When the Aceh War finally broke out in 1873 it did not come as a surprise to most contemporaries. In colonial historiography Aceh, a ‘nest of pirates’, according to the Dutch, had obviously precipitated the war by its ‘treason’ in turning to Turkey, America and other foreign powers for support against the Dutch. The discussions with the American consul in Singapore early in 1873 on a possible Acehnese-American treaty constituted a casus belli in the eyes of the Dutch.

There is a great deal to be said for the contention that national character expresses itself in popular sayings and proverbs. That the latter are sometimes paradoxical and tend to extremes cannot be denied. Truth is, however, often seen at her best on the tight rope.

The following selection of well-known Kurdish sayings is made with a view to illustrating the character of the Kurds. As an excuse for its imperfections reference can be made to the lack of Kurdish literature and the existence of many dialects, which make it somewhat difficult for a foreigner to acquire a working knowledge of the language as a whole.

The Kurds are a mountain race, with all the characteristics of mountaineers—love of freedom, violent passions, and a clannish feeling of pride. These primary traits dispose the Kurd to fly to arms at small provocation, and engage with zest in bitter blood feuds.

1. Analysis of al-Jabartț's account Al-Jabartī's chronicle, ‘Ajā’ib al-āthār fi'l-tarājim wa'l-akhbār formally begins with the year 1100/1688–9 (p. 24 of the first volume of the BŪlāq edition). He precedes his annals, however, with an introduction, of which the last part (p. 20, line 23–p. 24, line 4) is concerned with Ottoman Egypt from the time of the conquest by Sellm I to the beginning of the twelfth Hijrī century.

Legal manuscripts excavated from tombs serve as important materials for research on Qin and Han laws. These manuscripts differ from received legal texts or law documents found at archaeological sites in nature and function, as they were stored as funeral texts in tombs. This article studies the Ernian lüling manuscript in terms of its nature and function. It argues that the manuscript compiled in the second year of Empress Lü (186 bce) nearing the death of the owner was not produced for official use but specifically for burial in the tomb. This article further proposes that the burial of the Ernian lüling manuscript may have taken place to illustrate the social status and official capabilities of the owner to the underworld. The investigation of the Ernian lüling manuscript in its archaeological context helps us achieve a stronger understanding of the dating, origins, completeness, and compilation of its text.

Aύana has been referred to Skt. āpana, but there is nothing to suggest that it means “market” or “bazaar”. On the contrary, it is clear from the documents that it means “village”, “parish”, or “local township”, i.e. the small country towns or villages administratively dependent on Caota, the capital of the province. Further, -ύ- (= w) almost always occurs, not -v- which we would have expected out of an original -p-. It is possible, of course, that āpana might have been used in an extended sense “market-town”, but it can be explained perhaps easier out of Iranian. O.P. āvahana, Arm. lw. avan, both meaning “village”.

The paper addresses the frequent collocation /ir(hu)waliyan parittarwaliyan/, which occurs in Luwian incantations embedded in Hittite cuneiform ritual texts. Despite the relatively clear context, the meanings of this and similar collocations have remained obscure. Using combinatory and etymological methods, we intend to demonstrate that it hides the merism “internal (or) external”, which modifies various sorts of supernatural negative phenomena. Furthermore, we intend to argue that such an interpretation is compatible with the Late Bronze Age Anatolian beliefs about potential sources of evil. A collateral result of our demonstration is the elucidation of a number of additional contexts in the Hittite, Luwian, Lydian, and official Aramaic languages.

This paper examines the evidence for the marginal feminine endings *-ay- and *-āy- in Proto-Semitic, and the feminine endings *-e and *-a in Proto-Berber. Their similar formation (*CV̆CC-ay/āy), semantics (verbal abstracts, underived concrete feminine nouns) and plural morphology (replacement of the feminine suffix by a plural suffix with -w-) suggest that this feminine formation should be reconstructed to a shared ancestor which may be called Proto-Berbero-Semitic.

When we contemplate the extraordinary diversity of doctrine which has developed from the teaching in the sixth century B.C. of the Buddha, it is perhaps the most natural conclusion that it is really impracticable to discover with any precision the doctrine which in fact he expounded. This view, however, is naturally disappointing, and it is easy to sympathize with the energetic efforts of Professor Stcherbatsky in his works on The Central Conception of Buddhism and The Conception of Buddhist Nirvāṇa to ascribe to the founder of the faith a definite system, inspired by an intelligible philsophy, which again can be regarded as arising naturally from the spiritual ferment of his time among the non-brahmanical classes of India. Incidentally we may doubt the restriction of the ferment to these classes and believe that the Brahmans played, as they have normally and regularly done, a leading part of this activity, though we need not claim that their speculations powerfully affected the Buddha. In fact, Professor Stcherbatsky elsewhere admits that in the Buddha's time the Brahmanical community was mentally alert.

Scholars seem to be almost unanimous in admitting that there must have existed striking differences between the ritual institutions which are more or less clearly alluded to in the hymns of the Ṛgveda-saṃhitā, and the systematized rituals described and discussed in the brāhmaṇas and ritual sūtras. It has even been surmised that in ṛgvedic times there did not yet exist one elaborated and practically homogeneous ritual system. The probabilities would rather be in favour of the supposition that the chief Vedic families—in the first place those to which we owe some important collections of hymns—performed divine service according to substantially parallel but partly divergent traditions of their own, which, however, did not fail to influence each other. Evidence of these differences is expected from a careful comparison of the relevant facts found in the so-called family books of the Ṛgveda.

Italy in the late fifth century a.d. and Persia in the mid-thirteenth were lands of ancient and deeply-rooted culture. One had been at the centre of the western Roman Empire; the other had formed a significant part of the society of medieval Islam, and its traditions stretched back further still. Both lands found themselves invaded, conquered, and ruled by wandering ‘barbarians’, Ostrogoths and Mongols respectively, from beyond the then recognized frontiers of ‘civilization’.

It is surprising that not a single page has hitherto been devoted to the treatment of Khotanese syntax, even though Khotanese is unique among the attested later Iranian languages in preserving, for the most part distinctly, at any rate in Old Khotanese (OKh.), in the singular, six of the eight cases normally attributed to Indo-European (IE), and in the plural, five. M. J. Dresden, in his ‘Grammatical notes’ introducing his edition of the Khotanese Jatakastava (Trans. Am. Phil. Soc, NS, XLV, 5, 1955), called attention to the need for a treatment of Kh. syntax. He commented (p. 419): ‘Superfluous to say that the efforts of future research should be turned to this subject’.

It has long been argued that the peculiar syntactic traits which typify the modern Semitic Ethiopian languages can be accounted for by the Cushitic substratum, notably the word order of the sentence and the system of qualification (the qualifier-qualified order of elements). It has been suggested that among these languages Tigre is ‘more Semitic’ since (a) it is much less rigid as regards word order, and (b) ‘it may optionally have either the Semitic pattern or the Cushitic one’. A parallel diachronic statement would be that as regards its syntax Tigre was more successful in resisting Cushitic influence or, for some reason, less exposed to it. Here, to avoid the problem of measuring the syntactic features of Tigre in general Semitic terms, Gə'əaz is usually taken as the mode for a Semitic language. In this respect it follows that descriptively Tigre is more Gə'əz-like than the other modern Semitic Ethiopian languages. In spite of the plausibility of such an explanation, it seems to be a matter of scholarly tradition rather than the result of thorough investigation, i.e. the belief that Tigre is the odd man out among its modern relations by virtue of its syntax is an impression rather than a proven observation.

The existence of M Sogd. prqyš- ‘to imprison’, past stem prkšṯ-, and the meaning of the associated B Sogd. noun prk'š ‘imprisonment’ were first established by Henning in 1936. Later he recognized also the equivalent Parth. verb prg'c- ‘to incarcerate’. For the alternation between š and č he compared NP āγōš: Parth. 'gwc (‘side’) and MP āgustan <*ākuštan: Sogd. ākōč-/ākuγd- (‘to suspend’), remarking that ‘the discrepancy is found only in syllables that begin with k- and is therefore probably due to assimilation or dissimilation’.

The story of Sudhana is one of the most popular of the avadānas of Northern Hīnayāna Buddhism. There are two main versions of this story, one adopted by the Mahāsanghika school and the other by the mūla-Sarvāstivāda school. The former is preserved in the Mahāvastu under the title Kinnarījātaka, and a similar version of this story is found in a Chinese collection called Liu-tu-chi-ching ‘Collection [of tales to illustrate] the six pāramitās’, said to have been translated in approximately A.D. 270 (Taishō Tripiṭaka, in, no. 152, 44 f.) and accessible to us in Chavannes's Tripitạka (Cinq cents contes et apologues, no. 80). The mūla-Sarvāstivāda redaction is found in a Vinaya text of that school called the Bhaiṣajya-vastu. It was translated by I-ching and is referred to as Ken pen chouo … by Chavannes (iv, 133).

The exposition of different deity mantras forms an essential part of Tantric compendia. A mantra, a combination of letters thought to be of divine origin, is transmitted by a preceptor to a disciple in an initiation ritual whereby the disciple is authorized to practise its ritual repetition and strive for its perfection in order to attain supernatural powers. The different stages of the process from the selection of the mantra by the preceptor to its employment in desire–oriented rites by the practitioner shall be described in this paper mainly on the basis of chapters 15 and 16 of the Kulārṇavatantra (= KT), one of the most important texts of the Kaula School of Tantrism, written between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries A.D. These chapters were written at a stage when the technicalities of mantraśāstra had been fully developed and were widely accepted. Among other texts consulted were the Śāradātilakatantra (= ŚT) by Lakṣmaṇa Deśikendra with Rāghavabhaṭṭa's commentary entitled Padārthādarśa (= PĀ) (A.D. 1494), the Mantramahodadhi (= MM) by Mahīdhara (A.D. 1588/89) and the Tantrarāja(tantra) (= TR) with the commentary Manoramā (A.D. 1603/04).

The discovery that a number of classical particles originated by the fusion of other, generally better understood, words, has already contributed a great deal to the understanding of eariy Chinese literature. The examples of such contraction which can already be taken as reasonably certain are:—

As a normative discipline Qur'anic exegesis shares both principles and terminology with the other Islamic sciences, and as such is not likely to have been articulated before the third/ninth century. Prominent in the fully elaborated system, as for example exhibited in the work of al-Zamakhshari (d. 538/1143), are the complementary principles of qiyās and taqdīr. While the former is commonly understood to represent the hermeneutical instrument called analogy, a typological description of qiyās will distinguish between applications of the principle which depend upon a textual similarity, and those which are derived from a rational or causal relation. Of the first type it may be said that there are as many kinds of analogy as there are means of establishing external (grammatical and lexical) affinity between different scriptural contexts. Underlying the second type of analogy is a unifying principle (ratio) independent of textual similarities, both explicit and implicit. In theory, if not always in practice, one may differentiate the two types of qiyās by reference to the incidence in each of what I have called the complementary principle of taqdīr. This term, of which the most common rendering ‘supplementation’ (Ergänzung), alluding to only one aspect of the procedure in question, is not quite satisfactory, signifies reconstruction or restoration (Wiederherstellung: restitutio in integrum), namely, of a scriptural context or passage. Now, while the elaboration of grammatical qiyās by the so-called ‘Basran school’ was characterized by an almost unlimited application of that principle, two reservations must be made.

From the earliest times, the political tradition of Islam, on the one hand as formulated in Islamic theology and law, on the other hand as expressed in the accepted versions of early Islamic history, contains two distinct and in some measure even contradictory principles concerning the problems of government and obedience, of which one might be described as authoritarian and quietist, the other as radical and activist. The exponents of both these principles point to the authority of the Qur'ān and tradition, and to the example of the Prophet himself. Both principles are indeed exemplified in the career and teachings of the Prophet and in the history of the early caliphate, which constitute the shared memorv and common heritage of Muslims everywhere. These two traditions may be examined separately.

The Year 9 A.H. is known as 'ām al-wufūd, ‘the year of the delegations', on account of the many tribal delegations which came at that time to the Prophet at Medina. One of the most impressive was that of Tamīm. The accounts of its meeting with the Prophet are rich in detail, and involve both Qur'ānic verses and poems. As is often the case with our sources, there is a considerable amount of confusion between the various accounts. In this instance, however, the confusion is the result not merely of falsifications of failures of recall but also of the conception which guided the Muslim scholars in their redaction of the material. The compilers, rather than their primary sources, are responsible for the confusion which is the main subject of thispaper.

The basis of the list of biographical works in this part is the material in two articles from al-Rābitat al-‘Alawīya, a rare but learned journal published by the ‘Alawl saiyids for about four years at Batavia. This journal is unlikely to be found in Europe, unless indeed a set exists in Holland, but it is a source of major importance for the student of Hadramī history, as he will find material there not available elsewhere. I have not seen a complete set even in Hadramawt, though individual issues are to be found in various libraries.