The Anglo-Ethiopian Treaty of 1902 was designed to determine the frontier between the Sudan and Ethiopia. In an annex to this treaty the British, Italian, and Ethiopian Governments embodied a number of agreed modifications to the frontier between the Sudan and Eritrea (Italy's colonia primogenita) as well as to that between Ethiopia and Eritrea. While the latter survived until the Italo-Ethiopian war of 1935–6 (and was re-established, in substance, by the British Military Administration in 1941 subsisting until the Ethiopian-Eritrean federation in 1952), the Sudan-Ethiopian frontier has remained substantially unchanged to the present day. The treaty was the culmination of protracted negotiations between the Emperor Menelik and the British Agent in Ethiopia, Lt.-Col. J. L. Harrington.

It is not yet generally accepted in European works that a distinction of grammatical gender exists in Kurdish. In the Northern group of Kurdish J dialects the Izafe appears in a number of forms, e.g. a, ā, ē, ī, and the nominal 5 oblique case ending as -ē and -ī. An analysis of these forms into a clear system, with two declensions according to grammatical gender, has been made by members of the princely family of Bedir Xan. A comparison of all the available texts in the light of their analysis serves to confirm the general validity of the paradigms and therefore of a distinction of grammatical gender, disguised to a varying extent by the generalization of certain forms. The history of a number of words of known gender suggests that the distinction is inherited.

A hitherto unexplained phenomenon is the appearance in the Central Kurdish Mukrī dialect of two forms of the nominal oblique case ending, -ē and -ī. The similarity of these forms to the corresponding Northern dialect forms is obvious. A comparison of related words in the two groups of dialects shows that in the Mukrī dialect also the difference of the forms marks a distinction of grammatical gender.

THERE can be few phrases more familiar to readers of Buddhist texts than the traditional opening of the sūtras:

Pali: evaṃ me sutaṃ ekaṃ samayaṃ bhagavā Sāvatthiyaṃ viharati.

Sanskrit: evam mayā śrutam ekasmin samaye bhagavān Śrdvastyaṃ viharati sma.

It might appear that the Qur'ān does not establish the wuḍū', or ‘lesser ablution’. It mentions only ġasl and tayammum the distinction between which is most clearly expressed in Q. 4: 43:

Do not approach the [place of] prayer when you are befuddled, until you know what you are saying, nor in a state of ritual impurity (junub)—except for those merely passing through [the place of prayer]—until you have cleansed yourselves (taūtasilū); and if you should be ill or on a journey, or come from the lavatory or have touched women, and cannot find water, then make for (tayammamū) some pure soil and wipe your faces and your hands

Puns stand as a bridge between rhyme and metaphor. Sound—that characteristic of rhyme—combines with the explosion of semantic implications associated with metaphor into the form of word play or punning. The quality of blending of sound together with meaning remains the best definition of what constitutes a pun. Certainly it is possible to create a classification system for puns which will lead to a workable description of the phenomenon. Interesting attempts along this line have been made working with Arabic, Biblical Hebrew, and English material, for example. Such efforts tend to rely on the formal aspects of the words used in the puns in order to produce their classificatory systems. That is, they speak of puns using the ‘literal’ meaning of two words, puns relying on ‘metaphoric’ meanings, and so forth; or they speak of the formal relationship between the words in question in terms of the combinations and permutations of letters and sounds. The aim of this paper, however, is not to circumscribe the use of puns in the Qur՚ān, although certainly a number of formal ranges of punning employment will emerge in the course of the treatment. Rather, the goal is to see what puns convey to the reader of the Qur՚ān, to see how the sound of music combines with sound argument within the text of scripture. Leaving the definition of word play or pun open (indeed, even using those two words interchangeably) allows the broadest view of the phenomenon to be embraced.

Avatāra, or the periodical incarnation of the deity, is a cardinal doctrine of the Vaiṣṇava sect of Brahmanical Hinduism. The increasing number of the avatāras is an indication of the popularity of this doctrine both among the theologians and among the devout laity. The modest list of three (Varāha, Kūrma, and Matsya) of the Brāhmaṇa literature grows into a list of 10 traditional avatāras (Matsya, Kūrma, Varāha, Nṛsiṃha, Vāmana, Paraśurāma, Rāma, Kṛṣṇa, Buddha, and Kalkin) in the Mahābhārata, and ends up in a still longer list of 22 in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa. The latter has in its inflated list quite a few ‘minor’ (aṃśa) avatāras, mostly consisting of names of great sages renowned for their austerities and learning, e.g. Nārada, Nara, Nārāyaṇa, Kapila, Dattātreya, Ṛṣabha, and Veda-Vyāsa.

It is over 100 years since Brian Houghton Hodgson was persuaded by what he described as ‘great peculiarities in the use of the pronouns’ in certain of the languages of the southern Himalayan region to ‘divide the Himalayan races primarily into two groups, distinguished by the respective use of simple or non-pronomenalised [sic], and of complex or pronomenalised languages’. This method of classification was taken over by Sten Konow in the third volume of the Linguistic Survey of India and has been widely accepted by linguists since that time. ‘Pronominalization’ has been taken to mean pronominal usage of a certain kind, particularly within the verbal complex, and has on the whole been regarded as a non-typical feature of Tibeto-Burman languages, probably to be accounted for by alien influences, and restricted, within the Tibeto-Burman family, to the languages grouped together by Konow under the name ‘Himalayan’.

The expression pramāṇabhūta is attested in a number of Indian grammaticaland philosophical texts, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, its existence in texts no longer accessible inSanskrit being inferable from their translations in Tibetan where we find its standard equivalent tshad mar gyur pa. But the grammatical correctness and the interpretation of the term have given rise to a good deal of discussion and exegesis. Some commentators have taken up the grammatical question as to why we have the form pramāṇabhūta rather than the at first sight perhaps more normal form pramāṇībhūta. And in the Buddhist Pramāṇa-school a problem arises as to the precise meaning of the expression pramāṇabhūta employed as an epithet of a person. For by Dignāga and Dharmakirti pramāṇa has been exhaustively divided into pratyakṣa ‘(direct) perceptual knowledge’ and anumāna ‘inferential knowledge’, so that in the usage of their school at least a person (puruṣa, pudgala)—as opposed to knowledge or a cognition (jñāna = šes pa, or dhi/buddhi = blo)— would not strictly speaking be considered in the first instance as a pramāṇa.

§ 1. The Pahlavi text treated in this article was first published by M. E. BLOCHET from a codex of the Bibliothėque Nationale of Paris—the manuscrit Supplément persan, no. 1216, p. 1—4— in the Revue de L'Histoire des Religions, Paris 1895, vol. 32, pp. 18—23 of the appendix, and translated by him with notes in the same volume of the Revue pp. 233—241. It was published for the second time in the PahlT. II, pp. 109—114 and edited by JAMASP-ASANA (Bombay 1913) with collations from the mss. JE. JJ. MK. and DP.

The last active period in the tradition of Sanskrit poetics, although associated with scholars who for the first time explicitly identified themselves as new, has generally been castigated in modern histories as repetitious and devoid of thoughtfulness. This paper presents a case study dealing with competing analyses of a single short poem by two of the major theorists of this period, Appayya Dīkṣita (sixteenth century) and Jagannātha Paṇḍitarāja (seventeenth century). Their arguments on this one famous poem touch in new ways on the central questions of what the role of poetics had become within the Sanskrit world and the way in which it should operate in relation to other systems of knowledge and literary cultures.

It is well known from relatively recent Ethiopic tradition that Ethiopia was once ruled by a queen called Gudit, Yodit, Isat or Gaՙwa, with both positive and negative characteristics. On the one hand she was a beautiful woman of the Ethiopian royal family, much like the Queen of Sheba, and on the other she was a despicable prostitute who, at a time of political weakness, killed the Ethiopian king, captured the throne, and as a cruel ruler destroyed Aksum, the capital, persecuted the priests, and closed the churches.

Khowar, the predominant language of Chitral and of the adjacent parts of the Gilgit district, is characterized on the one hand by a tenacious preservation of ancient IA. sounds, forms, and words, and on the other hand by the existence of a remarkably large number of foreign elements. According to Sir George Grierson, Khowar “in some essential particulars agrees rather with the Ghalcha languages to the north”. And, drawing attention to the fact that the Chitral valley was formerly inhabited by Kalashas, he expresses the opinion that the originally homogeneous Dardic population of Kafiristan, Chitral, and Gilgit “was subsequently split into two by a wedge of Khō invasion, representing members of a different, but related, tribe coming from the north [of the Hindukush]”. In whatever way one may be inclined to interpret the position there can be no doubt that Kho., when compared with the neighbouring Dardic dialects, presents many peculiarities which deserve our attention.

Oertel, in Lectures on the Study of Language, writes (in the footnote on p. 304): “The effect of taboo on the lexicon of savage tribes deserves further investigation.”

The period of nearly three centuries which lies between Selīm I's overthrow of the Mamluk sultanate in 1517, and Bonaparte's landing at Alexandria in 1798 is one of the most obscure in the history of Muslim Egypt. For the latter part of the period, from the early twelfth/eighteenth century, there are ample materials for the reconstruction of the political history in the famous chronicle by Jabartī. The Ottoman invasion, and the years which immediately succeeded it have also received some attention, thanks to the detailed information provided by the chronicler Ibn Iyās. In contrast, there has been virtually no investigation of the last seventy-five years of the sixteenth century and the whole of the seventeenth.

THE following table shows: in columns 1 and 2 two separate series of personal affixes; in column 3 the present tense of the verb ‘to be’; in column 4 the personal inflexions of the present tenses of all other verbs; and in column 5 the personal pronouns in their separable forms.

There is no need to explain what I mean by “Biblical Hebrew” (BH): I refer, of course, to the language of the major part of the Old Testament (OT) which is written in a Canaanite tongue clearly distinguished from the few chapters in Daniel and Ezra which are composed, or at any rate extant, in Aramaic. While we have no knowledge of the precise nature of the language spoken by the Hebrew immigrants into Canaan, it is likely that from a linguistic point of view the OT owes more to the vanquished Canaanites than to the conquering Hebrews. The latter are called 'iḇrīm already in the Patriarchal narratives (Gen. xiv, 13, xl, 15, etc.), but their language ('iḇrīṯ) is never as such mentioned in the OT. This may, of course, be owing to one of those purely fortuitous circumstances in the transmission of the ancient Hebrew vocabulary with which this paper is in part concerned. Whether yәhūḏīṯ ‘Jewish’ (2 Kings xviii, 26, Isa. xxxvi, 11, etc.), śәṗaṯ kәna'an ‘the language of Canaaan’ (Isa. xix, 18), and 'iḇrīṯ ‘Hebrew’ (first attested in the prologue to Ben Sira) are wholly identical is—as I have endeavoured to show elsewhere—not fully established.

The odes of Hafiz have been for some 600 years a source of delight to Persians, and an object of their serious study. To Europeans they have been known for less than half that time; yet here too, many scholars and poets have laboured to understand and interpret them. Much remains, no doubt, still to be done; but it is unlikely that anyone will now discover in the poems wholly new ranges of meaning, which have been hidden from generations of scholars among the poet's own countrymen. Any claim to such discovery must necessarily be subjected to the strictest scrutiny.

The great inscription of Darius I at Bisitun has hitherto been the only Achaemenid inscription known to exist not only in the three versions carved on the rock-face—Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian—but also in an Aramaic translation on papyrus. The fragmentary scroll containing the Aramaic text was first published by Sachau in 1911. In general, the Aramaic version agrees closely with the Babylonian and is therefore comparatively easy to interpret in spite of its poor state of preservation. However, both Sachau and all later editors have been baffled by one passage in the last column of the Aramaic text. The lines preceding and following correspond, at least approximately, to §§44 and 49 of the Babylonian: ‘King Darius states: King, whoever you are, who may arise after me, protect yourself well from lies. Do not trust the man who lies … Believe what I did and tell the truth to the people. Do not conceal (it). If you do not conceal these matters, but you do tell the people, may Ahura Mazda protect you …’. The intervening lines have not been identified up to now and their meaning has remained obscure.

The following study contains a translation of al-Bīrūnī's rendering into Arabic of the second chapter of Patañjali's Yogasūtra cum commentary. (On this point see our translation of al-Bīrūnī's rendering of the first chapter of Patañjali's Yogasūtra.) This translation is based on Ritter's edition of the Arabic text. Comparison has been made with the unique MS of Ritter's text: Köprülü, 1589, folios 412a–419a (written on the margins). We have also compared the text with parallel passages and expressions in al-Bīrūnī's India. In some cases the passages in India are identical, while in others they show differences. Sometimes these differences are merely stylistic. In other cases there is a doctrinal divergence.

The present paper is an attempt to throw preliminary light on heretical Sufi groups in the Arabic-Islamic world in the early-modern period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries). Previous scholarship on antinomian Sufism has tended to focus on earlier centuries and on Persian- and Turkish-speaking groups. Evidence suggests that there is also a history to be written of antinomian mystical groups in the Arabic-speaking world in later centuries. On the eve of modernity in the Arabic-speaking Middle East, groups and individuals existed who rejected or ignored the prevalent scholarly interpretation of Islam and challenged the authority of the class of religious scholars (ʿulamā'). A number of sources from the period, usually hostile and/or satirical, attest to the existence of such groups and allow us to reconstruct the overall contours of their outlook.