In the year 5282 (A.D. 1521–2) an Italian Jew made a pilgrimage to Palestine, of which he left a brief record in Hebrew. Until the present year, no manuscript of this work was known,, and even the author's name had not come down to us. The text was preserved in an old Italian collection of Palestine Itineraries, published in Leghorn in 1785, under the name of Shibhḥē Yěrūshālāyim, by one Jacob Bārūkh b. Mōshe Ḥayyim, and several times reprinted since.The editor informs us that he found the work in an old manuscript, and that though the author's name was not marked, he was obviously a man of great learning. Nothing beyond this was known of the anonymous traveller. It had been suggested, without much evidence, that the traveller's name was Bārūkh, and that he was the Rabbi Bārūkh with whom the theologian R. Tam b.Yaḥya corresponded. The latest reprint of this text is that of Mr. J. Eisenstein, in his Corpus of Jewish Travellers.

In the present year a new edition of this work has been published by Mr. Isaac Ben-Zevi, who has had the good fortune to find an early—probably an autograph—manuscript.

Mr. Ben-Zevi's text is in every way fuller and better than the Leghorn edition, and is presumably the original and correct one.Although the manuscript does not bear the author's name, there is no reason to doubt Mr. Ben-Zevi's attribution of the work to Rabbi.

These remarks on the verb complex are based on the speech system of one informant. The informant was born in Tientsin but was brought up in Peking, and lived in both Peking and Tientsin until 1948. She does not wish her name to be divulged, but I should nevertheless like to place on record here my very great indebtedness to her for her great patience and conscientiousness.

The following documents were discovered by Sir Aurel Stein in his last Central Asian expedition, in 1930. Since he was not allowed by the local authorities to bring anything out of the country on that occasion, these texts are edited from photographs. The originals are presumably not likely to be seen again.

Khami is one of the most important Sino-Tibetan languages because of the extensive data it presents regarding prefixes, preserved in so few groups of that linguistic family. The Khimi described here is a subdialect of the Southern dialect of the Khami language, Kukish group, Burmic division of Sino-Tibetan. Phonetically it differs from the more commonly recorded Southern dialect chiefly in the pronunciation of an original -a as -aw (as in English awe).

There is one important respect in which әW differs from yW and wW. For these last it was sufficient to state exponents of ‘ y ’ and ‘ w ’; the exponents of ‘ ә ’ however can be stated only by introducing a further prosodic system, of the initial syllable, y/w, i.e. ‘ y neutral words ’ (yәW) and ‘ w neutral words ’ (wәW). The prosodic and phonematic systems of yәW resemble those stated above for the initial syllable of yW, and those of wәW resemble the systems stated for the initial syllable of wW, i.e.

The two-term y/w system (yә/wә) is stated for the initial syllable of the (ә) word, and is not to be confused with the two-term prosodic system of the syllable initial (y/wl). The exponents of y and w in the initial syllable (CVC) of әW comprise:—

Of the medieval Muslim historians writing in Arabic and Persian several supply us with lists of the viziers employed by Ṭughrul Beg, the first sultan of the Āl Seljuq.

The list supplied by Ibn al-Athir (died A.D. 1234) shows the following four persons as having acted in turn for him as vizier:

(1) Abū'l-Qāsim ‘All ibn ‘Abd Allah al-Juwaynī. (2) The Ra'īs al-Ru'asā Abū ‘Abd Allah al-Husayn ibn ‘Alī ibn Mīkā'īl. (3) The Niຓāam al-Mulk Abū Muḥammad al-Ḥasan ibn Muḥammad al-Dihistānī. (4) The ‘Amīd al-Mulk al-Kundurī.

The legal and social attitude towards delicts against individuals in the great settled states of South Arabia is a subject on which information is very scant. All that has survived in the case of homicide is a fragmentary legal prescription of uncertain import, a temple regulation on the subject of slaves, and two incidental communications gleaned from dedicatory inscriptions. To this may be added a general prohibition contained in a late Greek law code purporting to stem from the Homeritae. Moreover, this small corpus of information is geographically limited in the first case to Qatabān, and in the remainder to Saba', while each instance refers to a different stage in the social development of South Arabia.

The last ten years have seen a remarkable increase in the number of published studies about the Sīrat Banī Hilāl, or, to borrow the term used by francophone specialists from the Maghrib as well as from France itself, La Geste hilalienne. The subject matter and the approach of these specialists has been varied. Their interests have focused on the myriad plots of the narrative of the sīra, the imagery employed, the performance of the shā ‘ir and the documenting of the texts, be they oral or written. In aggregate, these studies have done much to clarify the nature of the work itself and its relationship, if any, to the exploits of the real Banū Hilāl during and after the eleventh century within the Maghrib. They have also contributed to a better understanding of the literary value of all the best known Arabic folk epics.

In the 1994 season of the excavations in Ramla, archaeologist Don Glick, digging on behalf of Israel Antiquities Authority, exposed in a field on the eastern part of the city, some 600 m. to the south east of Birkat al-ՙAnaziyya, a complex of water installations consisting of two small basins or troughs (one 1.00 × 1.50 m. and the other 0.50 × 0.62 m.), and water canals and pipes. One of the canals was covered with a slab of marble, with an Arabic inscription, in a secondary usage. In the course of fitting the stone to its new purpose, it was cut and a few lines from the top and bottom of the inscription were lost. From the contents of the inscription, as we shall soon see, it can be learnt that the field and the water installations continued to be in use, long after the inscription ceased to serve its purpose, for it was utilized in the repairs of the water installations in the field at some later date.

The peculiarity of the Druze law of divorce does not lie in the mechanism of dissolution, which is not materially different from that of the Muslim sharī'a, but in its effects: a dissolved marriage cannot be restored; the repudiation of the wife by itself creates an absolute bar to a remarriage between the parties. Article 11 of the Lebanese Druze Law of Personal Status of 1948 (hereinafter referred to as ‘the Lebanese Druze Law’), which was adopted by the Israeli Druze Community in 1961, provides, in conformity with Druze religious law, that a man must not remarry his divorced wife. Unlike Islamic law, Druze law does not distinguish between revocable (raj'ī) divorce, which does not immediately sever the marital bond but permits reinstating the wife during the waiting-period ('idda) by express utterance or significant conduct, and irrevocable (bā'in) divorce, which takes immediate effect; reinstatement in the latter case requires the conclusion of a new marriage with all that this implies (dower, etc.). A Druze divorce is absolute under any circumstances; the wife cannot be reinstated by way of taḥlīl, i.e. an intermediate marriage to another man and divorce from him so as to become again permitted to her first husband; this course is adopted in Islamic law after the third repudiation. Although the Lebanese Druze Law does not say so expressly, it seems that the legislator intended to block the reinstatement of the wife and restoration of the marriage by every possible means. In fact, religious law goes so far as to forbid divorced spouses to meet under the same roof even if separated by many partitions. The ban on taking back a divorced wife dates from the early days of the Druze religion.

Me trouvant pour quelques jours à Londres à, la fin de Juillet 1936, j'ai voulu vérifier sur les manuscrits sogdiens du British Museum certains endroits où la lecture de M. Reichelt, bonne en général, mais établie sur des photographies, me semblait sujette à caution. Puis, constatant que l'examen des originaux fournissait plusieurs corrections au texte de l'édition, je me suis décidé à une révision plus large. Mais comme le temps me manquait pour la faire complète, j'ai dû me limiter: j'ai intègralement contrôlé tous les fragments bouddhiques et révisé partiellement (premières et dernières lignes assez endommagées et divers passages au milieu) les trois grands textes: Vimalakīrtinirdeśasūtra, Dhyānasūtra et Dhūtasūtra.

The hill of Ramtek (21°.28´N, 79°.28´E), c. 45 km. NE of Nagpur (Maharashtra), merits special attention because it appears to be one of the very few places in India where an uninterrupted historical development from the fourth century A.D. to the present day can be investigated through a series of archaeological monuments which, although partly restored or built over in later periods, seem never to have been exposed to destructive and iconoclastic forces. From at least the fifth century onwards the hill, also known as Rāmagiri, Sindūragiri, or Tapamgiri (Tapogiri), served as a regional centre of religious activity and probably, also had a more secular function as an outstanding strategic base controlling the highway that connected, and still connects, the central and eastern part of the basin of the Ganges with the northern Deccan. This could possibly explain, at least in part, why the religious structures on top of the hill have attracted the attention and care of the rulers of the area from a very early date.

Despite the similar titles of the two books reviewed here, they are very different in aims and scope. While Samadi's book is primarily an etymological dictionary of verb forms, Kellens's is in effect the first volume of a comprehensive Avestan grammar, as a companion to which the author promises ‘ in the near future' (p. 435) a complete lexicon of the Avestan verb. What they do have in common, in addition to the relationship in subject-matter indicated by their titles, is a comprehensiveness which ensures that they will both become standard works of reference. It is this characteristic above all which seems to justify reviewing them in more than usual detail.

The Aramaic clay tablets presented here are legal documents with Neo-Assyrian formularies. These texts are important as they attest to an Akkadian legal tradition and its adaptation to an Aramaic context. The fact that the writing material is clay is exceptional since one would expect an Aramaic document to be written on parchment or papyrus. Published examples of Aramaic documents on clay are relatively uncommon although more are surfacing.

Every student of Rabbinic literature is aware of the formal argument known as qal va-ḥomer ‘the argument from the minor to the major’. There are numerous instances of the argument in Rabbinic literature, dating from pre-Tannaitic times down to the close of the Talmud. The argument runs: if A is so then B must surely be so; if the ‘minor’ has this or that property then the ‘major’ must undoubtedly have it. It is of interest to Old Testament scholars that the Rabbis purported to detect many examples of the use of this argument in Scripture. The Rabbis use the argument as one of their hermeneutical principles by means of which they expand and elaborate on the Biblical teachings. However, they rightly contend that they did not invent the argument but that it is found in the Bible itself. The purpose of this paper is to examine this contention more fully and to note possible implications for Old Testament studies.

WHILE I was in Isfahān at the end of June, 1932, a young of Yazd, came to see me before going on to his school in Shīrāz. We met four times, and before leaving he requested an acquaintance of his, a young man, Qobād, who was visiting Isfahān, to come to see me. Qobād's home was with his parents in Teheran, so that he had little opportunity to use this dialect. In August of the same year I was able to visit Yazd for one week, and there found a young school-teacher, Mehrabān born in the neighbouring village of Maryābād (or Mōriābād).

The text-historical problems surrounding the medical works attributed to Vāgbhaṭa are well known and have been excellently outlined by Vogel (1965: introduction) and again briefly by Meulenbeld (1974: 423–5). From the published colophons of both the Aṣṭāṅgasaṅgraha (As.) and the Aṣṭāṅgahṛdayasaṃhitā (Ah.) we learn that Vāgbhaṭa was the son of Siṃhagupta. This is stated again in the text of the As. (VI.50, end) where it is further stated that the author's grandfather was also called Vāgbhaṭa, and was also a doctor. We are in addition told that the author was born in the Sindhu region and that his teachers were Avalokita and, to a greater extent, his father Siṃhagupta. Thus we have the following family tree.