The turn of events in Tehran completely frustrated whatever chance there might have been for a loan from Britain in 1898. On 21 July Durand reported that Muzaffar al-Dīn had complained that the loan was not big enough. Hewanted §2,000,000 and he would not increase the security. The Amīn al-Sultān was ‘practically in power’ (he was reinstated on 12 August 1898 as Sadr-iA'zam), and was working vīgorously against the loan. This is partly explainedby his being himself a farmer of customs from whīch he drew an estimated§ 70,000 annually and so was against any foreign control. The sum which the Shah named could not be raised in London on the security offered. Besides,after the return to power of the Amīn al-Sultān the loan discussions betweenthe British and the Persians took on an air of unreality.

In colloquial Tamil the form-class of expressives includes some items which have in each member of a reduplicated pair an initial voiced stop, alongside many with initial voiceless stops. This is unlike the form-classes of nouns and verbs which have in initial position only voiceless stops, except for some borrowings from Sanskrit or other sources. The writing system has no provisions for such initial voiced stops, except for a very few items with the ‘northern letter’ j-. The etymological dictionary shows that in general, when in colloquial Tamil these voiced stops appear in expressives, etyma that appear in the other Dravidian languages also have voiced stops; they are then to be reconstructed for South Dravidian or in some cases even for Proto-Dravidian, and it is to be assumed that they were found in all periods of Tamil even though they were not written as such.

The chapter about innovations in mosques in al-TurtŪshī's Kitāb al-hawādith wa-'l-bida‘ contains a remarkable tradition about the building of the mosque of the Prophet in Medina which deserves special attention. This tradition, not included in the orthodox collections of hadith, is of considerable importance: it seems to belong to a large body of early traditions omitted by later collectors of hadīth, and it may throw some light on an attitude of the Prophet which was later ignored by Muslim scholars. This tradition may help us to understand the views and opinions of the early Muslim scholars.

A new edition of the astronomical compilation MUL.APIN follows closely upon the recent publication of two sections of the large compendium of Babylonian astronomical omens known as Enūma Anu Enlil. The text of MUL.APIN likewise includes a section of astronomical omens, as well as a catalogue of stars, including the ‘fixed’ (ziqpu) stars, and information regarding the planets, heliacal risings, the path of the moon, calendrical intercalations, and a shadow table and water clock. This modern edition is clearly presented nd well-translated, and includes notes on both the philology and astronomy of the text.

In or about 1925 or 1926, three stones which were said to have been brought from Lo-yang, and which contain parts of a Kharoṣṭhī inscription, were shown to the Lazarist missionaries in Peking; and in 1926 a priest of the mission, Georges Prévost, who had come to the conclusion that the script was Palmyrene and the language Hebrew, produced an interpretation on this basis in a pamphlet of 31 pages. Such an explanation naturally involved its author in numerous difficulties both of language and palaeography; and since the pamphlet was printed only in a limited edition for private circulation, it might seem kinder to pass over in silence a mistake so unfortunate. Prévost was indeed aware of some of the difficulties, although he appears to have entertained no doubts at all about the identification of the script and language. But in spite of the restricted circulation of the original pamphlet, its existence has been recorded in several other publications; and the mention in print of these ‘Hebrew inscriptions’ from China, when the photograph is not easily accessible, is a potential nuisance to scholars. It is therefore desirable to prevent any future misunderstanding by making it clear that the inscription which is republished here is in fact the same as Prévost's ‘inscriptions sémitiques’.

Awld Jbir, the sons of Jbir, were eminent religious teachers in the Nilotic Sudan during the later part of the sixteenth century. Apart from their own importance, they and their kinsmen by blood and marriage formed a complex group of religious families. Information concerning numerous members of this clan is provided by the collection of biographies of Sudanese holy men known as the Ṭabaqtof Wad Ḍayfallh, which is the main source used in the present article. Two uncritical editions were published in Cairo in 1930.1

Ever since the Ta hsüeh was extracted from the Li chi to form part of the ‘Four books’, the term ke wu which appears in the sentence in the opening passage: ‘The furtherance of knowledge lies in ke wu’, has exercised the ingenuity of commentators. I do not propose here to review the vast literature on the subject, but before going on to deal with the meaning of the term a brief look at the two best-known commentaries may prove instructive. Cheng Hsiian £ comments as follows

In the following pages an attempt is made to give as comprehensive J- a list as possible, and to discuss some important features of the eras and calendars which have been or are still being used in the Muḥammadan East since the early years of Islam up to the present day, as well as of those occurring in the books of the Muslim authors. This is, however, not claimed to be complete and can by no means be considered as an exhaustive survey of all the different calendars used here and there in the Near East in Islamic times, though sometimes only for a short period or in a limited area. Many a great and famous ruler had the ambition to found an era in his own name or to reform the calendar in general use in his time. I will content myself with a simple mention of the name, or a very brief description of the eras or calendars which are sufficiently well known in all details, as well as of those concerning which we have very little information, but will try to discuss those which, in spite of the existence of ample materials relating to them, are comparatively little known or about which difference of opinions exists.

Most scholarly contributions analysing the Han Feizi tend not only to overlook the influence military literature might have had on its conception and unfolding, but also to assert that the figure of the ruler, as described in this text, and that of the commander, as portrayed in military treatises, are incompatible. In refuting this view, I shall attempt to demonstrate that the writings collected in the Han Feizi fully embrace the logic of military confrontation, which entails, among other things, the deployment of deception and irregular procedures as a necessary means to secure sovereign power and to achieve a complete control of the administration. Accordingly, I shall show that a comprehensive understanding of this important work in the history of classical Chinese thought is not possible unless one takes into account this convergence of shared ideas and concepts from both spheres, that of military strategy and that of political science as set forth in the Han Feizi.

This article includes a line-by-line translation and textual analysis of the Warring States period Chu script bamboo slip manuscript, Zigao 子羔. It argues that the manuscript differs from the transmitted Confucian tradition, but would have been considered a ru 儒 (“Confucian”) text. Unusual features include: (1) The disciple is Zigao, who is described negatively in the Lun yu. (2) The term tian zi 天子, “son-of-sky/heaven” is used literally, to refer to the divinely conceived progenitors of the three royal lineages. (3) The term san wang, “three kings”, refers to these progenitors rather than the founding rulers. (4) Confucius advocates abdication. (5) The progenitors of the dynastic lineages, rather than the founding rulers, are juxtaposed to Shun 舜, who received the rule from Yao because of his merit. A Chinese edition, with direct transcriptions and alternative readings of the Chu script graphs, is appended.

Arab historical writing was not a specialized study in the seventeenth century. Organized work in Arabic and Islamic studies was still a recent development in western Europe generally. The first modern English Arabist, William Bedwell (1562–1632), was during most of his life an isolated figure: the principal result of his studies was an Arabic lexicon which was never printed, although he bequeathed the MS to Cambridge with a fount of Arabic type for that purpose. In the third decade of the century, however, some younger scholars began to interest themselves in Arabic.

The jungle tribes (or, as the Malays style them, Orang Utan) of the Malay Peninsula are not altogether an unknown quantity from the point of view of anthropology and linguistics. A number of scholars and travellers have devoted themselves to the study of them, the most important being Hrolf Vaughan Stevens, R. Martin, W. W. Skeat, the leader of the Cambridge expedition, Annandale, and Robinson.

The language of Zanzibar par excellence is Swahili, and Zanzibar may be said to be the home of this language, not in the sense that its oldest form is spoken there, but because the Zanzibar dialect has come to be known best, owing to the writings of such men as Steere, Madan, Sacleux, and, to some extent, Krapf, though his dictionary is mainly devoted to the Mombasa dialect. Also in the days of the opening up of Africa, explorers and traders generally fixed up their caravans in Zanzibar, and these porters and soldiers journeyed into the far interior, some of them remaining there and thus making Swahili a lingua franca understood, as Steere says, along the coasts of Madagascar and Arabia, and in Central or inter-Tropical Africa, as well as by the Seedees (Sidis) in India.

The following study contains a translation of al-Bīrūnī's rendering into Arabic of the third chapter of Patañjali's Yogasūtra cum commentrary. (On this point see our translation of al-Bīrūnī's rendering of the first two chapters of Patanñjali's Yogasktra). 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, fols. 412a–419a (writen on the margins). We have also compared the text with paralled passages and expressions in al-Bīrūnī's India.

Despite their period from the tenth to the twelfth century, at the height of the Middle Ages; despite their position in Egypt, at the centre of the civilization of the Near and Middle East; and despite their prominence as the third Caliphate of Islam, the Fāṭimids lack a satisfactory modern history of their dynasty. This is partly because of the length of their life, which covers the histories of so many hundreds of years; partly because of the span of their empire from North Africa to Egypt and Syria, stretching across the histories of so many regions; and finally because, at the level of Islam itself, their empire was divided between their dawla or state and their daՙwa or doctrine. The doctrine, which focused on the Fāṭimid Imām as the quṭb or pole of faith, gave the dynasty its peculiar strength and endurance. The failure of that doctrine to supersede the Islam of the schools, however, left the Fāṭimids increasingly isolated and ultimately vulnerable. Standing outside the mainstream of Islamic tradition, the dynasty's own version of its history was disregarded. Instead, its components passed out of their original context to be incorporated into the regional or universal histories of subsequent authors. Maqrīzī was alone in compiling his Ittiՙāẓ al-ḥunafā' as a history of the dynasty in Egypt, introduced by a miscellany of information on its origins and previous career.

This monograph was originally intended as a continuation of “Swahili Phonetics”, which appeared in African Studies, vol. 1, nos. 2 and 3, 1942, but war-time typographical difficulties rendered publication impossible then. I am very grateful to the editor of the S.O.A.S. Bulletin for publishing it now. Although it may be read as a separate monograph, some knowledge of Swahili phonetics is necessarily taken for granted, and I have numbered the paragraphs as from the end of “Swahili Phonetics”, so as to allow for cross-reference to that article.

Among the Arabic documents preserved in the archives of Sicily is one relating to the affairs of the Jewish community in Siracusa at the end of thetwelfth century. Belonging by origin to the episcopal church of Cefalù, it isnow in the Archivio di Stato at Palermo (Tabulario della Chiesa Vescovile di Cefalù, Perg. no. 25), and was included in the collection published by S. Cusain 1868–82.

The early imperial period was a time of rapid change in medical ideas and practices in China. Manuscripts and artifacts excavated from tombs of the second century B.C. along the Yangtze river valley bring fresh insights into some of the processes involved in medical innovation in the early centuries of the empire. Through examining exorcistic practices and petty surgery to the refinement of a body sustained and nourished by physiological essences, this paper describes recurring patterns found in the changing medical techniques associated with stone, be that lancets, hot pressing stones or mineral prescription. After the transition to a culture of applying fine metal acupuncture needles vestiges of these treatments found in early Chinese stone culture remain enshrined in both the theory and practice of canonical medicine.