Professor E. H. Johnston's sudden death in October, 1942, was a grievous blow to Oriental research. Sir Richard Burn, called in by the authorities of Balliol College to go through his papers, found amongst them a rough manuscript article and other material on the Sanskrit inscriptions of Arakan, together with correspondence on the subject with Mr. G. H. Luce and other scholars who had supplied him with rubbings and photographs. As will be seen from the following letter to Mr. Luce, dated the 15th August, 1942, Professor Johnston was contemplating the preparation of this work for publication:

“I have not yet heard what is your opinion about publishing some of the Arakanese results now. Life is short and uncertain these days, and it will hardly be possible to get anything out in Epigraphia Birmanica for years to come. What I should like to do is to publish Ānandacandra's inscription, omittiṇg all I have said in the draft about the palæography and just mentioning the others, with a brief account of the coins and of the historical conclusions. For one thing it might attract the attention of linguists and lead to some ideas about the vernacular names; e.g. what language is Seviṅreṅ, assuming my reading to be correct? The fuller consideration of details could then be reserved till Epigraphia Birmanica is ready to come about.

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.

English Translation: The ‘Song Of Bagauda’ In the name of God the Merciful, the Compassionate. May God bless our Lord Muḥammad and his family, and his Companions, and his wives, and his offspring, and grant them peace.

In the study of Chinese science it is important to take into account the fact that there are many Chinese terms which do not convey exactly the same meanings to traditional and modern scholars. It is essential to try to put ourselves in theshoes of the former in order to have a better understanding of classical Chinese texts. Take for example the simple term shuxue, which we all take to mean ‘mathematics’. Indeed we are quite correct to call it ‘ mathematics’ when it appears in a modern text, or after the time of Li Shanlan (1811–1982) who first used itwhen he translated Western mathematical works into Chinese. However, when the term shuxue appears in any text written before the time of Li Shanlan it can often be dangerous to use the modern meaning of the term without circumspection. I quote a passage on the Biography of Zhang Zhong from the Ming waish. contained in the Imperial Compendium Gujin tushu jicheng which reads:

(Zhang) Zhong was studying at his youth and presented himself at the jinshi level of civil examinations. However, he failed, and whereupon he gave rein to roaming among the mountains and streams. On one occasion he came across an extraordinarily gifted person and learned shuxue from him. (Henceforth) he talked about future destiny, and was often uncanny in accuracy.

Before considering the literature of Egypt of the eighteenth century, a glance at the state of the country would not be out of place. There was not such a great difference between Egypt under the Turks and under the Circassians. The Sultan sent a Turkish governor but the Amīrs, no longer the great men of earlier times, were still the rulers. The governor lived in perpetual terror of his own garrison, while the Amīrs, who had formed themselves into parties (the Ḳ¯simīs and the Fiḳārīs were the most famous), fought and intrigued with one another for power. At times the anarchy was unbearable, but street fighting seems to have been of such common occurrence that the tradesmen sometimes did not even bother to shut up their shops while it was going on. Occasionally a really strong Amir was able to prevail over the rest of his rivals for a few years and a few names of such strong men are worth mentioning, for it was under them that Egypt was able to regain some of its prosperity.

Most Iranists are probably acquainted with some of my writings on Iranian chronology and systems of time-reckoning. One of the essential points in my outline of the history of the Iranian calendars is the theory I put forward about the date of the creation of a fixed religious year, co-existing and running parallel with the civil year, which was a vague one. This fixed year, called in Pahlavi literature Vihēǰakīk, was, however, theoretical and without any application in daily life. It was used only by the Zoroastrian clergy for the purpose of ascertaining the original position of the religious festivals and keeping them in or about their astronomical positions. By the ‘original position’ is meant the places these most important religious days occupied in the tropical year at the time of instituting the Vihēǰakīk year, which time may or may not have been the epoch of the initial adoption of the Mazdayasnian or ‘Young Avestan’ civil year in Iran. The date I proposed was 441 B.c., or at any rate some time in the first decade of the second half of the 5th century B.c.

In what follows I would like to discuss the structure of Amharic relative clauses. In the course of the discussion, I would like to make the following three claims which I will attempt to substantiate in turn. First, I believe that relativization is a kind of pronominalization and, consequently, the particle yä- that is attached to the main verb (or its auxiliary) of the relative clause is not a relative pronoun. Second, I maintain that the ‘yä- clause’ in subject position in Amharic cleft sentences is also a relative clause with an unspecified element as its head. My third claim is that Amharic genitive phrases originate from relative clauses and that the noun (phrase) in the genitive phrase to which the particle yä- is attached in surface structure is governed by a preposition in underlying structure, and the head of a genitive phrase is the head of the under-lying relative clause. In this connexion, I also argue that there is a rule in Amharic which moves the particle yä- (to the right) over, at least, one constituent.

The present paper describes a palatographic investigation of Javanese coronal stops. Javanese exhibits stop consonants at both dental and alveolar places of articulation. In the current roman orthography, the dentals are represented by the single letters t, d, while the alveolars are represented by the digraphs th, dh. Thus, for example, titik [titI?] ‘full stop’ contrasts with thithik [titI?] ‘a little’.

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.

In 1955, the appearance in the Patrologia Orientalis of the Old Georgian version of St. Luke's Gospel brought to a successful conclusion the project initiated some thirty years ago by the late Professor Robert P. Blake of Harvard University, namely the critical editing of the famous Adysh (or Adishi) Gospel manuscript, copied at Shatberd in Tao-Klarjet'i in A.D. 897, and later removed thence to be preserved in a remote village in highland Svanet'i.1 After Blake's death in May 1950, his work was brought to completion by Canon M. Brière, who had already collaborated on the edition of St. John.2 Now that their pioneer work has made this important Biblical text fully accessible to Western scholars, the time seems ripe to attempt a brief survey in the most general terms of recent work published or in progress in Georgian New Testament studies.

Priyā Dās was the first commentator on Nābhā Dās's celebrated work, the Bhaktamāla. His commentary entitled Bhaktirasabodhinī is a most valuable exposition of the Bhaktamāla, and later commentaries are mainly based on Priyā Dās's work. It is both surprising and disappointing how little is known about Priyā Dās. Although all the writers on the history of Hindi literature have frequently referred to and quoted from the commentary, only a few sentences, in some cases not more than two or three, are devoted to the author. This paper attempts to throw light on some aspects of his life and his other works, and to remove certain misconceptions.

The inscriptions published here for the first time were discovered in the course of a visit to Edessa, the modern Urfa, during the summer of 1956. My journey was made possible by generous subventions from the Central Research Funds of the University of London and the Pilgrim Trust Fund administered by the British Academy. It is a pleasure to express here my gratitude not only to those bodies, but also to the officials of the Turkish Department of Antiquities and to the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, whose ready co-operation greatly facilitated our work in the field; and my sincere thanks are due no less to the energy and perseverance of Dr. D. S. Rice and his assistants Dr. Donald Strong and Mr. Michael Ballance, my companions in the rigours of an Anatolian heat-wave.

Kha, cf. Greek , is generally “cavity”; and in the Ṛg Veda, particularly, “the hole in the nave of a wheel through which the axle runs” (Monier-Williams). In Journ. U.P. Hist. Soc., vii, 44–5 and 62, Mr. A. N. Singh shows conclusively that in Indian mathematiqal usage, current during the earlier centuries of the Christian era, kha means “zero”; Sūryadeva, commenting on Aryabhaṭa, says “the khas refer to voids (khāni śūnyā upa lakṣitdāi) … thus khadwnake means the eighteen places denoted by zeros”.

In societies where oaths and vows are taken seriously the problem inevitably arises of how to escape from them when necessary. The story of Jephthah and his daughter in Judges 11.3Off. illustrates what might happen if no escape mechanism is sought. In both the Bible (Num. 30:3) and the Qur՚ān (5:89) we are told that we must fulfil our oaths and vows, but both scriptures also set out acceptable ways of atonement for certain occasions when fulfilment proves impossible (cf. Lev. 5:1 ff. and Qur՚ān loc. cit.). The atonement might then serve as an escape route for someone who is bound by an oath or vow which he can no longer keep. Other ways out were also provided by the law and its interpreters (sometimes known in Islam as the ahl al-ḥall wa՚l-՚aqd, ‘those who loose and bind’): the words used might be held to be invalid; recourse might be had to the principle that we cannot be held to vows which are beyond our capacity or are contrary to God's law; our state of mind at the time we made the vow (whether in anger, jest, or mental distraction) might be taken into consideration, etc. The tension thus generated between the desire to stress the seriousness of oaths and vows on the one hand, and the need to be realistic in recognizing human weakness on the other, could be considerable.

Of the 7, 000 manuscripts (including fragments) which were taken by Sir Aurel Stein, almost at random, from the great hoard in Tunhuang, some 380 bear dates, ranging from A.D. 406 to 995. Six are of the fifth century, and forty-four of the sixth. A few of the undated MSS. may be even earlier than 406, while it is highly probable that others are later than 995, seeing that the date 1035 is found in the similar collection at Paris. But in any case the period covered does not greatly exceed 600 years.

Modern tendencies in the linguistic development of Arabic, in both its literary and colloquial aspects, has for some time now been the subject of serious scholary study (see, e.g. Blau, 1978, Cantarino, 1974-5, Stekevych, 1970, amont others). Contact between different social groups and thus between different dialects and speech levels, has brought about changes in the actual speech of Arabic-speaking peoples which have been variously called koineization, levelling and classicization (or literarization) (cf. Blanc, 1960). These processes will be the subject of this paper.

The conversion of the Znāga of the western Sahara 1 to Islam may have begun as early as the second/eighth century, but the spread of Arabic as a spoken language in the area began only with the immigration of Arabic-speaking tribes 2 in the eighth/fourteenth century, and the development of many of the conventional Arab and Muslim perspectives which now exist among most tribes of Znāga origin seems to have taken place only during the last two or three centuries.

The Director of the School of Oriental Studies has invited me to contribute to this first number of the Bulletin a sketch of the history of the foundation of the School. The present article has only the modest ambition of supplying to the future historian of the School certain references, dates, and facts indispensable for his task.

Perhaps no question of historical-geographical interest relating to the ancient Middle East has been so frequently a subject of inquiry or brought a greater difference of opinion than has that of the location of the countries of Magan and Meluḫḫa. The problems of identification are particularly confused because widely separate areas appear to be indicated at different periods. Old Babylonian and Sumerian references seem to place these regions at the lower end of the Persian Gulf and along the coast of the Indian Ocean beyond, while texts of the late Assyrian period indicate Egypt and Nubia/Ethiopia