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.

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:—

Khul’, according to its shar ī definition, is a wife's ‘redemption of herself’ from the marriage tie, with the husband's consent, by the use of the word khul’, or a verb derived from it, in return for consideration. The husband, not the wife, dissolves the marriage tie; he must be legally competent to divorce the wife, and the wife must be legally competent to enter into a contractual divorce agreement for consideration (Anderson, 1970: 367). She is a party to the proceedings for divorce by shar’ī khul’, just as she is a party to the marriage contract. She generally compensates the husband by returning the dower (which is her property under the sharī'a), wholly or in part, in exchange for her freedom. This is the picture emerging from the sijill and confirmed by research elsewhere.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

The method of editing Sumerian literary texts has been the subject of heated debate in recent years. It used to be that Sumerian text editions followed the practice of classical philologists, giving the text with an apparatus criticus of manuscript variants, but this method has an inherent flaw: the editor must either choose to use as his main text an ‘eclectic text’ combining the best readings of all the manuscripts, or select one manuscript as the best version. Moreover, although the apparatus may reveal manuscript variants, it often does not inform the reader of how much of any one line is preserved in any one text. Since Sumerian literary texts may show a considerable number of variants between duplicates, the Partitur format has been proposed and utilized, in which every line of every manuscript is given in full, although the system has been opposed on grounds of waste of space.

Headhunting has a long and well-documented history in China, but most people are today unaware of this practice, first recorded in Shang oracle bones and regularly mentioned in ancient Chinese texts until the Han dynasty. This ignorance is because headhunting subsequently came to be seen as a barbaric practice and knowledge concerning its long history was destroyed: this was achieved by inventing a new character, guo 聝, which means “to cut the ear of a dead enemy combatant” and using this to replace (and thus confuse meanings with) an older character guo 馘, which refers specifically to headhunting. Ancient texts in which headhunting practices are documented have been misunderstood and misrepresented by imperial era scholars to prevent anyone from seeing that ancient China was a headhunting culture. This study shows how dominant cultural norms can impact on the way in which texts are read.

This article uses the World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840, and the way in which it was represented in Benjamin Robert Haydon's painting of it, to reflect on the ways in which Britons thought of themselves as an ’imperial people’, ’lords of humankind’, fit to rule over others. The Whig reforms of the 1830s had brought the enfranchisement of large numbers of middle-class men, and the emancipation of the enslaved across the British Empire. Excavating the assumptions of the abolitionists who gathered at the Convention allows us to see how new hierarchies of difference were encoded by 1840, placing freed black men, middle-class women and Irish Catholics on the margins of the new body politic.

In the central and eastern inscriptions of Aoka (Kls, Dhauli, and Jaugaḍa, Pillar Edicts and Minor Rock Inscriptions) a long vowel of Sanskrit whenfollowed by a double consonant or a consonant-group is shortened (e.g. tt att) as generally in Pali and Prakrit. But the long vowel is retained in the Girnr inscription and in some of the Pillar Edicts and Minor Rock Inscriptions. In the Girnr forms the consonant following the long vowel still representeda geminate; whether or not it still did so in the other inscriptions atthat date cannot be ascertained. Although the distinction of length is not shownin Kharoṣṭh writing, the long vowel before geminates was certainly maintainedin the language of the Shhbzgaṛh and Mnsehr versions, for the longvowel in this position is still preserved in the North-Western languages: Sindh, Lahnd, Western Panjb, Kshmr (not so demonstrably in other Dardic languages) and some West Pahari dialects.

This article presents a publication and translation (with linguistic and philological commentaries) of a recently discovered piece of Old Amharic poetry, possibly dating to the first half/middle of the seventeenth century. The published text bears the title Märgämä kəbr (“Condemnation of glory”), but its content differs from that of several other Old Amharic poems (not entirely independent from each other) known under the same title. It is only the general idea and the main topics that are shared by all Märgämä kəbr poems: transience of the earthly world, the inevitability of death and of God's judgement, and the necessity of leading a virtuous life. One can thus speak of Märgämä kəbr as a special genre of early Amharic literature, probably originally belonging to the domain of oral literature and used to address the Christian community with the aim of religious education and admonition of laymen.