Before broaching my subject I should like to explain the reason why a serial number has been added to the title of this article. A list of my publications will be found in the BSOAS., 1953, xiv/3, pp. 69–81, but as a variety of subjects has interested me during my career, readers may be baffled by the seemingly disconnected array of titles. In fact, my original intention was to integrate my studies in separate books, but on seeing that for both material and personal reasons this plan had no chances of success, I decided to take every opportunity for publishing the material collected—not only to solve some definite problems, but also to show the methods which I would have wished to apply to my subjects, in the light of my experience and the observations made in some more developed fields. This underlying preoccupation is what to my mind connects my writings. On the other hand, I should like to draw the attention of users of my ‘ specimens ’ to some particular classes of my studies; in a word, to their serial character.

It is a remarkable fact that of the Achehnese language, one of the most important languages of Sumatra, no grammatical description has ever appeared in print that meets minimum requirements. The only grammar extant is K. H. van Langen's Handleiding voor de beoefening der Atjehsche taal (The Hague, 1889). But notwithstanding Van Langen's laudable effort under difficult conditions, his work does not do justice to the language. There are two main objections. First, it is based on the written language. This is (or was in Van Langen's time) exclusively written in Arabic script, which clearly represents an earlier stage of the Achehnese language when certain phonemes had a different value and certain finals existed which have now been dropped. But Van Langen based even his transliteration in Latin characters on these archaic and obsolete Arabic spellings. The second objection is that the author never realized that Achehnese is an inflecting language, and treated certain personal prefixes as indicating a passive voice and a gerund instead of flexional elements of the verb. One aspect of his work is, however, still useful: the chrestomathy which forms a part of it, written in Arabic script, with a transliteration and a translation of some of the texts.

John Dryden's ‘Religio laid’, a defence in rhyming couplets of English Protestantism, is not an obvious point of departure for this study of a Muslim poem about juristic authority. There is value however in the comparison for the contrasts that emerge. Dryden's poem first defends Christianity against an Enlightenment Deism, and then situates English Protestantism between the two extremes of Papism and ‘the private spirit’ (‘Occasioned by great zeal and little thought’). Ibn ‘Ābidīn's ‘Chaplets on the mufti's task’, written in the nineteenth century, is a highly condensed version of a conventional academic work of the type sometimes called ‘manuals for muftis’ or adab al-muftī. It aims to inform the professional mufti and the educated jurist of a methodology for the discovery of a rule of law. It speaks of secure authority; very different from the challenged, if triumphant, authority of English Protestantism in the seventeenth century.

In the course of their expansion into Central Asia the Muslims came into contact with Turks, either settled and Iranized or else nomadic and marauding in their mode of life. As early as the time of the Caliph ‘Uthmān, when the conquest of Khurāsān was barely complete, there were, according to the historical sources, a number of incursions by Turkish nomads into that province in the neighbourhood of Marw and even as far as Nīshāpūr. Under the Umayyads, however, the Muslims came into direct contact with both the Western and the Northern Turkish states. In the period 86–96/705–15, under Qutaiba b. Muslim, the famous Umayyad governor, the Muslims won their first important victory over the Western Turks. Under Naṣr b. Sayyār, in the year 121/738–9, the Muslims broke the power of the Western Turks by defeating the dominant group amongst them, that of the TürgeshKhāqāns. The empire of the Northern Turks was destined to come to an end shortly afterwards in the year 744.

The Pahlavi inscription discovered in 1936 by the expedition of the Oriental Institute of Chicago is perhaps the most important document of the Sasanian empire. It was found at the eastern wall of the so-called “ Kaaba of Zoroaster ” which was probably a Firetemple, in front of the Achsemenian tombs at Naqšl-i-Rustam.

We owe our thanks to Professor Sprengling, of Chicago, who unhesitatingly undertook the task of publishing this very difficult inscription although previously Pahlavi was not among the numerous fields of his researches. As early as January, 1937, a preliminary transcript of the text together with a short commentary was published 1; this edition was closely followed by a further contribution of Professor Sprengling 2 which was accompanied by a photograph of the inscription, thus facilitating the participation of other scholars in the interpretation of the new monument 3; for much remains to be done.

This article is based on letters from the Geniza. The writers were merchants who dealt in imports and exports between Egypt and other countries of the Mediterranean basin. These merchants were part of the Jewish elite and maintained close ties with the Muslim authorities. They enjoyed considerable status with these authorities, who co-operated with the merchants, especially in the transport of goods; some of the high officials were, in fact, ship-owners. The administration of the time took a great interest in imports and exports, and would at times confiscate goods required by the army. The article reviews a series of citations from letters thus examining the relationship between the merchants and the authorities. The second part deals with the evidence of the droughts found in the merchants' letters; it is interesting to compare the details on droughts with the information in the Arabic sources. The third part discusses the information contained in the Geniza documents on the conquest of Jerusalem (638). This is followed by a discussion of two figures who are also known from Arabic sources: Manasseh b. Abraham Ibn al-Qazza¯z, and Barjawa¯n. The letters also reflect the restrictive measures against Jews and Christians in the days of Caliph al-Ha¯kim.

This article examines the competing theories dealing with the origin of the so-called plural suffix -men in Chinese. Their internal consistency is assessed both diachronically and—in a novel approach—on the conceptual level, that is, with reference to the fundamental value of -men today. As a result, the theses favouring an autochthonous development come out on top, to the detriment of those postulating an exogenous source. -Men is in all likelihood an outcome of the grammaticalization of the notion of ‘clan’, operating on a substratum of ancient Chinese collectives.

The absence in Socotri of a t- Prefix in some imperfect verbal forms has been noted briefly in a number of learned atricles, but this important feature of the language has not been adequately documented or analysed. It is possible, however, to show that the non-occurrence of a t- prefix is observable only in the imperfect forms of certain types of verb, principally the causative verbs, simple quadriliteral verbs, simple hollow verbs, certain intensive-conative verbs, and, it seems likely, the passives of simple verbs.

Yenitsa, in Ottoman Turkish Yenije-i Vardar or Vardar Yenijesi, is a small town some 50 km. west of Thessaloniki. Situated at the foot of Mount Païkon, near the lake of the same name (which was drained several years ago), it was in the Ottoman period an important Turkish military and cultural centre, particularly as being the base of the ghāzīs, the ‘warriors for the Faith’, who had followed the great march-lord (uj-begi) Evrenos on his campaigns in Thrace and Macedonia. Very early, perhaps as early as 1372, Evrenos had come to Central Macedonia with his followers and settled in this place, where already there was probably a Byzantine castle. There soon grew up a township, from which Evrenos and his sons and grandsons set out on repeated raids in all directions, devastating the countryside and preparing the way for the definitive occupation of Macedonia, and later of Albania, by the ‘central’ apparatus under the command of the sultan. It is probable that the several occupations of various towns in this area, such as Veria (Turkish: Karaferye) and Thessaloniki, were the achievement of these raiders. Yenije soon had a con-siderable Turkish population, so that in 1430, after the final occupation of Thessaloniki, Murad II was able to order the deportation from there to the newly-conquered city of a thousand Turkish families without reducing Yenije's prosperity.

A discussion of the mathematical manuscripts of Mauretania requires an overall introduction to this almost completely unexplored literature.

Its foundations must first be established. Between the years 1978 and 1985 a project financed initially by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (BRD), then by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, was entrusted to Dr. Rainer Oßwald and myself by the Mauretanian Ministry of Cultural Affairs. Its objective was the collection and protection of the selected Arabic manuscript literature of Mauretania.

IN October 1948, the Governor of Hong Kong appointed a committee to consider the position of Chinese law and custom in that colony. The report of this committee, which was published in February 1953,1 will have drawn attention to the fact that the old family law of China, quite apart from the limited recognition given to it by the courts, continues to exercise considerable influence on the lives of millions of Chinese, not only in Hong Kong, but in the other British territories of South-East Asia. In China itself, as regards matters of the family, the Civil Code of the former National Government had never, over most of the country and for the mass of the people, any very eifectual force, and the customary law continued to exist in almost undiminished vigour until the establishment of the People's Government in 1949.2 Since then the situation has changed completely. New laws regarding marriage and property are effectively enforced, and have everywhere replaced the old customs and, what is still more important, an extremely efficient system of mass-education in the principles of Communism will before long have expelled from people's minds those beliefs on which the old Chinese law was based. From now on, apart from Formosa, it is only in Hong Kong and among the communities of overseas Chinese throughout South-East Asia that Chinese customary family law will continue to exist, but even with such limitations it is still of sufficient importance to make its study of practical significance.

The distinction made between the ākhyāyikā and the kathā by the writers on Sanskrit Poetics is well known. We propose in this paper to consider how far the prescriptions of the rhetoricians apply to the few existing specimens of the ākhyāyikā and the kathā by Subandhu and Bāṇa-bhaṭṭa, and what light, if any, they throw on the development of these species of prose composition in Classical Sanskrit.

Considering the unique position of the Modern South Arabian languages within Semitic it is surprising how little has been published concerning them. A case in point is the Jibbāli language of Dhofar, whose extreme phonetic and phonological complexity should arouse the interest of the general linguist as well as of the Semitic specialist. This becomes clear in even a brief perusal of the most notable pioneer study of the language, T. M. Johnstone's Jibbali lexicon.

Although in Chinese culture surgery has not usually been seen as a major part of medical practice, during the Sui (A.D. 581–618) and the Tang dynasties (A.D. 618–907) it showed a marked flowering in the field of ophthalmology. There are indications that it was closely related to Indian medical and surgical ideas which were transmitted to China. The evidence is found in historical records, popular literature and also in medical works and compilations. Interestingly, the origins of this transmission are seen in Chinese Buddhist canonical literature which emerged during the introduction of Buddhism into China in the late Han period (A.D. 25–220) and the mutual contacts which followed immediately thereafter.

Just before the intellectual impact of Britain on Indian Islam a religious reform movement had swept over Muslim India. Although this movement itself does not come into the scope of the present essay, we note it at the outset because: (a) Intellectually it sought to regenerate Islam by going back to the pure and simple Islam of the early period and tried to weaken the hold of medieval authorities on the Muslim mind. Consequently, although reactionary in itself, its ‘purification’ impetus prepared, in some measure, the way for subsequent intellectual developments.

Amar Chitra Katha (Immortal Picture Stories) is India's leading comic book series, featuring hundreds of mythological titles about the Hindu gods. Founder Anant Pai initially eliminated all miracles, believing them to be unscientific interpolations. But while producing Tales of Durga (no. 176, 1978), he declared that the comic must be an “authentic” recreation of the Devī Māhātmya scripture, and that all miracles in the classical Sanskrit text must be faithfully rendered in the comic. This article examines the discourse of authenticity that surrounds the production of Tales of Durga in particular and this comic book series more generally. Through a careful reading of the Devī Māhātmya, content analysis of Tales of Durga, a consideration of the unique characteristics of the comic book medium, and interviews with comic book producers, this study provides insight into modern interpretations of the Devī Māhātmya and evolving Hindu attitudes towards the martial goddess Durga.

The present paper discusses the synchronic status and the origin of the semi-vowels /j/ and /w/ in Old Tibetan on the basis of modern Tibetan languages and other Sino-Tibetan languages, in particular Rgyalrong and Lolo-Burmese.

THIS paper is the outcome of a short study of the pronunciation of an Ossete born in Dzaeusegi-hseu (Wladikavkaz). The Digoron dialect of Ossetic is my informant's mother tongue, but as he left his homeland more than twenty years ago and has in the interval probably had more occasion to speak Kussian and Polish than his own language, the possibility that his pronunciation has been thereby affected cannot be discounted. At the suggestion of Professor H. W. Bailey a short investigation of his pronunciation of Ossetic was undertaken. Some of the material used was taken from notes put at my disposal by Professor Bailey, to whom I am greatly indebted for his generous help and for much invaluable information and criticism. Other material was found in a collection of folk-stories, the Pamyatniki narodnogo tvorchestva Osetin, or was supplied by my informant himself. The tentative nature of any linguistic analysis based on a short study of the pronunciation of one speaker is obvious, and it will be understood that the findings are only valid within these limitations.

The typographical conventions adopted in this paper are as follows:—

Italic type is used to show the roman spelling of Digoron as used in the Pamyatniki or by my informant.

Heavy type is used for the phonetic transcription of my informant's pronunciation.

Heavy type in single quotes is used to indicate the units of what may be called “unuttered speech”.

The use of all three conventions is demonstrated by the following statement:— “nivәrun niværun is the realization of the junction of ‘ni’ and әvәrun’”.

The Portuguese presence in Sri Lanka dates back to the early sixteenth century and lasted some hundred and fifty years. It gave rise to a Creole language based on Portuguese, Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole (SLPC), which Dalgado (1936) considered to be the most vigorous of the Portuguese Creoles.