The applicability of Western concepts to an understanding of gender in other cultural settings has become increasingly problematic. We need to elicit an understanding of how particular societies define sexual difference, and derive locally grounded ideas of self and the materiality of the body as a starting point for analysis. This paper examines some of the wider implications of this view for notions of cultural context and comparison. Its ethnographic examples come from Latin America. They build on the regional interest in spiritual and symbolic forms as ‘scripts’ for gender identifications, exploring the diverse ways in which idealizations, images and icons are read in ways that encompass both ‘local’ and ‘non-local’ narratives. However, the discussion aims to be relevant beyond this geographical location, suggesting that both secular and sacred discourses appear to work at a number of different, sometimes contradictory, levels, often drawing together transcultural notions of being, and generating a field of meaning in which gender, value and morality are constituted.

The two famous monuments known as the Orkhon Inscriptions, erected in honour of the two Turkish princes, Kül-Tegin and his brother Bilgä Kagan, though mentioned in Chinese histories, remained forgotten and ignored down to quite recent times. They stand near the Lake Kocho Tsaīdam, to the west of the River Orkhon, about 50 miles north of the monastery of Erdentso (the site of the ancient city of Kara Korum), and about 25 miles to the north-west of the ruins of the capital of the Uighurs, Kara-Balgassun. They are two great square monoliths, which originally reposed in two sockets. Both these sockets are still in their original position, but the monuments have been thrown down, with the result that Monument II is in four pieces. They contain long Turkish inscriptions in Runic characters on three sides, and on one side (the western) the inscription is in Chinese. The Chinese inscriptions are very beautifully cut; the Runic inscriptions, which are also probably the work of the Chinese stonecutters, are less elegant. It may be mentioned that the Chinese inscriptions differ entirely in their contents from the Turkish.

Recent epigraphic discoveries shed new light on merchant groups in early medieval Bengal, a region whose history in the period from the mid-sixth to the thirteenth centuries is shrouded in obscurity. The present article attempts to provide a better delineation of this history with additional information from new inscriptions, and presents a transcription, translation and discussion of the Rajbhita stone inscription which records the activity of an association of merchants called vaṇiggrāma. The history of merchant groups in early medieval Bengal can be delineated as a process of the ruralization of urban elites in its early phase, and of the organization of merchants located in rural space towards specialized groups comparable to jātis in its later phase. The new inscriptions enable us not only to fill gaps with new information, but also give us perspectives from which we can go beyond unilineal simplicity.

Okina , a ritual play without plot, a collection of old songs and dialogues interspersed with dances, can be seen in many parts of Japan, performed in various versions. In village festivals, it may be put on by local people using libretti derived from oral traditions, and in larger shrines professional players might be employed to perform it at the New Year. Puppets enact Okina dances at the start of Bunraku performances and Kabuki actors use them to open their season. Such Okina performances derive from Nō traditions, and as might be expected, the Nō schools have their own Okina, based on texts deriving from the Edo period, which they perform at the start of celebratory programmes. These ‘official’ versions feature, among other roles, two old men: Okina and Sanbasō (). Before the fifteenth century, when Nō traditions were being established, it was common for a third old man known as Chichi no jō () to appear as well (I shall refer to this ‘complete’ form as Shikisanban, three ritual pieces, a term used by Muromachi performers). These old men are marked out from all other Nō roles by their use of a unique type of mask, having a separated lower jaw connected by a cord (the so-called kiriago).Erika de Poorter, in her introduction to Okina, suggests that actors dropped the third section because its Buddhist content conflicted with a trend away from Buddhism towards Shinto (a trend she refers to as ‘the spirit of the times’). She supports her theory by adducing a similar ideological shift in contemporaneous interpretations of Okina and legends about the origins of Nō. De Poorter tells us little about these interpretations, as is perhaps appropriate for an introductory essay. This study, however, aims to give a full account of them, starting with a Buddhist reading, recorded near the beginning of the Muromachi period, proceeding to interpretations current among performers in the fifteenth century, and concluding with the purely Shinto explanation taught by the Yoshida lineage in the mid-sixteenth century.

This article presents the results of further work on the Dōsiri dialect of Arabic, a preliminary study of which appeared in this Bulletin some time ago.

Since this first article appeared, I have been able to examine more closely the extent of 'Ajmi influence on the phonology of the dialect spoken by my Dōsiri informants, and to place their dialect more accurately within the group to which it belongs. It now seems certain that, although this Dōsiri dialect does not share all the distinguishing features of the Nejdi group, the parent dialect does belong to the south-central type of Nejdi dialect. As a result of the placing of the dialect of the Duwāsir a little more exactly, and of the comparative studies this has involved, a more precise formulation of some important phonological and syntactical features can now be made.

When Lord Salisbury's long administration came to an end in the summer of 1892, there ended also an era in British diplomacy. This was not immediately apparent because the development of the ‘new course’,2 different from Lord Salisbury's, took more than a decade. Lady Gwendolen Cecil has described Lord Salisbury's policy as ‘neighbourliness’. Dame Lillian Penson has called it ‘practical co-operation’. This policy had by 1892 secured for his country a position of political authority in Europe which was unique, in that it ‘owed nothing to military pre-eminence or that subtle manipulation of international jealousies, which was the chief weapon of Prince Bismarck's genius’. Its weakness was that it was his alone and depended for its success upon personal characteristics which could not be passed on to a successor.3

In a number of Nilotic languages spoken in East Africa it has been shown that there exists formal marking of case based exclusively on tonal differentiation. This has been fully described in Maasai (Tucker and Mpaayei, 1955) and all investigated Kalenjin dialects (Tucker and Bryan, 1962. 1964–5). It also is clearly present in my own data on Teso, though interestingly enough it seems to be lacking in the Luo group generally.

The object of this paper is to give preliminary information about Shāhrudi, one of the Iranian dialects spoken in Khalkhāl, the south-eastern province of Āzarbāijān lying between the Caspian province of Tālesh to the east, Ardabil to the north, Zanjān to the south, and Miyāna(j) to the west.

Our information about the Iranian dialects of Āzarbāijān, where a form of Turkish is the common language, has until recently been very defective. The scanty material available was summed up by Professor W. B. Henning in a recent article. Since then, however, several studies of the current dialects of Āzarbāijān have been published.

In the study of the early history of South East Asia the nature of the shipping which operated between India and the regions to the east has been the subject of much discussion. Sources for this study are rare enough and the fact that one of them, Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, § 60, is either corrupt, as Müller believed, or contains a difficult hapax legomenon, has proved something of a stumbling block. The text of the Periplus rests upon a single MS (Heidelberg: Cod. Palatinus Gr. 398 saec. X ineuntis) of which there is a fourteenth or fifteenth century copy in the British Museum (Add. Mss. 19391)

The importance of poetry as the chief aesthetic experience of the Arabs as well as the principal repository of materials on their life and thought had long been recognized by the Arab and, following them, non-Arab students of Arabic culture. The fact that all the technical terminologies of Arabic verse which were formalized in ‘ilm al- ‘aruḍ (Prosody) are derived from the components of the bedouin tent—a highly prized possession—indicates the significance of the art to the Arab mind. The pride of place enjoyed by poetry in Arabic literary thought derives primarily from the hieratic idiom associated with it, as well as from its structural coherence, which relies on the harmony of prosodic factors (al-‘awāmilal-‘arūūiyya) associated with poetic praxis.

A new dispute between Shaykh al-Azhar and the [Chief] Muftī concerning the marriage contract: Shaykh al-Azhar argues that the new contract permits the forbidden and forbids the permitted, that the contract is the creation of the secularists, and that it contains forbidden innovation (bid‘a) and is misleading; the Mufti holds that the contract does not permit the forbidden or forbid the permitted, that it is a result of a permissible independent reasoning (ijtihād mashrū‘), and that some of the articles included in the contract were approved by a few classical jurists.

The Chadic (Afroasiatic) language Hausa, spoken mainly in Nigeria and the Republic of Niger, has a series of ‘glottalic’ obstruents. This includes both ejectives ([k’], [s’] or [ts’]; orthographic κ, ts) and two other consonants which have often been described as ‘implosives’ and are represented by the IPA symbols for implosives in Hausa orthography (б, d). In addition, there is a ‘laryngealized’ palatal glide (orthographic ‘y). The description of orthographic б, d as implosive has been called into question, however. Ladefoged, in his well-known work on the phonetics of West African languages (Ladefoged (1964: 16)), suggested that, while these sounds may on occasion show the ingressive air flow characteristic of implosives, their most consistent characteristic is a distinctive mode of vocal fold vibration (phonation type) known as creaky voice or laryngealization; thus, Hausa б and d should be labelled ‘laryngealized stops’ rather than ‘implosives’. One implication of this change in descriptive label is that, at least from a phonetic point of view, б and d should be grouped with ‘y.

Küçük Muḥammad was a man of obscure origin who, in 1087/1676, seized control of the Janissary headquarters in Cairo. Twice ousted from this position, he regained power there finally in 1103/1692, after collusion with Ibrāhīm Bey b. Dhi'l-Faqār, a prominent grandee of the Faqāriyya faction, and Ḥasan Ağga Balfiyya, the influential commanding officer of the Gönüllüyān corps.

The use of oral mnemonics in the transmission of instrumental music is a well-known and persistent feature of East Asian musics. In both Korea and Japan, there are several such systems for different instruments. There are also various systems of written mnemonics, that is, musical notation; many originally oral systems have come to be used as notations as well. Following Western scholarly usage, we shall often refer to oral mnemonics in general by the term solfège; although etymologically dubious, this practice at least helps avoid over-use of the unwieldy expression ‘oral mnemonics’.

The present paper will deal with one type of oral mnemonics in Korea, known collectively as yukpo or sometimes as kuŭm (cf. Lee, 1981: 31–4; Hahn, 1973: 79–83; Howard, 1988: 68, 91, 115, 182, 212, 227).3 Yukpo exist or are known to have existed for most string and wind instruments and even for percussion. By the sixteenth century at least, these originally oral syllables had begun to be written down as a kind of musical notation. The first mention of yukpo is in the Annals of King Sejo (A.D. 1470): ‘ Formerly there was only [for musical notation] the use of mnemonic sounds, called the Yukpo … The complexities are difficult to comprehend’ (quoted in Lee, 1981: 31, Condit 1976: 205, 207 has a more extensive but interpretive translation). This quotation suggests that yukpo were already considered both old and obscure by Sejo's time.

It has long been observed by Cushiticists that the prefix conjugation in various Semitic languages represents one of the major arguments for treating this language group as belonging to the Semitohamitic (Erythraic, Afroasiatic) language phylum. From Semitic and Berber we are acquainted with (at least) two different prefix conjugations, a short one and a long one. THe long from is found in Berber and in several Semitic languages, although there is no general agreement about this. With this in mind, we should be surprised if we could not find so-called long imperfect forms in Cushitic as well. A strong candidate would be the Beja present which nasalizes the second radical, which is lengthened in other languages. In this context, however, I should like, not to discuss the problem bearing on the verbal forms of North Cushitic, but rather to draw the attention of the compartive Semitohamiticist to some East Cushitic languages for which new material is now available. ITt seems convenient to limit this discussion to the Rendille and Boni languages which have recently become knownthrough the work of Bernd Heine (1975–76, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1982) and Hans-Jürgen Sasse (1979, 1980a, 1980b).

In the Manuscript Collection of the Cairo Library (Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriya), there is an unpublished and practically unknown manuscript (Kashf al-Asrār al-'Ilmiya bi Dār aḍ-Ḍarb al-Miṣriya), which contains a treatise dealing with problems of the Egyptian mint. It was composed by Manṣūr ibn Ba'ra a-ahabī al-Kāmilī. Although the manuscript is only a late copy of the original work, it constitutes an important source for the study of the monetary system and minting problems of medieval Egypt.

The category of participle (P) usually includes at least two distinct paradigms. The terms for these vary, as it is not easy to determine the often language-specific nature of the opposition encoded in them. Temporal- ‘aspectual’ terminology is widely applied, giving present or ‘imperfect’ or progressive Ps as opposed to past, preterite, or ‘perfect’ Ps. An alternative popular opposition in many a linguistic tradition is of active vs. passive Ps. To avoid commitment to any of these nomenclatures, I use neutral formal terms: PI and P2.

In order to establish the place of P in the verbal system of a given language, the relevant verbal-syntactic categories of that particular system must first be isolated. For this, I define the following components of indicative verbal systems in non-aspectual languages.

One of the arguments for supposing that the ‘world's earliest printed book’, the Diamond Sūtra in the Stein collection in London, is actually the outcome of a long process of development relies on the very high quality of the images contained in the frontispiece. It is possible, of course, to point to much more crudely formed Buddha images stamped on paper from the same source at Tunhuang, but the dated examples that have been studied are actually later than the Stein Diamond Sūtra itself.1 The practice of printing Buddha images on paper and silk in India is attested in 792 by the Nan-hai chi-kuei nei-fa chuan of I-ching who was in India 673–85, and Paul Pelliot for one was prepared to believe that this practice, using Chinese materials, was originally derived from China itself.2 Frustratingly enough, however, no Chinese source has so far been identified which clearly mentions printing on paper at any point earlier than I-ching's text, which itself does not antedate by more than half a century or so the earliest printed materials we actually possess, notably in the form of a dharaṇī from Korea.3

The Mss. herein described were purchased, copied, or recorded during a tour V A in Hadramawt as Colonial Research Fellow. Besides visiting the main ”f Wadi lying between Kabr Hūd and Hainin, I made investigations in the Wādī f Daw‘an, Huraida in ‘Amd, and in the course of a journey from Bal-Hᾶf, on the I coast, to Habbān on the western fringe of Wāhidi territory. Time did not I allow of a systematic recording of all existing MSS., which can be seen in i hundreds, especially as this formed only part of my programme, but those described here are the more interesting MSS. inspected. A similar tour seems to have been performed by Dr. Hamidullah in the Yemen shortly before my own investigations in Hadramawt.

The many scholars, mostly saiyids, whom I met in Hadramawt gave generously of their assistance, often placing MSS. freely at my disposal; I must; mention in particular the ‘Attās family of Huraida, and Sālih b. ‘Alī al-Hāmidī of Saiwūn. On the other hand, I have been informed, I have no means of assessing how accurately, that there are occasional individuals in the country I who possess some valuable MSS. but would rather see them moulder to pieces ‘ than show them to strangers. I understand that some saiyids keep their books in the women's part of the house, as in learned saiyid society books are reckoned fair game to the casual borrower who succeeds in abstracting them while the owner is not looking.

For anyone wishing to discover new MSS.

No written literature of an Indonesian people has been so brilliantly and completely described as that of the Achehnese in the north of Sumatra. This description was the work of Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje. Before it appeared in 1894 as one of the seven chapters of his work De Atjèhers, all that was known to the outside world about this literature consisted of a few specimina, printed (under Snouck Hurgronje's supervision) in K. F. H. van Langen's manual of the Achehnese language (The Hague, 1889). After some preparatory work in Holland and a stay of only seven months in Kutaraja (in wartime, cut off from intercourse with the country by the then prevailing system of a concentrated line surrounding the capital), Snouck Hurgronje was able to reveal the existence of a rich epic, romantic, and relïgious Achehnese literature, to give summaries of all its works of any importance and to deal elaborately with its chief masterpieces, to investigate the prosody of the poetry in which nearly all these texts are written as well as the origin of the foreign elements found in many tales and treatises. In the second edition of his work, which was published in English (The Achehnese) in 1906, only a few additions had to be made. The catalogue of the manuscripts, collected by Snouck Hurgronje himself and by some pupils and friends inspired by his example, will show some more, but they do not alter the general picture drawn in the first edition.