Inscription on a limestone slab, 27 ½ in. 7 ½in.; obtained from a man who has done extensive digging in Haid Ibn ‘Aqil, the necropolis of Timna’, and now in Major, M. D. Van Lessen's possession. Plate I.

In a recent brief survey in Biblische Notizen Pardee has defended the concept of an ‘epistolary perfect’ in Hebrew letters. In that survey he examined each of the usages of a ‘perfect’ verbal form (i.e. ‘suffix conjugation’ or qātat) in the extant corpus of Hebrew letters most of them extra-Biblical. Those forms which described completed acts prior to the writing of the letter were separated off from those which described aspects of the epistolary acts themselves such as ‘writing’ ‘sending’ and ‘commanding’ and the latter were termed ‘epistolary perfects’. In the present study we wish to examine the epistolary conventions observed in Ugaritic and in Akkadian. As in Pardee's previous study Ugaritic ‘perfect’ (qtt) forms and Akkadian preterite (iprus) and perfect (iptaras) forms will be examined in order to determine the conventions governing their usage in letters.

Apart of the island of the central Solomon Islands which was called Santa Ysabel by the Spanish discoverers is known as “Sambana” to the natives of Narovo (Eddystone) and Mandegusu islands, who used to raid it. The north end of the island is called Kia, and the southern end is known as Bugotu. There is no one native name for the whole of the island.

The manuscript numbered S. 788 in the Stein Collection at the British Museum is a fragment, only about a foot square, containing on one side of the paper part of two ballads descriptive of fighting in the frontier regions, the second of which is entitled “the Ballad of Yen,”. Both the writing and the paper point to a date in the late ninth or beginning of the tenth century.

In the 1950s when Professor Stein was engaged in his research on the Gesar epic, he wrote: ‘If there ever existed a complete recension of all Chapters, they remain unknown to us. Neither written texts nor oral versions contain the totality of the epic story. And the ones that we know of at present, present themselves in the form of a literature that is still alive and mobile.’

Since then, the situation has totally changed with the publication of many previously unknown chapters, not only those that have come down to us from the past but also the new products of a literature that is still expanding, as Professor Stein so accurately observed. What I am concerned with here, however, is the theoretical basis which underlies the ordering of the episodes relating to the hero and his life, and the notion of a correct ‘chronological order’ which the tradition presents, however fictitious the events may be. It is the materials which existed before our time which are most pertinent here and which permit us to identify the theoretical basis of which I speak. That basis provides a perspective on the question as a whole, and a guide through the tangled structure of the Tibetan epic. We are now, as I said, in a better position than in the 1950s to make an assessment of the whole body of Tibetan epic literature.

Of the various appellations by which ‘Alī b. Abī Ṭālib is known, none has evoked more interest and controversy than that of ‘Abū (al-)Turāb’. This by-name is attested in early sources, both Muslim and non-Muslim; an example for the latter is the letter allegedly sent by the Byzantine Emperor Leo III (717–40) to ‘Umar b. ‘Abd al-’Azīz (99–101/717–20), in which ‘Abū Turāb’ appears twice.

IT is well known that Tamil in contradistinction to other Dravidian languages does not admit of the voiced stops g, j, d, b at the beginning of a word ; whereas in the middle of a word the unvoiced sounds are represented by the voiced, though the writing takes no notice of this distinction. Caldwell (3rd ed., p. 138), formulating this state of affairs as the“ Convertibility of Surds and Sonants ”, assumes it to have been characteristic of the primitive Dravidian tongue. In this most people have tended to follow him. More recently, however, contrary opinions have been expressed, notably by M. Jules Bloch.

The Musabba'āt played an important part in the history of the Kordofan/Dār Fūr region in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This article attempts to define who they were and to examine the careers of three generations of Musabba'āt sultans, in particular that of the grandson, their most famous sultan, Hashim b. ‘Isāwī al-Musabba'āwī.

The Arabs in Central Asia occupied in the past, as is well known, considerable territory, especially in the lower parts of the basins of the Zarafshān and Qashqa-daryā rivers, and also in Khojend and the south-eastern regions of Tajikistan.

In the course of centuries the majority of the Central Asian Arabs have lost their language and only small groups of them continue to speak Arabic up to the present time in the villages of Jōgarḹ, Čardaḹ (Ġijduwān district) and ‘Arab-Xōna (Wobkend district) of the Bukhārā region and in the village of Jeinau in the Qashqa-daryā region.

Conventionally, the history of early and medieval India is viewed against a framework of a large number of dynasties, some local, others ‘imperial’, some ephemeral, others extending over several centuries.3 In this paper I argue that such a conceptualization is to some extent illusory, at least if a dynasty is defined as a series of genetically related rulers succeeding to a given office over time. The purpose of the paper is not to deny that many of these dynasties could have existed, or even that they did exist, but only to argue that the nature and extent of our evidence is not sufficient to permit many of the hypothesized reconstructions of them. In other words, the impression of a dynastic Indian past often has resulted from a maximum of inference based on a minimum of satisfactory data.

Examination of the verb paradigms of Omotic can easily engender a sense of bewilderment; there is such a variation from language to language, even when, in other respects, the languages concerned appear to be quite closely related. Coming to Omotic from a language group such as Eaśt Cushitic, the contrast is especially striking. For example, when investigating any little known East Cushitic language (and there are a few left!), one starts out with a strong expectation of finding in the verbal system certain morphological elements and patterns (e.g., t ‘2nd person, 3rd feminine singular’; n ‘1st person plural’ a palatal vowel signalling ‘perfect’; a guttural verb signalling ‘imperfect’; a rounded vowel signalling a ‘subordinate function’ or ‘non-indicative mood’; etc.), and one is never entirely disappointed; the well known formatives, along with the anticipated patterns of distribution, crop up with an almost monotonous regularity. Similar predictabilities are not obviously the case when we look at Omotic. With virtually every new language investigated, new and unfamiliar features emerge. I have remarked on this before (Hayward, 1984: 324), but I am not alone in having done so; Andrzej Zaborski has also emphasized the high degree of innovation seen in the Omotic verb (Zaborski, 1986: 528). But I think the essence of the problem is not that there are no identifiable cognate formatives so much as that we have been unable to understand their historical significance, andso supply them with meaningful labels.

When Soslan went to the land of the giant Uomar, son of Tara, he pretended to be his own hireling: Tari furt Uomari zænxæmæ ranæxstæræy ye'xuærsti ræuoni, Pam. ii 60. The Dictionary translates Dig. ræuonæ as ‘cause, pretext, appearance’, and quotes our passage to illustrate the third meaning: ‘in the appearance of his hireling.’ There is, however, another passage, in which ræuonæ clearly means ‘disguise’. Uaskergi had placed watchmen at the gorge of Zadælesk, to prevent Cænxigol, the spirit of salt, from leaving the heights. The villain Sirdon advises Cænxigol: mæn gadcay ræuændtæy leu næ rayervæzay uædta, dæ ramardzænæncæ ‘if you do not escape by means of my bitch's ræuændtæ (plur. of ræuonæ) they will kill you’; thereupon Cænxigol Sirdoni gadcay cari bacudæy ma uotemæy qalaurtæbæl rayevhudæy, “Sirdoni gadca æy!” zæhgæy ‘Cænxigol entered the hide of Sirdon's bitch and thus passed by the watchmen, who said: “it is Sirdon's bitch”’ (Miller, Ocemuhckue Эmю∂ы i 102). Miller translated mæn gadcay ræuændtæy as ‘by the ruse of my bitch’; evidently the meaning is ‘by disguising yourself as my bitch’. The plural ræuændtæ is also used, according to B., my Digor friend, when the word means ‘pretext’.

According to the promise in BSOS., X, 365, I give translation of and brief commentary on the Khotanese Rāma text. Considerable progress has been made since the lecture published in the Journ. Amer. Or. Soc., 59, 460 ff., and also since the printing of the text. Superseded views expressed in the lecture are ignored here. Certain introductory matter can be added.

1. References to the Rama story in Khotanese.

(a) E 6, 4–5.

rāmä daśagrīvi sīysau nāte laṃggä kīnthai bāste

ttye käḍäna jīvätu rruste rāmāyanä ttandī arthi

valmīki räṣayī haṃbaste haṃtsa drūgyau hāḍe

cvī lovi mānya pyūṣḍe samu haṃdara-ysaṃthva karma

“From Rāma Daśagrīva took Sīta, he carried her to Lankā, city. For that he lost his life. Such is the content of the Rāmāyaṇa. Vālmīki the sage composed it, but with lies. For the person who listens to him with honour, surely there is karma leading to other births.”

(b) E 6, 90.

rāmä päte karjunä karṇä ṣṣai ttä ysaṃthīgya samudru

“Rama's father Karjuna and Karṇa these too are in the ocean of birth.”

It is, of course, for his immense contribution to linguistics and the general study of African languages that Wilfred Whiteley is known. It is sometimes forgotten that he was originally trained as an anthropologist and, moreover, retained this disciplinary thrust in his treatment of linguistic problems. In a truly extraordinary manner he was able to keep up to date with much anthropo-logical literature, a fact of considerable significance in his recent move into the field of sociolinguistics. For anthropologists as much as for linguists he is here irreplaceable. The important consolation is the existence of the initial fruits of his labours in this new field of sociolinguistics (Whiteley, 1966, 1969, 1971, in press, and many articles) and the fact that many of us are trying to respond to his great example.

Shuhayd (or Shahīd) al-Balkhī is remembered mainly as one of the earliest poets in Neo-Persian. But he was also a minor poet in Arabic and, moreover, a tantalizingly obscure figure in the history of Muslim philosophy in the ninth century. A first sifting of the relevant biographical material was made by M. Qazwīnī in 1910 and the only really significant contributions since have come from P. Kraus and most recently from G. Lazard, who published a critical edition and translation of the surviving fragments of Shuhayd's Persian poetry together with a comprehensive bibliography. The present attempt to add a bit more flesh to Shuhayd's still decidedly skeletal biography is based essentially on just two texts, one of which has been known all along, but has not, I think, previously been understood correctly; the other has only recently become available.