One of the interesting features of the Pahlavi Bundahišn, the great work on cosmogony and cosmology completed in the ninth century A.D., is the manner in which traditional, orthodox beliefs derived from the Zoroastrian scriptures appear side by side with later and even contemporary scientific opinions. While in some parts, notably the astronomical chapter II, the resulting incongruity is undisguised, in others there has been a conscious effort of syncretism. The astrological sections are a case in point.

THERE still remain many interesting and important problems connected A with, the emergence in the 14th century of the Turkman federations of the Qara-qoyunlu (780–874/1378–1469) and Aq-qoyunlu (780–908/1378–1502). The roots of the Persian risorgimento under the Safavids (1502–1722) go deep into this preparatory period. On the internal policy of the Qara-qoyunlu our documentation is still insufficient. Having succeeded the Jalayirs the Qara-qoyunlu must have inherited the administrative pattern evolved under the Mongol il-khans.1

It is remarkable that, of the many more or less fragmentary Manichaean writings in Iranian languages discovered in Central Asia at the beginning of this century,1 one of the few texts directly attributable to Mani himself has still, three-quarters of a century after its first partial publication, not appeared in a full and satisfactory edition, with translation. ‘Mani;apos;s Šābuhragān, in which he summarized his teachings in Persian for the enlightenment of Sabuhr I,;apos; is known from nine more or less fully preserved sheets (i.e. of at least two pages each) of one MS. and some eight or nine smaller pieces. The larger fragments were first published in transcription in 1904, in F. W. K. Müller's pioneering ‘Handschriften-Reste in Estrangelo-Schrift aus Turfan, Chinesisch-Turkistan’, II, with an incomplete interlinear translation and partly out of order. The text alone was then republished in transliteration (in Hebrew letters) in C. Salemann's ‘Manichaeische Studien’, I. There the matter largely rested until 1930, when A. V. W. Jackson used the text extensively in his article ‘A sketch of the Manichaean doctrine concerning the future life’. In an article published posthumously in 1946, A. Ghilain established, without seeing either photographs or the originals, that the two fragments of M 473 glassed together as a and b, and published by Müller as they so appeared, are to be fitted together in the reverse order, the lower piece b above the upper a. Most recently Mary Boyce has included the text of the fragments M 473, 475, 477, 482, 472 and 470, so ordered correctly but with the omission of a number of incomplete passages, as text z in her Reader in Manichaean Middle Persian and Parthian.

The purpose of this essay is to provide a convenient introduction to the Arabic literature composed in Nigeria and the immediately adjoining areas in the period before the commencement of the Fulani jihād. That far-reaching movement of political and religious reform, initiated in 1804 under the leadership of Shehu Usuman dan Fodio (in Arabic texts ‘ b. Fūdī, often surnamed Nur al-zamdn and Mujaddid al-isldm) clearly marks off the division between the early and the modern period in the Arabic literature of this area. As is well known, the standard bibliographical work of reference, Brockelmann's encyclopaedic Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur, however full its coverage of the writing of the Arabic-speaking world at large, represents only scantily the West African writers of Arabic.

IT is now almost a century since Rapp cited, 1 among Greek texts relating to Persian customs and beliefs, the charming tale of Zariadres and Odatis, preserved for us by Athenaeus on the authority of Chares of Mytilene.2 The story is in brief as follows: Hystaspes and his younger brother Zariadres were said by the people of their land to be born of Aphrodite and Adonis. Hystaspes ruled Media and the lands below it, Zariadres the region above the Caspian Gates up to the Tanais. Beyond the Tanals lived the Marathi, ruled by Omartes, whose daughter Odatis was the most beautiful woman in Asia.3 Odatis dreamt of Zariadres, and loved him; and he too loved Odatis through dreams. He sought her vainly in marriage, for her father did not wish to give her to a stranger. Soon after, Omartes held a marriage-feast attended by his own kinsmen and nobles, and bade Odatis give a cup of wine to him whom she wished to marry. Zariadres, forewarned by Odatis, came in full haste across the Tanals, accompanied only by his charioteer, and entered the hall in Scythian dress as, weeping, Odatis slowly filled the cup. She recognized him with joy, and he carried her off. This tale, Chares states, was greatly esteemed by the barbarians of Asia, who painted scenes from it on the walls of temples, palaces, and even private houses, the nobles often giving the name of Odatis to their own daughters.

The Sogdian “Ancient Letters”, no doubt one of the most important of Sir Aurel Steins many finds, have been attributed to the middle of the second century of our era, on the strength of archaeological evidence (Serindia, ii, 671 sqq.). Their editor, H. Reichelt, expressed a mild doubt (Die Soghdischen Handschriftenreste des Britischen Museums, ii, p. 6), and so did Pelliot in his review of Reichelts edition (Toung Pao, xxviii, 1931, 457–463). If the date originally proposed by Sir Aurel Stein (between A.D. 105 and 137, or in 153) could be substantiated, the Letters, which are on paper, would have to be regarded as the oldest paper documents in existence.

I. ECONOMIC CONDITIONS

Two accounts of trade conditions in the 6th century show that there had been a great change since the ' Periplus Maris Erythaei' was written, about A.D. 50. The writer of that manual for merchant skippers was precise as to the location of the incense-bearing lands.

After Kanē, as the land continues on, there opens out another, very broad, gulf, stretching a considerable distance in depth. It is called Sakhalitēs, and the ‘ libanos-bearing land ’. It is mountainous and bad for landing. The air is thick, dust-laden with the libanos blown down from the trees. These trees that bear libanos are of no great diameter, and are not tall. They produce the libanos in a solid form on the bark, just as some of our trees in Egypt weep gum. The libanos is handled by the royal slaves and by those sent for punishment. These places are dreadfully infectious and plague-ridden, even for those just sailing along the coast, but for those working there death is in the air, and they are downright destructive because of the insufficiency of food.1

The word bāj (older wāj) has been an important part of Zoroastrian religious vocabulary from at least Sasanian times; and the act of ‘taking the bāj ‘is so general and significant that in a Jewish-Persian text the Zoroastrians are distinguished thereby from those of other faiths: gabragān abā bāj-stānš ān ‘the Zoroastrians with their taking the bāj ‘.1 Down the centuries the word has acquired additional meanings; but the range of its usages in older times was already so wide that E. W. West, working on the Pahlavi texts, applied for an interpretation of them to Tehmuras D. Anklesaria. This Anklesaria admirably provided, in a letter which he himself subsequently published among the appendixes to the Gujarati translation of the first part of the Dādestdn ī dīnīg, made by him in collaboration with S. D. Bharucha.2 This was the pioneer treatment of the term.

In stratified societies, accumulated material goods—be they made of metal, stone, cloth, bone, or even foodstuffs—represent the wealth and privilege of the élite within a social hierarchy. Anthropologists have shown that goods symbolic of wealth generally fall between two absolutes: alienable goods (items not tied to social membership and produced for giving, trading, or selling), and inalienable goods (items tied to social membership and imbued with a sense of the sacred history of the owner; relics found or crafted specifically to be treasured and saved). (See Weiner, 1982; Appadurai, 1986: ‘Introduction’.) The value of these objects is a measure of the power of the owner over the acquisition and distribution of desired goods. The objects in turn represent the cycles of production and exchange that provide them with a social value (Webb, 1974: 351–82). This is particularly evident in redistributive economies, such as the Native American societies of the North-West Pacific and South Pacific island communities, or certain highland South-East Asian societies where goods are collected by Big Men or chiefs and redistributed at ritual occasions. Gift-giving, often performed in association with ritual feasts involving lineage representatives, both living and dead, is a feature many of these complex societies share with ancient China.

In a book to be entitled Early Ismā'īlism I shall argue in some detail that the Ismā'īlī movement began about the middle of the third/ninth century. It was at that date that the missionaries sent out by the leaders of the movement appeared in various parts of the Islamic world; soon afterwards their successful preaching, the increasing number of their followers, and various armed conflicts with the authorities, brought the movement to the knowledge of the outside world and secured for it the first entries in the pages of the chroniclers.

Studies on Ottoman society and law through the so-called court sijills have lately proliferated, surpassing in volume all previous studies based on other archival sources, including tax and land registers. The comparatively massive size of these sijills, and the fact that their majority did survive, even in a good state, have led some scholars to the conclusion that only the Ottoman qāḍīs kept records of their court proceedings in a systematic fashion, and that they were the first to establish the sijill as a formal institution. Even those who do not share this view of a uniquely Ottoman achievement seem in no sense clear as to the pre-Ottoman history of this important institution. My purpose in this article, therefore, is to attempt to unravel some important aspects of the sijill's history, including the less consequential issue of the terminological confusion which has engulfed it in modern scholarly discourse.

In the majority of cases, the religion of contemporary Burma is described as a compound of Theravāda Buddhism and the survivals of an indigenous ‘Animism’. As an anthropological field-worker I have recently found in Burma certain beliefs and rituals which did not appear to fit exactly into either of these two categories. I present here, in two parts, a study of an association which I have chosen to call Messianic Buddhist. In the first part I describe the building in which it is housed and the cults I witnessed, together with beliefs concerning these cults elicited in the course of several conversations with members of the association. In the second part I draw on comparative materials in printed sources in order to justify my choice of terms and to attempt to explain the origin and nature of the association.

A powerful revivalist impulse emerged in the Islamic world of the eighteenth century. Some of the leaders, like Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb or Shāh Walī Allāh in India, are well known. However, the foundations of this revivalism remain relatively obscure and personalities who inspired its leaders remain shadowy figures in history. One such person is Muḥammad Ḥayyā al-Sindī, who was a teacher of the founder of the Wahhābī movement. A closer examination of this Medinese scholar and the intellectual community of which he was a part can provide insight into the conditions which helped to inspire a prominent revivalist. Even more important, however, such analysis provides a basis for discerning some of the relationships among a number of the major eighteenth-century movements.

If written texts usually involve some kind of performative dimension, oral performances also entail the constitution of a text. American linguistic anthropology uses the term ‘entextualization’ for the process by which stretches of spoken discourse are detached from their immediate context and rendered repeatable and thus transmissible. In African oral poetry there are entextualizing strategies which involve rendering discourse object-like: by making it the focus of exegesis, or by presenting it as quotable, thus foregrounding the perception that these words pre-existed their present moment of utterance and could continue to exist after it. However, African oral praise poetry is also highly dynamic. Text is not consolidated in order to constitute it as an unchanging monument, but rather so that it can be re-activated in a new context of utterance, where it has an effectual engagement and dialogic force. Thus the performative and the entextualizing dimension can be seen to be inseparable and mutually dependent.

The fact that Zoroaster was a priest, a zaotar, is likely to have been of considerable influence in nurturing and shaping his spiritual life; and in more than one study of Zoroastrianism it has been given due prominence, without, however, its implications being fully explored. There seems room, therefore, for a further attempt to assess, as far as the evidence allows, the relevance of Zoroaster's priesthood for the evolution of his doctrines.

Korean Confucianism has been described as “the enemy of feminism”: feminists often argue that Confucianism is the source of the patriarchal society. Feminist scholars have produced significant works about Confucianism's role in preserving the idea of women's subordination to men; they argue that the idea of men's superiority to women is embedded in Confucian philosophy. In this article I will examine whether Confucian philosophy is responsible for women's subordination to men in such Confucian texts as Naehun, The Book of Change, The Book of Poetry, and The Analects. Naehun was written by the mother of King Sǒngjong in 1475, for the purpose of the Confucian education of Korean women; I will look also at other, related, Confucian texts used for Korean women's education. Confucian classics such as The Book of Change, The Book of Poetry and Confucian Analects will be included in the analysis to investigate whether Confucianism legitimizes women's subordination tomen. In the analysis of these Confucian classics, I will focus on the ongoing debate between scholars of Confucianism and feminism in Korea today.

Perhaps the first point which attracts the attention of the European lawyer who begins to study the treatment of qatl (homicide) in the text-books of Islamic law is that it is there treated, in modern parlance, more as a tort than a crime. To understand the offence properly, however, no such simple classification will suffice: instead, it is essential to view it in its historical setting and detailed development.

Under the heading of ‘uqūbāt, or punishments, Muslim lawyers treat primarily the very limited number of offences for which definite penalties (hudūd, singular hadd) are expressly prescribed in the arīa, although reference is also frequently made to the discretionary power of the Ruler or Judge suitably to punish other wrongdoing. Offences in general, moreover, are normally sub-divided into those which are regarded as exclusively involving the “right of God”, those in which both the “right of God” and the right of some individual is recognized but the former is held to preponderate, and those in which the latter is regarded as predominant. In the first category all jurists include sariqa in its two degrees (theft and brigandage), zinā (illicit sex relations), urb (wine drinking) and, when placed in this context, irtidād (apostacy from Islam); in the second, some jurists place qaf (the unproved assertion of a chaste person's incontinence), although others put this in the third category; while in the latter all include homicide and wounding. In effect an offence in which the right of God (as the Head of the community) is held to be exclusive or preponderant more or less corresponds to the modern crime, and one in which a private individual's right is regarded as predominant to the modern tort, for the chief practical difference is that in the former neither the party primarily injured nor, indeed, the Court may drop the case or allow a settlement once it has been started, while in the latter the injured party may do either at his or her discretion.

Arabic sources have preserved the texts of seven treaties concluded in the second half of the seventh/thirteenth century between the Mamluk sultans al-Ẓāhir Baybars and al-Manṣūr Qalāwūn on the one hand, and various authorities in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem and in Antioch-Tripoli on the other. Four are given by the Egyptian chancery clerk al-Qalqashandī in his encyclopaedic compilation, Ṣubḥ al-a'shā. This was completed in 814/1412, over 120 years after the extinction of the Frankish states, but the treaties were transcribed (as al-Qalqashandī tells us) from an earlier work by a clerk in Qalāwūn's chancery, Muḥammad b. al-Mukarram. Two of Qalāwūn's other treaties are found in his biography, written by the contemporary chancery clerk, Muḥyi al-Dīn ibn 'Abd al-Ẓāhir (d. 692/1292). Yet another of Qalāwūn's treaties was preserved by the contemporary chronicler, Baybars al-Manṣurī (d. 725/1325).

The term ḥalqa, as a name of a military unit, seems to be mentioned for the first time in 1174, when Tūrānshāh set out, under Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn's orders, on his expedition to the Yemen. This unit is also mentioned a few times during the siege of Acre in 587/1191. The sources do not indicate the date of its founding, and no authoritative explanation of the meaning of its name is available. Two opinions as to the latter may be submitted with all due reservations: Quatremere thinks that the halqa was so called because it was a corps which surrounded the sultan and constituted his bodyguard, and indeed the sources' description of its position and part in combat support the impression that it was composed of the élite of Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn's forces; A. N. Poliak disagrees, and holds that the name is derived from the special tactics the Turkish peoples used to employ in attack, i.e. that of surrounding the enemy in the form of a ring (ḥalqa). Poliak supports his view by alluding to the frequent recurrence of these tactics in the combat manoeuvres described in the furūsīya literature and in the hunting expeditions which the Ayyubid and Mamluk sultans frequently organized. In the present state of our knowledge, both explanations must be viewed as hypothetical, since no data are available to support either the one or the other; the writer inclines to favour Quatremere's view.

Despite countless discussions, the date of Zoroaster remains a controversial problem. This is due to the fact that the testimony of the available sources is meagre, conflicting, and often ambiguous, for these are based on traditions which were put into writing long after the prophet is supposed to have lived, and contain both fictitious elements and the rationalizations of ancient savants. Of these traditions, the one now most widely accepted in the West is that which counts ‘258 years from Zoroaster till Alexander’. Formerly a number of distinguished scholars—among them Windischmann, Tiele, Geiger, Oldenberg, Bartholomae, Meyer, and Christensen—questioned the credibility of this tradition, arguing with cogent reasons that Zoroaster must be placed much earlier, probably at about 1000 b.c. In the second quarter of the present century, however, the late date gained credence, mainly on the ground that a precise figure transmitted by a people well known for their veracity must be based on historical facts. For a time this view almost came to prevail, primarily because outstanding authorities—such as Herzfeld, Taqizadeh, and Henning—gave it their support. But more recently, arguments in favour of an earlier date have again been advanced by a number of scholars. Yet the main difficulty remains, which is to explain, in the words of T. Burrow, ‘how this precise figure (i.e. 258) came to be adopted’. The purpose of the present article is to offer a solution to that problem, and to trace an older Iranian tradition that Zoroaster lived before 1000 b.c.