According to the medieval medical concept, ultimately going back to Galen, memory is a psychical faculty located in the posterior ventricle of the brain. When this faculty is affected by a disturbance of the balance of the four bodily humours, i.e., by too much moisture and/or coldness of the brain, forgetfulness will be the result. One way to treat this affliction is to restore the humoral balance by administering warm drugs. A popular but also notorious drug for forgetfulness was balādhur (Semecarpus anacardium L; marking-nut), indigenous in India, and called by the Arab physicians ‘ḥabb al-fahm’ (nut of apprehension). The popularity of the marking-nut is sometimes explained from the fact that its juice when exposed to the air turns into a black corrosive fluid which was used as an indelible ink for marking linen and woollen clothes. Another explanation is that the nut has the shape of a heart, cf. the Latin ‘anacardia’ and the Arabic epithet ‘ḥabb al-qalb’. The black, resinous, viscid and acrid juice of the nut is called ‘honey’ by the medieval physicians; it is, according to them, hot and dry in the fourth degree and is recommended for a variety of diseases, but above all forgetfulness.

In the history of Hebrew letters, few dates have so cavalierly been invested with literary and linguistic significance as 1886/7, the publication date of Mendele's short story BeSeter Ra'am.

Such scholars of literature as Ravnitzki, Klausner and Werses have hailed its style as the pointer or veritable trigger to a redeployment of the traditional ‘synthetic’ (composite Biblical/post-Biblical) Hebrew style—instead of being confined to the registers of non-fiction, it now rose to supplant Biblical Hebrew as the standard for narrative prose. Some historians of language have gone so far as to present it as a total innovation (for its time) in that the aforegoing Haskalah writers had adhered almost exclusively to a Biblical manner.

In the Saṅgītaratnākara, a thirteenth-century musical text by Śārṅgadeva, listed under svaraprastāra (lit. extension of notes) is a complete enumeration of all the possible combinations of the 7 notes of the Indian musical scale. This enumeration begins with the single note (ārcika) and is followed by all the possible combinations of two notes (gāthika), three notes (sāmika), four notes (svarāntara), five notes (auḍuva), six notes (ṣāḍava), and seven notes (pūrṇa). Each of these series of kūṭatānas (series of notes in which the continuity of the sequence is broken) develop in the same logical order based on the precedence of the ascending line over the descending line. In Śārṅgadeva's arrangement the first of the 7 note series is the straight ascending line, sa ri ga ma pa dha ni, which, for easy comprehension will be rendered as l 2 3 4 5 6 7 in this paper; and the last of the 7 note series is the straight descending line, ni dha pa ma ga ri sa, rendered 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 here. The changes in the order of the notes take place from the beginning of the series, at first involving only the first two notes, then the first three notes, then the first four notes, and so on. In fact, the progression for the 7 note series includes the progressions for all the smaller series within it. Thus the 7th note of the 7 note series remains constant until the progressions of one, two, three, four, five, and six notes have been exhausted. Only then is the 7th note replaced by the 6th. The chart on p. 308 is an abbreviation showing the nature of the progression. The 2 and 3 note series involving the first 2 and 3 notes respectively are complete. Beginning from the 4 note series, the chart is abbreviated as follows. The 4 note series is divided into four groups determined by the terminal note, each involves change in the first 3 notes, and each of these groups corresponds to the previous 3 note series, which is in fact the first group of the 4 note series. Of the remaining groups only the first and last sequences are given with an indication as to the number of sequences comprising that group. Similar abbreviations are used in the longer series that follow. Commas have been placed to indicate that the preceding numbers now replace the original ascending sequence (mūlakrama) and that the progressions which follow in that group involve change in only these preceding numbers. For example, if one wishes to determine the complete series from 1 2 4,3 5 6 7 to the end of its particular group 4 2 1 3 5 6 7 the comma after 4 indicates that only the first three numbers change.

Music has its origin in Nature, a fact which is recognized by the Chinese. Music may be conscious (men) or unconscious (animals, storm, etc.). Vocal imitation preceded instrumental, which may have originated in the limitations of the human vocal chords.

Speech is communication between man and man, between mind and mind; music is communication between man and Nature, the gods, the spirits. Ancient music was no more than the sounds of Nature combined into some sort of system. As we see in this work, vocal imitation of the sounds of Nature came before instrumental music. Learners of whistling were numerous when Shun ‘developed music and invented the lute’.

The view has more than once been mooted amongst archaeologists, though dissenting voices have frequently made themselves heard, that the art of the ‘Graeco-Buddhist’ School of Gandhāra is contemporary with the zenith of the Kuṣāṇa dynasty under the rulers Kaniṣka, Huviṣka, and perhaps Vāsudeva. A further analysis is naturally required to convert this proposition into terms of absolute chronology. Yet the basic thesis is one that would find justification in an argument developed by Ibn Khaldūn in his masterpiece of historical theory, the Muqaddima:

‘The monuments of a dynasty are its buildings and large (edifices). They are proportionate to the original power of the dynasty. They can materialize only when there are many workers, and united action and co-operation. When a dynasty is large and far-flung, with many provinces and subjects, workers are very plentiful, and can be brought together from all sides and regions. Thus even the largest monument can materialize’.

Abī Manṣur al-Tha'ālibī devotes twenty pages of Yatīmat al-dahr to selections from al-qaṣīda al-sāsāniyya of Abū Dulaf al-Khazraji, the fourth century A.H. poet, who prided himself on being a member of the ‘world brotherhood’ of beggars and impostors known by the ‘royal’ name of banū sāsān. This group of people used a special jargon, munākāh, a considerable part of which is preserved in this poem of Abk Dulaf's.

This article explores some important parallels and differences between certain Eastern Christian and Islamic heterodox (Alevi/Kizilbash, Yezidi and Ahl-e Haqq) cosmogonies, which shared and developed old cosmogonic themes such as the ‘primal ocean’ and the ‘earth-diver’-demiurge, and co-existed during the Ottoman period. The investigation reveals that some of the Eastern Christian versions of these cosmogonies have retained their archaic forms, but in most of them the earth-diver is identified with the Devil, a movement towards cosmogonic and religious dualism that could have been effected by both heretical and popular Christian diabology. Conversely, despite the existing traits of dualist and earth-diver cosmogonies in Northern and Central Asian non-Islamic Turkic and related religious traditions, a comparative analysis as demonstrated in this article shows that the Alevi/Kizilbash, Ahl-e Haqq and Yezidi cosmogonies did not absorb or develop these dualist features but rather tried to neutralize them by reinterpreting them in a largely monotheistic framework.

In the year 577/1181–2, in a letter to the Caliph in Baghdad explaining his activities in Syria, Saladin writes that he is engaged in a struggle for Islam against a three-fold enemy—the infidel Frankish invader, the heretical and murderous Assassins, and the treacherous Zangid rulers of Mosul, whom he accuses of intelligence and even alliance with both Franks and Assassins.

qhɔ-qhô ί-kâʔ c, Lâhō t-m c.

The mountains have [springs of] water; the Lahu have proverbs. (#1012)

Proverbs are a particularly interesting type of sentential formulaic expression. This paper analyses a rich corpus of proverbs in Lahu, a language of the Central Loloish branch of Tibeto-Burman, in terms of both their syntactic structure and their semantic content. Overwhelmingly bipartite in form, these proverbs reflect cultural and moral preoccupations of the Lahu people, and are sometimes expressed in similes and metaphors that are quite obscure to the outsider. They make implicit or explicit analogies between phenomena in the outside world and aspects of the behaviour of human beings. They often use earthy, scatological imagery, which tends to be bowdlerized in Chinese translation. Many of them bear a resemblance to the cryptic Chinese folk similes known as xiēhòuyû 歇后语. The proverbs cited are compared to similar ones in other languages, revealing the universal aspects of folk wisdom. Most Lahu proverbs seem to be original creations, although some look like literal equivalents of Western or Chinese sayings. A full-scale comparative study of Sino-Tibetan proverbs would shed light on possible paths of transmission, whether via missionaries or Chinese or Indian influence.

steering between opposing explanations of religion as either sui generis or sociological construction, this paper argues for an alternative way of conceptualizing the phenomenon called ‘sikh theology’. normally attributed to the interior religious experience of the founder of sikhism, ‘sikh theology’, it will be argued, can more usefully be envisaged as the product of a discursive regime, a regime of colonial translation, which effectively demarcated the conceptual framework of modern sikhism. this regime of translation contains an ideology about religion that made translators such as ernest trumpp imagine the work of translation as providing a remedy for a scripture perceived as lacking conceptual coherence, or in the case of trumpp's non-sikh protagonist m.a. macauliffe, as based on a ‘dialogical interaction’ with sikh native informants. the paper's main focus is to show how key theological concepts passed from trumpp to macauliffe, and were inadvertently imbibed by writers of the exegetical commentaries on scripture such as bha¯i¯ vi¯r singh, even as they were contesting trumpp's odium theologicum.

THE origin of the term miḥrāb is somewhat obscure. In Islām it is usually particularly applied to the prayer-niche, and the article in the Encyclopaedia of Islām2 treats of it only as such, yet this technical usage of the word seems to be derived from a more primitive and general meaning, and on the balance of the evidence its emergence as a name for a part of the sanctuary appears to be Islāmic only. Miḥrāb has been discussed by Nöldeke,3 by Horovitz,4 and by Landberg.5 It has been discussed in connexion with architectural studies by Creswell,6 and by Sauvaget.7 These studies cite a number of references and sources which I have re-examined, but do not propose to repeat in toto. Each of these authorities shows conclusively that the employment in the technical sense of prayer-niche is not early.

This study of the nominal forms of Bilin follows the theoretical approach and expositional framework of a previous paper that dealt with the verbal forms of the language, but the linguistic statement is both phonologically and morphologically of a very different type.

The forms associated with the scatter of the noun are far less numerous than those of the verb; the maximum number theoretically obtainable from the analysis presented here is 84. Some of the forms could be regarded as composed of three elements (and in some cases four), but for a general statement it is more appropriate to treat Bilin as inflected rather than as agglutinative. For there are again phonetic features that preclude a purely segmental analysis; these include pitch pattern, but not vowel harmony, and two new features, one of reduplication, and the other involving alternating types of consonantal articulation.

This article provides a new edition and translation of chapter 25 of the Śāradātilaka(tantra), a compendium on mantraśāstra composed, probably in the twelfth century, by Lakṣmaṇadeśika. The chapter itself presents a type of yoga that combines elements we normally associate with different yoga systems. In particular, we find elements associated with systems usually labelled as haṭhayoga, and elements of mantra practice as well. The chapter also contains references to the methodical knowledge of the rise or predominance of the gross elements (bhūtodaya, also known as svarodaya) and its connection with the six rites of magic. The significance of chapter 25 lies in the fact that it provides us insight into the teachings on yoga in a comparatively early text.

The Avromān parchments, two (I and II) in Greek and one (III) in Parthian, were brought to England in 1913 by Dr. Sa'īd Khan Kurdistāni and were acquired soon afterwards by the British Museum. Professor E. H. Minns, of Pembroke College, Cambridge, in his article ‘Parchments of the Parthian Period from Avroman in Kurdistan’, published in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1915, has translated and discussed at length the two Greek texts. The latest and most authoritative of several articles on the Parthian manuscript is that of Dr. H. S. Nyberg entitled ‘The Pahlavi Documents from Avroman’, in Le Monde Oriental of 1923. The summary of information relevant to the present paper given in the following three paragraphs is based on these articles.

Since its début in 1881, when Charles Rieu's brief but masterly grammatical sketch appeared, the Gorānī koinĒ has become one of the Cinderellas of Iranian studies, literary and linguistic. Apart from a notice by E. B. Soane, of which more below, its only real outing has been in Professor Minorsky's compendious article on ‘The Gūrān’, containing an illustrated survey of all the epic, lyric, and religious verse then known in Gorānī. The surviving manuscripts acquired by Professor Minorsky he has since donated to the Leningrad branch of the Oriental Institute (Institut Narodov Azii AN), where they remain unpublished.

Needless to say the Amharic speakers also have close contact with the speakers of the other Semitic Ethiopic languages as well as of the Cushitic languages. Nearly all the Semitic Ethiopic and Cushitic languages have many Arabic loanwords for the same reasons mentioned above in connexion with Amharic. It is, therefore, often difficult to know whether an Arabic loanword in Amharic came directly from an Arabic dialect or through the intermediary of another Semitic Ethiopic or Cushitic language. Since we have no adequate means at our disposal for a historical treatment of the Semitic Ethiopic vocabulary, we shall most probably never be able to determine the precise origin of some of the words considered here as borrowings, that is to say whether they come directly from an Arabic dialect or through another Semitic Ethiopic or Cushitic language.

The mausolea that safeguarded the remains of the Commanders of the Faithful are not preserved among the meagre remnants of 'Abbāsid Baghdād. The history of these prominent buildings can be reconstructed from historical sources, however, and their significance sketched. The evidence presented here is not new, but it may profitably be reviewed with regard to funerary practices, terminology, and the development of Islamic architectural forms.

Some years ago, I published in this Bulletin an article, one of the main purposes of which was to propose a hypothesis concerning the dating of the Kharoṣṭhī documents discovered by Sir Aurel Stein at the ancient sites in Chinese Turkistan, the so-called ‘Niya’ site (Cabta), and Lou-Ian (Kroraina). At almost the same time, Professor Enoki Kazuo independently published an article which, while covering a much wider historical period, nevertheless dealt also with a certain number of topics included in my own article; and it was gratifying to find that on most of these points we had reached similar conclusions. More recently, Dr. Michael Loewe published an article which was largely a critique of certain points in my own, for which purpose he drew upon the evidence of the Chinese histories. I bow to Dr. Loewe's superior knowledge of these sources and of the Chinese language; and it would be presumptuous of me to attempt to assess or criticize his article as a whole. Nevertheless, I venture to continue to disagree with him on a number of points, on which I maintain my original views, or have modified them but slightly.

Drawing on the large corpus of Chola period Tamil inscriptions, this paper attempts to clarify the meaning of the apparently obscure and neglected term in Tamil epigraphy, known as veḷam. The paper argues that the term in Chola period sources should best be understood as a “palace establishment” composed mostly of women (and sometimes men) of servile status. A relatively comprehensive review of the term in inscriptions and literature sheds significant light on the organization of the lower echelons of labour in the Chola royal household and the conditions under which men and women of this status were incorporated into such service. The paper argues for a reconsideration of the importance of the veḷam as an institution in Chola times, as well as the lives of its members, concluding with reflections on how the institution changed over time.

Plural markers in some languages are quite unlike their Indo-European counterparts in that their use does not depend only on number but also on other considerations (pragmatic, perspective-related and so on). This article gives an insight into how such plurals work, based on a careful analysis of the suffix -men in Mandarin Chinese.

The notion of personal collective is what universally underlies the so-called plural of personal pronouns. Benveniste (1966) has shown that in this case pluralization does not amount to an addition or multiplication of elements, but to what he calls ‘amplification of persons’, that is, a collective. In Chinese it is this pronominal plural that has been extended, under certain conditions, to nouns.

It is claimed that the occurrence of -men is governed by the conjunction of number (n>1) and person (reference to a subject-origin). Grammatical person is taken to refer to the space (and positions within it) organized around a subject-origin, normally the speaker. -Men requires that entities be related to a human locator who performs the role of the deictic centre and acts as the origin of point of view. The required conditions are by definition met with personal pronouns, which is why -men is obligatory, but are seldom satisfied with nouns, which is why the latter take the suffix only rarely. Most remarkably, when nouns are not reducible to pronouns, the occurrence of -men is associated with a shift in perspective. The group is considered from the point of view of a locator distinct from the speaker, not from that of the speaker. The speaker being essentially free to shift his viewpoint or not, this explains why -men is optional (though not arbitrary) with nouns in such contexts. Note that, all else being equal (n>1), the contrast between N and N-men is not one of number but of point of view (external versus internal point of view). In summary, the suffix operates in all cases with reference to a subject-origin, either the speaker or a protagonist whose point of view is provisionally adopted by the narrator.

The case of Chinese, far from being exotic, is a meaningful illustration of the interaction between the grammatical categories of number and person. This study opens up new typological perspectives in terms of grammaticalization of the pronominal versus nominal plural across languages.