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.

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:—

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).

WHEN my translation of the Hudud Al-' Ālam was published in 1937, it was found impossible to swell the book1 by further remarks on the language of the Persian original, and I promised (p. xii) to deal with this problem at a later date. On the other hand, the quarter of a century which has elapsed since I began my work on the Hudud has brought a considerable number of new facts bearing on the interpretation of the data which I was trying to explain. In various ways my work has been continued, both in the articles which can be considered as a by-product of the Hudud2 and in contributions on fresh but cognate texts.3 The object of my present article is to bring the book up to date by integrating my own research and by completing it with references to the studies of other scholars.

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.

The debate concerning the Head of the Jews (ra'is al-yahud) in the Fatimid kingdom, which has interested researchers since the late nineteenth century, has yet to reach a final conclusion. Today's researchers usually argue that this position was established in Egypt at the end of the eleventh century with the final fall of the Palestinian Yeshiva; prior to this the Head of the Jews was the gaon of Palestine, appointed by the Fatimid Imam. More recently a new argument has emerged, re-embracing the approach of J. Mann, who argued that the position of the Head of the Jews was established at the beginning of Fatimid rule (late tenth century), and the person to hold the position was a Jewish courtier from the field of finance or medicine, appointed by the Imam to be the supreme leader for all Jews in the Fatimid kingdom: Rabbanites, Karaites and Samaritans. This old–new notion is yet to be clearly proven. Such views are mainly supported by circumstantial analysis of logical arguments that arise from the Geniza documents, without real written proof, but the Geniza is known for surprises and it is possible that we will soon find unequivocal proof to show that the Head of the Jews in the Fatimid kingdom was indeed a Jewish courtier appointed by the Imam, since the beginning of the Fatimid rule over Egypt, Palestine and Syria at the end of the tenth century.

In this article I edit and comment on the Hoernle manuscript IOL Toch 81 (H 149.292) with fragmentary texts in three languages, Sanskrit (6 lines) TocharianB (1 line) and Turkic (15 lines). The primary interest is in the Turkic text, which probably forms part of an upāsaka's vow. Its orthography, morphology and lexis, perceptibly different from standard Uighur, show features which point to high antiquity and perhaps to non-Uighur provenance. Some Buddhist terms seem to be deliberately designed on a Manichaean foil. Thus the Turkic part of the manuscript may date back to the second half of the ninth century, or, if non-Uighur, to an even earlier period.

The province of Khurāsān constituted the centre of political, cultural, and religious life in the Sunni Islamic world from the ninth until the mid-twelfth century, after which Khurāsān was completely eclipsed. The question of how this occurred has remained almost completely unstudied; and the one study that there is does not consult the key primary literary sources for the time. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to re-examine what the primary sources reveal about the catastrophic cultural and political eclipse of Khurāsān in the mid-twelfth century, in order to demonstrate that this catastrophe was not due to “climate, cotton and camels” – in fact, Khurāsān was doing very well until the 1150s – but to concrete human agency and action: namely, the province's destruction by the rampaging Oghuz Turkmens after Sultan Sanjar had been taken captive by them in 1153, thus leading directly to the downfall of the Great Seljuq Sultanate.

This paper attempts to reconstruct aspects of the phonology and morphology of the Arabic of the Islamic conquests on the basis of Greek transcriptions in papyri of the first Islamic century. The discussion includes phonemic and allophonic variation in consonants and vowels, and nominal morphology. The essay concludes with a discussion on possible Aramaic and South Arabian influences in the material, followed by a short appendix with remarks on select Arabic terms from the pre-Islamic papyri.

In this paper, a synchronic study of the syntax and the semantics of the causative verb shi in Han period Chinese, particularly in combination with negatives, is at issue. Two different structures involving negation of this verb exist in Han period Chinese: first, (NP1) NEGshi NP2 V2P and second (NP1) shi NP2NEG V2P. A thorough analysis of the first structure ‘(NP1) NEGshi NP2 V2P' shows that two different semantic interpretations are required to account for the syntactic differences between the two structures. The article proposes that the first structure has to be analysed as an analytic causative construction with a visible causative verb which, in its negated form, contrasts with an affirmative causative construction. The negative has scope over the entire causative construction including V1 and V2P, whereas in the second structure the negative has only scope over V2P

The importance and function of the Secret Committee as an essential part of the East India Company's home government have in general been misrepresented or ignored. From the beginning the Company's executive body in London consisted of the rather large number of twenty-four and, since the Company was wholly dependent upon trade, the formation of a smaller, trustworthy committee, which in emergency could safeguard the Company's voyages, especially against the threat of war or piracy, by giving secret instructions to the ships' captains, was sooner or later inevitable. Likewise, as the Company became increasingly entangled in Indian politics, it realized the necessity of issuing secret political orders from London, and since the Company's unwieldy executive body was obviously ill-fitted for this task a Secret Political Committee soon evolved. That the duty of ensuring the safety of the Company's ships and of issuing secret political orders should have been entrusted to one and the same Committee was convenient and natural. Historians have not only underestimated the significance of this Committee's activities down to its statutory establishment in 1784, but have also tended to disregard the part it thenceforth played, describing it at best as a mere ministerial instrument or as a channel, conveying to India the Ministry's instructions “which it could neither discuss nor disclose”. The truth is much less one-sided than this, and in fact long before 1784 the Secret Committee had emerged as the cabinet council of the Company, the most powerful Committee at the India House, a status which it maintained until the Company's extinction in 1858.

Since Bleek first introduced the method of classifying nominals in Bantu languages by means of their concord prefixes, and of assigning a number to each class so constituted, this has been the accepted practice in Bantu linguistic studies.

The numbering of the classes is, however, more precisely a means of labelling the different sets of concord prefixes that operate the grammatical agreement in any given language. Nevertheless, as it is in one type of word only, the independent nominal, that the class is an integral characteristic of the word, it is in respect to these nominals that the assorting into classes is important.

In his recent translation for the Hakluyt Society of Ma Huan's Ying-yai sheng-lan, Mr. J. V. G. Mills has published illustrations of four Chinese stellar diagrams and made some comments on them. He has, however, stated that ‘having no astronomy or higher mathematics, he is not competent to express a considered opinion on astronomical difficulties, or to check the consistency of the data of the diagrams’. He hopes ‘that an astronomer will find time to examine these interesting diagrams’.

Various writers on the language of the Fulani, or, have included in their accounts a description of the three Voices of the verbal system, and a brief statement of their role in the operation of the language. But no detailed analysis of Voice in Fula has yet been published. Such an analysis is attempted in this article, on the basis of the speech of two informants from Gombe Division in Northern Nigeria.

2. The term Voice is here applied to each of the three series of verbal affixes which are found in Fula. The tense affixes fall into three series, differing in distribution and behaviour, and to some extent in meaning. These series cut across the tenses, so that each tense (except for the Negative of Quality and the Imperative) has three different tense-signs associated with it, each belonging to a different series. Thus in the two sets of sentences.

This study is concerned with the interpretation of number and gender concord as abstracted from sentences of different types whose common feature is the inclusion of a participial form. This term is used here, rather than the more usual ‘participle’, as the forms being considered here do not exactly correspond with what are described in the traditional grammars as ‘present (or imperfect) participle’ and ‘past (or imperfect) participle’; the term is applied here to those members of a verbal paradigm which can be colligated with huaa, huii, or hue.

The considerable size of the Ādi Granth, the varied authorship of its contents, and their arrangement within the volume to suit the requirements of liturgical performance rather than those of scholarly perusal, all these may be accounted factors to be held responsible for delaying, until quite recently, its critical analysis. Certainly the delay was not warranted by the intrinsic importance of the Ādi Granth (AG), which derives primarily from its status as the living scripture of the Sikhs, secondarily from the authenticity of the transmission of its text which this status has helped to secure since its compilation by Gurū Arjan in 1604.

It is astonishing how soon the Arabs fade out of Muslim history, Arabia itself excepted. There are notable instances to the contrary like the Hamdanids and the Banū Hilāl, but they are few. During the rule of the Fatimids in Egypt the Banū Jarrah of Tai' were the most important of the bedouins in Syria; their chief Mufarrij b. Daghfal b. Jarrāh died in 404/1013 and his son Hassān succeeded him. Contemporary with Hassān was Fadl b. Rabi'a b. Hāzin b. Jarrāh, who was, perhaps, as Ibn Khaldūn suggested and Ibn Hajar affirmed, the ancestor of the Āl Fadl: This Fadl was at times an ally of the Franks and at times an ally of thesultan of Egypt. He was banished and joined Sadaqa b. Mazyad and in 500/1106 was the ally of Sadaqa against the Saljūq sultan Muhammad b. Malikshāh; later he abandoned Sadaqa.

These notes are based on the pronunciation of Mr. Lai Mama, of the Baptist Mission at Lungleh, whose recent presence in London afforded an opportunity, rare in this country, of studying Lushai at first hand. The investigation was short and incomplete, but sufficient phonetic data were collected to enable certain principles governing the structure of the monosyllable in isolation to be stated.

With the affluence brought by oil, the cities, towns, and villages of Saudi Arabia are being transformed as they are rebuilt; the older mosques are being replaced by new ones in concrete and built in styles unknown in Najd 30 years ago. As a result, structures built in accordance with traditional designs are being gradually obliterated by modern, alien buildings. This process has virtually wiped out the older mosques on the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia and those in Najd may well vanish in the course of the next few years. This article attempts, albeit very incompletely, to catalogue some of the traditional mosques of Najd and to describe their architectural characteristics. I shall deal with these buildings within their geographical areas beginning with al-Ḥawṭca in southern central Najd and moving northwards, towards al-Qaṣīm and Sudayr.