changes brought in during the medieval period, is investigated through a close comparison of textual and material evidence related to the main urban religious complexes. It is suggested that the new Friday mosques were frequently built contiguous to Christian great churches, creating a sort of shared sacred area within the cities. Legal issues related to the Islamic conquest and the status of minorities are considered in order to explain the rationale behind such a choice by Muslims.

This paper (to be published in two parts in subsequent issues of BSOAS) aims to explore the meaning of colour in Shang rituals. Operating within an established framework of Shang religion and archaeology, it offers a detailed analysis of the evidence found in oracle bone inscriptions. The oracle bone inscriptions from Yinxu, the late capital of the Shang dynasty, can be divided into different diviner schools and subgroups. Part 1 of the paper will examine the inscriptions of the various diviner groups under the kings' school, and will reveal regular patterns in the use of colour.

In a previous study I indicated that some verbal constructs in Hindi whose components were analysable, at the morphological level, as noun + verb could be considered as comprised in the overall category of verb at the syntactical level on account of their patterning in the participial forms, and suggested T. Grahame Baileys term ‘conjunct verbs’ as a convenient term of reference for this sub-category. The aim of the present study is to consider ‘conjunct verbs’ more closely, and to relate both these and what Bailey terms ‘compound verbsx2019; to each other and to the Hindi verbal system as a whole.

There is no article “funeral” in the Enchclopædia of Islam so it seemed good to collect the material on this subject. The first charge on a Musulim' estate was the cost of his funeral, the provision of grave-clothes, tomb, and the expense of washing the body.

Washing

The body was washed by those nearest to the dead; normally men prepared a man for burial. “They turned up their sleeves, tucked their shirts into their belts, washed him, and wrapped him in the winding sheet.” Abū Baki was washed by his widow and Jābir b. Zaid gave orders that his widow should wash his body; this rule is generlized in al-Mudawwana.

This Law was promulgated under cover of Legislative Decree No. 59 of 17th September, 1953, during the Shishakly regime, and came into force on 1st November of the same year. It thus represents the latest development in the series of reforms in Shari'a law, as applied by the courts, which have appeared, one after the other, in the different countries of the Near East during the last few decades. The first major example—if we ignore legislation primarily concerned with matters of procedure—was provided by the Ottoman Law of Family Rights of 1917 which, short-lived though it proved in Turkey, was applied at the end of the First World War, with minor modifications, in Syria and Lebanon and, with further modifications, in Jordan. Next, there were the series of Egyptian reforms of 1920, 1929, 1923, 1943, and 1946—preceded, interspersed, and followed by similar, but much more piecemeal, innovations in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Then, as the immediate precursor of this Syrian Law, came the Jordanian Law of Personal Status of 1951—while a somewhat similar enactment has now been under consideration for a number of years in Iraq, but seems unlikely, for the present, to be promulgated.

The study of oral literature is among the many areas to which Wilfred Whiteley made an important contribution. He was one of the founder editors of the extensive ‘Oxford Library of African Literature’, and played an essential part in both the development of the study of African oral literature and the maintenance of scholarly standards through generous encouragement and informed advice to colleagues and students working in this area. His primary interest was in Africa but, with his background in Classical studies and his continuing co-operatioii with American folklorists, he also took a wide comparative approach to oral literature. It is appropriate therefore to devote this paper, in a volume in his memory, to some comments on one aspect of oral literature viewed in a comparative context.

In his phonemic analysis of Lhasa Tibetan in Love songs of the sixth Dalai Lama Jaw Yuanrenn (Y. R. Chao) notices ‘variations’ of some of the phonemes, and ascribes some of these ‘variations’ to differences in tempo or to chance: of the phoneme that he writes as ‘e’ he says ‘ i, 10 3 khrel gzhung tş'ilcuῃtş'ilcuŋ’ [it may sometimes change to l, e.g. in song 10, line 3, khrel gzhung tş'cuῃ is pronounced tş'ilcuῃ]; of the phoneme ‘a’, ‘ә 1 2 lam buhi lamp'ø lәmpø’ [it may change to ә in rapid speech, e.g. in song 4, line 2, lam buhi lamp'ø is pronounced lәmpø]; and of the phoneme ‘o’, ‘u, 36 3 rlung po luŋpo luŋbu’ [it may occasionally be pronounced u, e.g. in song 36, line 3, rlung po luŋpo is pronounced lunbu]; but a phonological analysis of the speech of Rinzin Wangpo (rig-'dzin dbang-po) (R.), a Lhasa-dialect-speaking Tibetan, overwhelmingly suggests that vowel alternations such as these should be attributed to vowel harmony.

With few surviving chronicles and the loss of almost all the state archives, historians of the later Ṣafavid period have to rely to a disproportionate degree on the accounts of European travellers. Fortunately some of these, such as Chardin, Tavernier and Olearius, have left pre-eminent examples of the genre, but even so, few attempts have been made to explore their preceonceptions, prejudices or the extent of their understanding of Persian society. Almost all travelled for a well-defined purpose, as members of diplomatic missions, military advisers, missionaries or merchants, and their attitudes and the kind of information they recorded naturally were determined by these preoccupations. They did not necessarily ask the kind of questions that interest historians today and rarely reached levels of Persian cultural and intellectual life beyond the Court and provincial officialdom.

This article questions certain assumptions on the intellectual history of modern Islam and on one of the most influential modern reform movements, the Salafiyya. By looking at the Sufi origins of one of the main Salafī reformers, it relativizes the notion of an inherent anti-Sufism of this reform movement. The article examines how Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849–1905), the famous Egyptian reformer, converted to Sufism in his youth after experiencing a spiritual and intellectual crisis. The influence of his paternal great-uncle Shaykh Darwīsh al-Khādir and of Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī (1837–1897) on ‘Abduh's spiritual and intellectual formation will be investigated. In his youth, Sufism provided him with an alternative form of religiosity with which he could express his dissatisfaction with the representatives of mainstream Islam in his time. ‘Abduh's mystical inclinations found its literary expression in his first major work, the Risālat al-Wāridāt (Treatise on Mystical Inspirations), whose contents will be discussed in detail.

On several occasions, when my Persian coaster ventured into the Indian Ocean and was battered by too heavy seas, and I was murmuring the verse of Hafiz:– Dr. L. D. Barnett, like the expert pilot he is, came to the rescue. As a token of gratitude I wish him to accept my translation of the chapter on India extracted from the unpublished part of Gardīzī′s historical work.

The data and analyses of Tangut verbal morphology which I have presented (1979b, 1981, 1982, 1985) represent the cumulative result of more than twenty years of research of Tangut texts. It is with great regret that I saw my analyses misunderstood (LaPolla, 1992). In order to clarify my view on the Tangut verbal agreement, I feel compelled to give a succinct account of the phenomena causing so much controversy in the Tibeto-Burman linguistic literature.

The Tangut verb shows agreement for person and number of actant. The three overt agreement morphemes are <-ŋa2> (first person singular), <-na2> (second person singular) and <-ni2> (first and second person plural). The Tangut verb shows overt agreement only with first and second person actant. Third person involvement is marked by zero. A Tangut intransitive verb agrees with the subject, i.e. the ‘intransitive subject’. The two rules for the distribution of the overt agreement markers in the transitive verb as formulated in my Tangut grammar (Kepping, 1985: 233–4) are: (1) If one and no more than one of the actants is a first or second person, then the verb will overtly agree with that actant regardless of its syntactic role, and (2) if a transitive verb has two non-third person actants, the verb will agree with the grammatical patient or ‘transitive object’.

The observations offered in this article are based on notes on the pronunciation of a number of Gujarati speakers of different classes from various districts, including field notes recorded in 1938.

Although the speakers included Christians from Khera District and Surat, peasants and telis from Ahmedabad district, Nagar Brahmins of Ahmedabad, and Brahmins from South and Central Kathiawar, they all in their different ways and often in different words, provided examples and illustrations of widespread characteristics of Gujarati.

One of the great problems in the study of Zoroastrianism has been to determine what were the new elements in Zoroaster's teachings—elements which roused such bitter hostility among his own people that he was driven to seek exile and to find his first converts among strangers. It is a problem because, through comparison with the Vedic religion, it has been possible to establish a good deal about the religion of the Iranians before Zoroaster, and naturally even more is known about the religion of the Zoroastrian church after him; and the two are remarkably and disconcertingly similar, as if the second were in many respects a natural development of the first, without any break in continuity, whereas neither is very fully or clearly reflected in Zoroaster's own highly complex Gāthās. Western scholars have fairly generally sought to explain this apparent anomaly by postulating that in many points of doctrine the religion of the Zoroastrian church is not in fact that preached by its prophet; they suppose, that is, that the followers of Zoroaster fairly rapidly betrayed his teachings and evolved a syncretic religion in which they reverted to many ancient beliefs and observances which he himself had denounced.

One of the more obvious facts about the occurrence of grammatical concord in a language is the possibility of classifying the words -that operate the concord. The simplest kind of classification is one in which a class consists of all those words which require or display a particular set of agreements. In this way a definite number of classes is established, but there is no indication of any relationship between the classes, indeed the nature of such relationships, if any, is a subject for further investigation. As is widely known, in Bantu languages grammatical concord is operated by means of prefix agreement, a fact which is moreover one of the criteria used to determine whether or not a given language is to be accepted as Bantu. For this reason it is possible to examine on a general basis certain features of the class system of these languages that is involved in the use of concord.

Although the ratio between Egyptian gold coins (dinars) and those of silver (dirhams) is known to have fluctuated throughout the history of Islamic Egypt, no attempt has been made to explain the principles underlying the rate of exchange. Any such research is handicapped from the start by a deplorable failure on the part of numismatists to provide their fellow-historians with details concerning the alloys of various Egyptian coins. This drawback deprives us of any means of counterchecking the textual evidence. Nevertheless, it is the belief of the present writer that the material contained in written sources relating to the period of the Ayyūbids (A.H. 569–648/A.D. 1174–1250), allows us to ascertain certain facts concerning the contemporary exchange pattern. The analysis of the nature of that pattern shows clearly that the exchange rate of the gold and silver issues of the BaḥrI Mamlūks (A.H. 648–784/A.D. 1250– 1390), which remained fixed at 1: 20, 1: 25, and 1: 28 1/2, had its roots in the system of the Ayyūbids.

Contemporary accounts of the events which led up to the Afghan conquest of Persia in 1722 ascribe some importance to the role played by the Georgians in this catastrophe. The well-known narrative of Jonas Hanway and reports of Catholic missionaries, European travellers, and Consular agents, together with the published documents from Russian archives, indicate that the deterioration of relations between the Shah and the King of K'art'li was among the factors which assisted Mīr Maḥmūd's enterprise. In the present brief study, the archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the Quai d'Orsay, as well as Georgian sources, have been drawn on to sketch the history of Georgian relations with the government of Shah Sulṭān Ḥusayn, and follow up some suggestive indications contained in Professor Minorsky's own writings.

FOR years now the question of orthography in the South African Bantu languages has kept the authorities busy. It flares up periodically in different parts of the country, and local committees are called from time to time to deal with the conflagration.

In the past, unfortunately, these committees have too often concerned themselves with the problems of one language only, and apparently ignored both the effect their decisions would have on literature exchange and the attempts of previous committees to solve similar problems in related languages. Thus we have Zulu and Xhosa, very closely related languages, with considerable orthographical differences, while North Sotho and Tswana now differ from each other and from South Sotho, which (perhaps wisely) has set its face against orthographic change since 1906.

Until Dr. Jacob Nhlapo launched his campaign for Southern Bantu linguistic unity, few people had seriously considered the possibility of an orthographic system which would cover both the Nguni and Sotho groups, the feeling being that such unity lay in the realms of wishful thinking in view of the virtual impossibility of achieving unity within the groups.

The present article is an attempt to combine the experience of past efforts into a system that would actually be applicable to these two language groups. The acceptance of such a system would naturally involve great sacrifices of tradition and prestige from both parties. This aspect is not to be ignored, but at the same time can have little connection with the scientific elaboration of an alphabet. Consequently the argument “The Sotho (or the Nguni) would never accept such a solution” must be relegated to the sphere of practical politics.

An important passage which has often been treated, but not so far satisfactorily, is found on page 186 of the Iranian text of the Bundahišn, lines 11–12,

that is, but dēv ān kē-š pat Hindūkān paristēnd api-š vaχš pat ān butīhā mēhmān <i > čēegōn bōδˇāsaf paristēt: “the demon But is that which they worship in India and in his images a spirit is resident which is worshipped as Bōδāsaf.”

The rapid pace of the change sweeping through the Arab world over the last few decades has profoundly affected both its various cultural products and its writers' perception of their national identity, social role and the nature of literature. The aim of this paper1 is to discuss the major changes in the sociopolitical reality of the Arab world, the cultural frame of reference and the responses of one of the major literary genres in modern Arabic literature: the novel. It is assumed here that there is a vital interaction between the novel and its socio-cultural context, in that novels encode within their very structure various elements of the social reality in which they appear and within whose constraints they aspire to play a role. Their generation of meaning is enmeshed in a variety of cultural, psychological and social processes, and their reception therefore brings into operation an array of experiences necessary for the interpretive act.