The contents of the document which forms the main subject of the present article are somewhat slender and cannot be appreciated outside the context of the struggles between the Ottomans and the Safavids for the incorporation of the Turkman tribes settled in the territories separating their states. Many points of the situation await further investigation and our summary will be as brief as the complicated subject admits.

The home of the Ottoman dynasty was in the north-western corner of Anatolia, but, by the middle of the fourteenth century, the Turks had crossed over to the northern side of the Straits and the Balkan territories became the nursery of the Ottoman empire.

The normal method of settling questions of inheritance in Babylonia was not by testament but according to a division among the male heirs. In legal terms, then, inheritance was normally ab intestato in Babylonia. The regulation of the size of the portions of the various heirs in a family varied according to local custom and regulation. Testaments are known sporadically from Old Assyrian and Middle Assyrian sources but are not found among the documents from Babylonian proper. In place of testaments we find posthumous regulations of inheritance among the heirs and parental regulation of inheritance by means of gift, i.e. donatio mortis causa. Such documents are infrequent, and we must assume, not only that normal inheritance was ab intestato, but also that frequently, and perhaps as a general rule, the parental estate was administered jointly by the heirs.

The Islamic institution of the ribāṭ appears to have made its initial appearance along the North African coast, in what is today Tunisia, during the second/eighth century. In the first phase of its development, the ribāṭ was essentially a fortress located at a sensitive point along the Islamic frontier, garrisoned by pious individuals who envisaged their vocation as participation in the jihād, the defence of the lands of Islam against external foes.

The word eduka first occurs in Sanskrit in the Mahābhārata. It is accepted by the Poona edition but there are several variants. The passage is of interest because of the light it throws upon the meaning: viparītaś ca loko'yam bhaviṣyaty adharottaraḥ eḍūkān pūjayiṣyanti varjayiṣyanti devatāḥ śūdrāḥ paricariṣyanti na dvijān yuga-saṃkṣaye (64) āśrameṣu maharṣīnāṃ brāhmaṇāvasaiheṣu ca deva-sthāneṣu caityeṣu nāgāndm ālayeṣu ca (65) eḍuka-cihnā pṛthivī na deva-gṛha-bhūṣitā1

LAMALANGA is situated on the north-west coast of the island called Raga, or Araga (Pentecost Island), in the central New Hebrides, Melanesia.

The head station of the Melanesian Mission on Raga is at Lamalanga which itself is on the coast; but the people who speak the language represented in this grammar live on the hills just above the Mission Station. Dr. R. H. Codrington published a grammar of the language spoken at Vun Marama on the same coast, a few miles north of Lamalanga.

The advancement of learning is learning is chiefly made in these three ways—by pure research, by applied research, and by interesting the general public in the results achieved. The last item is not the least important, although scientists, especially those engaged in pure research, are apt to discount and even to ignore it. In any event it is essential to publish the fruits of research among fellow-scientists for criticism, appraisement, and development. The spark of learning, which passes from master to pupil, is so feeble that unless fanned to a vigorous flame by some external agency it is apt to flicker out. It was only by a stroke of good fortune that the works of Mendel were brought to light after a long lapse of years.

This article takes as its point of departure the conclusions drawn in Professor Arberry's paper “Orient Pearls at Random Strung”. It is hopefully intended both to add to those conclusions in their own sphere of poetical criticism and to suggest something of the relevance of the problem as a whole in the broad structure of Persian thought. (It seems scarcely necessary to add that the extent to which that will imply Islamic thought and Eastern thought generally is, in every sense of the word, incalculable.)

D. H. Müller says of the Śheri poems which he published in 1907 that they are ‘in einem älteren Mehri-Dialekt abgefasst, der dem Überlieferer nicht ganz verstandlich war’. He goes on to say that despite his best efforts he has not been able to make complete sense of all of the poems he wrote down.

THE paradigms that may be set up for the nominals in Tigrinya1 in terms of the category of number (established on syntactical and further morphological grounds) consist of two members, conveniently termed ‘singular’ and ‘plural’. The morphological analysis for the forms placed in this grammatical relationship may, for some of them, be given in terms of ‘external flection’ or ‘sumxation’, but for many forms, including those in commonest use, the differences of syllabic pattern, and other differences throughout the entire forms, justify the use of the traditional term ‘broken plural’. It is the purpose of this paper to make a phonological analysis to handle the morphological relation between the broken plurals and the singular forms with which they are grammatically paired.

It was Harold Fleming who first drew the attention of linguists to the Bayso language. Reports concerning the existence of such a people on Gidicho Island in Lake Abaya go back to the beginning of the century and descriptions of various cultural and economic aspects of the life of the Bayso and other inhabitants of Gidicho appeared subsequently; but concerning the language nothing was available until the publication of Fleming's germinal article in 1964. The latter followed a brief period of work on the island with a Bayso speaker. The 216-item vocabulary list and brief indications of the grammar have nevertheless proved tantalizingly suggestive to everyone working on questions of genetic relationships within Cushitic. Alongside the Bayso material the article also presented the first data on the Rendille language of north-east Kenya. Fleming's conclusions that Bayso, Rendille, Boni, and Somali constitute a Macro-Somali group were seen as linguistic support for H. S. Lewis's hypothesis of a south Ethiopian (rather than a northern Horn of Africa) origin for the Somali. Since the initial presentation of these proposals, linguistic research into the Dasenech (Galab), Elmolo, and to a limited extent Arbore, languages has led German linguists to propose an extension of Fleming's Macro-Somali to include these languages. Until very recently the limited nature of the data available on many of the relevant languages had tended to detract from the strength of arguments about their internal relationships. Heine's reports of his recent researches on Rendille, Elmolo, and Boni, as well as his work on the diachrony of the ‘Sam languages’ have done much to advance our knowledge. To date, however, the material available on Bayso has remained restricted to what was presented by Fleming in 1964. The primary purpose of the present paper is to set out the results of research conducted for a period of 17 days during September 1976.

Kemant is spoken in the districts of Kärkär and Čəlga, to the north and west of the town of Gondar in north-west Ethiopia. The type of Kemant described in this paper is that of Kärkär only, collected in Gondar itself and in and around Təkəl Dangay, a little to the north of Gondar. Kemant belongs to the Agaw group of Cushitic languages.2 The material for this paper was collected in the field during the winter of 1973–4. Several informants were used, but principally Taddäsä Zäwdu of Təkəl Dəngay and Gäbrä ∃gziabəher Alämu of Gondar. It is not possible here to give any accurate figure for the number of Kemant speakers. However, Kemant does appear to be under heavy pressure from Amharic, and all my informants were bilingual in both Amharic and Kemant.

In al-Wāqidī's Kitdb al-maghāzī and in that part of Ibn Ishāq's Sīra which deals with Muhammad's life in Medina and is contained in Ibn Hishrm's version of al-Bakkā'Ī's recension, there are similar and sometimes identical passages. Since Ibn Ishāq is the earlier of the two authorities, it has been assumed on a plausibly a priori basis that al-Wāqidī modelled himself on his predecessor in the arrangement of his material, and drew from him much of the basic warp of his narrative to which he then added his own weft.

The attribution of the book to al-Farabi rests solely on the note on the flyleaf, which can, however, be shown to be spurious. Examining the manuscript some years ago, I noticed that the fly-leaf was pasted over the recto of the first folio of the manuscript, and that underneath some writing was faintly visible. The fly-leaf was then separated from the folio of the manuscript, and the recto of the folio turned out to be in effect the title-page of the manuscript.

Those who wish to ascertain ‘le dernier état de ces questions’ will be grateful to Professor G. Dumézil who has now summed up for us in brief compass his immense labours of nearly a quarter of a century in the study of Indo-European religion. Although the book does not cover the whole wide range of his researches, it does deal comprehensively (and with full bibliographical notes) with the central dogma:

'La comparaison des plus vieilles traditions des divers peuples parlant des langues indo-europeennes a révélé un fond considérable d'éléments communs, et d'éléments non pas isolés, mais organises en structures complexes, dont les autres peuples de l'ancien monde n'offrent pas l'équivalent. L'xposé qu'on va lire est consacré à la plus importante de ces structures'(introduction, p. 5).

At the moment, both in the British Protectorate and in Somalia, the adoption of a standard orthography for the Somali language is fiercely debated. In discussion of the merits of the various scripts proposed, technical problems of orthography have to some extent been lost sight of. Nationalistic arguments have favoured ‘Somali writing’ (‘Ismaaniya) while religious or Pan-Islamic arguments have supported an Arabic script. This article discusses an orthography invented some 20 years ago by a well-known Gadabuursi sheikh, Sheikh ‘Abduramaan Sh. Nuur, the present Government Qā1E0D;ī of Borama District in the west of the British Protectorate. The script has not, as far as I am aware, been previously described in the literature on Somaliland. I publish it here with no intention of attempting to contribute to the already abundant confusion in the choice of a standard orthography for Somali.

Since 1896, when I-ching's famous book on Buddhism in India and South East Asia was made available in an English translation by J. Takakusu, Western Sanskritists have looked with special interest at chapter xxxiv, on the Sanskrit grammarians. The general reaction has been one of disappointment; and for many years most Indologists would have agreed with many of A. Barth's criticisms: ‘Il demeure done bien acquis que, parmi des renseignements du plus grand prix, comme les dates de la Kāçikā Vṛitti et du grammairien Bhartṛihari, I-tsing nous a servi quelques bourdes énormes; par exemple, quand il fait du Mahābhāshya un commentaire sur la Kāçikā Vṛitti; quand il distingue entre le Vākyapadīya de Bhartṛihari et son commentaire sur le Mahābhāshya’; and more besides. Ironically, it is now known that the date given for Bhartṛhari is wrong, and that the latter did write both the Vākyapadīya and a commentary on the Mahābhāṣya. Nevertheless, other errors continue to be quoted.

It is about three-quarters of a century since the maryannu (maryanni) of Mitanni and its dependencies, appearing in Hittite and Egyptian records of the second millennium B.C., were first discussed in connexion with the IndoIranians. In 1910 H. Winckler interpreted the word as a title belonging to Aryan infiltrators from the north, who had come to form an aristocracy among the Hurrians; and he recorded the suggestion by F. C. Andreas connecting it with Vedic márya ‘ young man, man, hero ’. Subsequently W. F. Albright presented a carefully documented case for considering the maryannu to be primarily ‘chariot-warriors’, arguing that from about 1700 to 1200 B.C. ‘chariots played the same role in warfare that cavalry did later, and the chariot-warriors occupied the same social position that was held by the⃛ feudal knights of the Middle Ages’. He further pointed out, with regard to Vedic márya, that a semantic development from ‘young man’ to ‘warrior’ is widely attested. Thereafter R. T. O'Callaghan adduced yet more evidence from Egyptian and cuneiform sources to confirm that ‘from the mid-fifteenth century to the midtwelfth century B.C., and from the Mitanni kingdom down through Palestine beyond Ascalon, the term maryannu is to be understood primarily as a noble who is a chariot-warrior’. The area was one where Indo-Aryan names occur at about the same period; and in the fourteenth-century Kikkuli treatise from Boghaz-köy, on the training of chariot-horses, Indo-Aryan technical terms appear. There were solid grounds therefore for thinking that Indo-Aryans, bringing with them horses from the Asian steppes, had played a leading part in developing chariotry in the Near East at that time, and that it was this which enabled a group of them to become locally dominant there.