A folktale current among the inhabitants of Dayr al-Asad, a little village in Western Galiee on the Acre-Safad road, repors that in the early sixteenth century a Ṣufī shaykh named al-Asad was once travelling towards Safad, when he came upon some inhabitants of cha Christian village of al-Bi‘na, which then contained a monastery (dayr) and a Crusader church, and was insulted by them; moreover, while he was praying by the village spring, a lion (asad) appeared and devoured his donkey. Nething daunted, the shaykh put his saddle on the lion's back, mounted and galloped eastward until he suddenly found himself face to face with the Sulṭān Selīm I (or according to others, Süleymān ‘Qānūnī’), The sulṭān, to indemnify him for the insults of the Christians and in recognition of his courage and resourcefulness, permitted him to settle at Dayr al-Bi‘na. Some say that th shaykh returned to the village on the lion’s back after the sulṭān had expelled the Chrisians. Thereupon, so the story continues, Christian Dayr al-Bi‘na became Muslim Dayr al-Asad. The Christian Population established established a new settlement, called al-Bi‘na, about half a kilmetre south of Dayr al-Asad. There is today at al-Bi‘na a smal Christian minority, which in the opinion of the people of Dayr al-Asad originates from Dayr al-Bi‘na.

The evolution of technical terms in the Arabic science of rhetoric illustrates remarkalby its gradual adaptation to the exigencies of scriputural interpretation.Proliferation of rhetorical figures in the writings of the late medieval scholiasts appears to be a consequence not so much of the Qur'ān. In many of these figures a pre-exegetic existence can be discerned; others would seem to be the invention of industrious mufassirum. For the former it is sometimes possible to determine an approximate date of adaptation: the point at which the profane function of a rhetorical figure was abandoned, or at least relegated to an inferior position, in favour of its application to Qur'anic exegesis. An illustration of this process is provided by the figure called madhhab kalāmī, whose evolution I attempted to describe in a recent study. There it was seen that the figure treated by early rhetoricians shared its name, but neither its content nor its function, with that examined and applied to the Qur'ā by the later schoolmen. While the result of this metamorphosis became firmly established in the treatment of badī' by al-Qazwīnī (d. 738/1256) and his successors, it is in the earlier work of Ibn Abi 'l-Isba' (d. 654002F;1256) where we find the observation that although Ibn al-mu'tazz (d. 295002F;908) had denied the presence in the Qur'ān of Madhhab kalāmī, the Holy Book was in fact full of it; and his examples fit perfectly the scholastic interpretation of the figure.

The ‘makeshift’ or ‘pidgin’ language here discussed has been usuallycalled in English ‘the Yokohama dialect’ or ‘Yokohama Japanese’. In Japanese the corresponding ‘Yokohama-hotoba’ is sometimes heard, but it is hardly a recognized name, and examples of the language are apt to be dismissed as foreigners′ mistakes.

The phonetic text given below is a simplified “broad” transcription of story No. 5 on p. 37 of A Burmese Phonetic Reader, by Armstrong and Pe Maung Tin, and is based on experience gained in the practical use of the Reader with Burmans, and also in the teaching of Burmese phonetics in the Indian Institute, Oxford.

The establishment of the theatre in Egypt, like many other Western innovations, was aided by the initiative of the KhediveIsmail. The Suez Canal was completed in the year 1869; to celebrate its opening the Khedive decided to form the Ezbekia Gardens and to build the Opera House which still exists beside them. This building, in. whose fabric wood occupies a dangerously large part, was erected in a great hurry and inaugurated in November, 1869. The opera Aida which Verdi was composing for the occasion in return for a fee of 150, 000 francs, on a libretto originally arranged by Mariette Pasha, was not completed in time for the opening, and a performance of Rigoletto was given instead.

Emperor Menelik's reign (1889–1913) opens a new era in the kind of sources that the historian has at his disposal for the analysis of modern Ethiopian history. During his reign printing presses were set up in the country and spurred a gradual growth in the more widespread use of Amharic, not just as the spoken but also the written language of the imperial court. This is not to say that the Gә'әz literary tradition in Ethiopia disappeared altogether, for some chronicles in Gә'әz continued to be written after 1935, often very similar in form and content to those which have survived for the Gondarine and earlier periods of Ethiopian history. However, Menelik's reign, and the official chronicle of it by Gäbrä Sәllase, mark a significant departure, not least because the chronicle was written in Amharic and not in Gә'әz. There are a few earlier published literary works in Amharic, the songs of the kings of the fourteenth century being the most significant, but it should be emphasized that the Gә'әz tradition continued parallel to the Amharic in the form of tarikä nägäst, i.e the history of kings. Some of these are now preserved at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa, like the Gondarine tarikä nägäst which belonged to Nәgus Wäldä Giyorgis, the valuable biography of the grandson of Emperor Tewodros (1855–68), Mäšäša, and a published biography of Ras Makonnen.

In 1946 the School of Oriental and African Studies is celebrating the bicentenary of the birth of Sir William Jones: in 1948 University College, London, will celebrate that of Jeremy Bentham. In this there is something more than an accidental approximation of dates. All subsequent scientific English thinking about law is traceable to these two men. The English School of Analytical Jurisprudence; the great tide of law reform which swept through nineteenth-century England; the codification (the word is his own coinage) of law not only in England and India but in many different parts of the world: these things admittedly sprang from the genius of Jeremy Bentham. Sir William Jones's influence was smaller in volume, though almost as widely diffused. He had neither the apostolic fervour of reform nor the overflowing vitality which carried Bentham on with undiminished vigour to eighty-four years: he died before reaching his forty-seventh birthday. But his influence was, none the less, considerable. The first of our Orientalists who was also a lawyer, Colebrooke, Sutherland, Wynch, and other Sanskritists, the Macnaghtens and the Baillies followed in his footsteps. In particular Colebrooke, greatest of them all, and Ian Baillie came directly under his influence. But it is equally true, though less generally recognized, that he is the forerunner of the other great English school of legal philosophy, the historical and comparative school, and that the work of Sir Henry Maine and his successors might have lacked some of its most distinctive elements if Jones's translation had not rendered the Institutes of Manu available to Maine when he was writing Ancient Law. Indeed, Maine's whole career might have been different; for just as his known interest in Oriental legal systems led to Jones's appointment as a judge of the Supreme Court of Calcutta, so it was the interest in Indian ideas evinced in Ancient Law which led to Maine's appointment as law member of the Governor-General's Council, and so to all his later work on similar topics.

The collapse of the authority of the Saddozai rulers of Afghanistan in the early years of the nineteenth century left their empire divided into a number of separate states. By 1838 the only states still under Afghan rule were those of Herat, Qandahar, and Kabul. At that time fear that Russia had gained a preponderant influence in Persia which would be extended to Afghanistan caused the British authorities in India and England to decide to remove Dost Muḥammad Khān, the ruler of Kabul, and his brothers, who ruled in Qandahar, and to restore Shāh Shujā' al-Mulk, the deposed Saddozai monarch, to the government of those territories.

Heaven has its material for slaughter. Among animals, they are the sheep, the pigs, the chickens and the ducks; among men, they are the short and slight, ugly, mean-eyed, short-stepped, garrulous, effeminate, stupid people.

The Dizi (as they call themselves) have hitherto been generally known as the Maji, a term derived from the name of their largest chiefdom, in which there also lies the most important Amhara town of this region. They are one of the least studied groups of south-western Ethiopia.

The examination and cataloguing of Mongol manuscripts and prints in European libraries in recent years has brought to light a considerable number of books whose subject matter is the occurrence and treatment of sickness by magical means, and the magical ceremonies to be performed after a person's death in order to counteract the prolongation of the evil influences which were responsible for the occurrence.

The existence of a Chinese-Vietnamese vocabulary (i-yü) of the sixteenth century was first brought to the attention of Western scholars by E. Denison Ross in 1908, p. 692, in his discussion of the R. G. Morrison Collection manuscript entitled Ko-huo i-yü, then in the library of University College, London, and now held in the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies.

The main purpose of this two-part essay is to reconsider the interpretation Western scholarship has generally placed on the Akhbārī/Uṣūlī confrontation in Twelver Shī‘ism. To this end, Part 1 (BSOAS, LV, 1, 1991, 22–51) presented an edition and translation of the relevant section of ‘Abdallāh al-Samāhijī's twelfth/eighteenth-century treatise, ‘Munyat al-Mumārisīn’. The importance of this text to the present discussion is twofold. First, Western scholars have considered this treatise to be a summary of the main points of Akhbārī/Uṣūlī disagreement, the Akhbārī element generally being understood as having been given its earliest discrete form only a century earlier by Muḥammad Amīn al-Astarābādī; and secondly, discussion of al-Samāhijī's treatise has relied primarily on an abridged version of the text written nearly two centuries later.

The connection of Ait with Geography is obvious, but in the case of Persia the problem is somewhat different from that presented by other countries.

For example, the most immediate influence of the natural environment on the landscape painters is hardly of any importance in Persia, where the miniaturists present their heroes in purely imaginary surroundings, now of radiant sunny spaces, now of fantastic rocks reminding one of coral reefs.

The identification and assessment of his source materials are among the historian's most basic tasks. The purpose of the present discussion is to describe three versions of the Javanese chronicle called Babad tanah Djawi and to provide excerpts describing the familiar story of the fall of Madjapahit in order to show how the same story differs in these three versions. The texts will be compared with regard to date and origin, and their historical value will be considered. This is not an attempt to pronounce on the course of events surrounding the fall of Madjapahit, although scholars interested in that subject may find these texts to be of value. This is rather an attempt to identify and to compare these basic sources. In this consideration, the episode of Madjapahit's fall will be used as an example.

One obstacle which confronts any historian interested in reconstructing the history of the Bētä Esra'ēl (Fälasha) of Ethiopia is the comparative scarcity of reliable historical sources. References to the Bētä Esra'ēl in Ge'ez chronicles and gädlat are all too rare, while those in Hebrew generally lack historical value. The scattered mentions of the Fälasha in other languages prior to the nineteenth century are few and limited in scope. In light of this situation, any new source, no matter how brief, is deserving of attention and study.

In, and since, the nineteenth century a more than passing interest inPashto verse, both literary and popular, has been shown in Europe, as thefollowing titles (not to mention a number of chrestomathies) testify:

The second volume of A. Sachs and H. Hunger, Astronomical diaries and related texts from Babylonia (Vienna, 1989) extends from the years 261–165 B.C., and includes further information on Babylonian astronomy, weather patterns, market prices, and historical events during these years, and as such are an invaluable source for Hellenistic history. Of particular historical interest is a group of tablets from Babylon and Sippar which are duplicate reports from 16/17 August–10/11 December, 169 B.C. In addition to the usual astronomical and meteorological data, this report includes brief accounts of contemporary events which potentially alter the historical picture of the reign of Antiochus IV. Although the passage has been known for a long time, and previously cited by Pinches, Eddy, and van der Spek, the new edition by Sachs and Hunger gives the opportunity to reopen the discussion.

In 1929 Professor Angela Codazzi published a careful edition, with an Italian translation, of a geographical compendium by Isḥāq ibn al-Ḥusayn entitled Kitāb ākām al-marjān fī dhikr al-madā'in al-mashhūra fī kull makān. According to Professor Nallino's suggestion the author may be identical with one of the sources mentioned by Idrīsī ( “IsḤāq ibn al-Ḥusayn al-munajjim” ) and by Ibn-Khaldūn ( “Isḥāq ibn al-Ḥasan (?) al-Khāzinī”).

The decline of the Gondarine monarchy and the concomitant increase in wealth and power of Tegre province, and of its capital Adwa, led, in the mid-eighteenth century, to a shift in the Ethiopian balance of power. This development, which threatened the then impoverished ruling house of Gondar, and the very continuity of the but weakly centralized State, resulted, as on other such occasions, in a major dynastic alliance between the contending parties. The compact involved two of the most important Ethiopian political figures of the century: Emperor Bakaffa's astute widow Empress Mentewwab, and the first of the great warlords of Tegre, Sehul Mika'el, a rich and powerful chieftain who was soon to emerge as the maker and breaker of kings. Mika'el was by then already well known in the Ethiopian metropolis where, according to the later Scottish traveller James Bruce, he was so ‘lavish in his money’ that ‘all Gondar were his friends’, as a result of which it was ‘plain’ to ‘everybody, that nothing could stop’ his ‘growing fortune’.