L'emploi des Psaumes en dehors de l'usage liturgique est bien attesté aussi bien dans la tradition juive que dans la tradition chrétienne. Il y a d'abord la bibliomancie à proprement parler. Comme tous les livres bibliques, les Psaumes peuvent servir à la divination. La méthode la plus courante dans la bibliomancie est celle où l'on ouvre le livre au hasard et l'on prédit l'avenir d'après le passage que le doigt touche ou bien on cherche à répondre à une question posée au préalable.

Monemvasia, an island town of the Morea, the Malvasia of the Italians, the Malvoisie of the French, is now an almost forgotten place, though its name still lives on as that of the strong sweet wine originally grown there—the ‘Malvasia’, ‘Malvasier’, ‘Malvoisie’, ‘Malmsey’ of the various languages and literatures of Europe. Yet once Monemvasia was a major port and emporium on a most important sea-route, and at the same time an impregnable fortress which played in history a rôle of no small consequence. As guardian of the western entrance to the Aegean Sea it was indeed the ‘Gibraltar of Greece’, as a modern writer1 has called it, though nowadays the comparison is confined to its natural situation.

The presence of Sanskrit loanwords in Malay was noted at least as far back as the time of Sir William Jones (Asiatick Researches, III, 11, 12), and lists of them have been compiled, showing how they include not only abstract terms like those that need the conception of time or price or profit, but terms of relationship, names for parts of the body, names for utensils and articles of commerce, and many court terms of honorific import.

In a recent (and as yet unpublished) study of Swahili intonation (John Kelly and Joan Maw) it was pointed out that the neutral situation vis-à-vis grammar is to have one tone-group corresponding to one clause (except under certain predictable conditions), and within the tone-group to have two points of reference, named the ‘salient’ and the ‘tonic’, whose neutral positions (again except in certain predictable cases) are respectively on the first lexical item and on the last item in the clause. Any other arrangement constitutes ‘special’ intonation. Amongst other conclusions, it was tentatively hypothesized that special intonation of the multiple tone-group type seemed to correlate with marked clause structure. Marked clause structure, as defined in Maw, Sentences in Swahili, London, 1969, designated clauses with marked sequence of elements of structure, such as the Subject following the Predicator, the Complement preceding the Predicator, the Subject and Predicator separated by an Adjunct, and so on (the neutral situation being generally the sequence (A)SPC(A)); and also discontinuous clauses. The hypothesis that multiple tone-groups and marked clause structure might show correlation could only be tentative, because in the passages used for the Kelly and Maw study marked clause structure was not particularly frequent. But in the most varied text there were 36 clauses with marked sequence of elements, of which 28 had multiple tone-groups. Moreover there were only 37 clauses with multiple tone-groups in all in that text. This particular point about possible correlation was, of course, only a minor suggestion in a general description, but it seemed worth looking into more closely.

The story of Maitrakanyaka is unquestionably old, and has survived in a number of versions which vary considerably in detail. The main outline of the story in the Avadāna-śataka, which is closely related to the versions in the Divyavadāna, the Avadāna-kalpalatā of Kṣemendra, and the Bhadrakalpāvaādna, is as follows:

A rich merchant, Mitra, for a long time has no children who survive childhood; and he is advised that if he gives a girl's name to the next son to be born to him, the child will live (yadi te putro jāyate, tasya dārikā-nāma sthāpayitavyam, evam asau cirajīvī bhaviṣyati). After the child's birth, the relatives say, ‘This boy is the son of Mitra (mitrasya putrah, as being equivalent to maitraḥ), and is a girl (kanyā ca); therefore let his name be Maitrakanyaka’.

The rise and development of Persian poetry in Transoxiana and Khurāsān coincided with the growth in influence of the Turkish element in the Sãmãnid state. Although Turks had alredy been living in these regions at the time of the Arab conquest, it was under the Sāmānids especially that emerged into political and military prominence, having risen form the status of slaves to the highest ranks of power. In the fragmentary survivals of the Persian poetry of this period we not only find mention of Turks but even the occasional word of Turkish origin:

‘This cloud is like a crazed Turk, shooting arrows; the lightning his shafts, and the rainbow his bow.’

Scholars working in the field of oral epic all have a particular form of words committed to memory—Milman Parry's celebrated definition of the formula. The definition in fact appears in two slightly differing forms in Parry's writing. In 1928 he wrote, ‘In the diction of bardic poetry, the formula can be defined as an expression regularly used, under the same metrical conditions, to express an essential idea’ (Parry, 1971: 13). Two years later came the more familiar version: ‘The formula in the Homeric poems may be defined as a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea’ (Parry, 1971: 272). The differences between the two forms of the definition are negligible, and Parry made no further attempt to refine or modify it during the five years of life that remained to him. For Albert Lord, too, the definition was clearly adequate as it stood: in ch. iii of The singer of tales he simply quotes it verbatim (Lord, 1960: 30), and proceeds directly to a consideration of the function of formulaic diction.

Islamic metalwork has in recent years been the subject of several important new publications. James W. Allan has written a lavishly illustrated guide to a recently acquired private collection whose pieces attest to the high quality of objects available to the discriminating collector. The 27 pieces span the variety of wares produced in the medieval Islamic world: bowls, ewers, candlesticks, inkwells, incense burners, and other objects produced in Egypt, Syria, the Jazira, Iran, and India from the tenth to the seventeenth century. Multiple photographs in both colour and black and white accompany a lengthy discussion of each piece. In the introduction the author offers a brief summary of the Islamic metalware tradition (its origins, expansion, and decline) and discusses the symbolism inherent in its decoration, particularly the imagery of light and darkness and the sun.

In my Dictionary of Sea Dayak, I gave a scheme for the systematic spelling of the language in a table that is reproduced below. The following notes on the phonetic interpretation of this spelling are based on the pronunciation of speakers from the Second Division of Sarawak. The descriptions refer to words spoken in isolation, which have slightly increased stress on the final syllable.

In this note I shall re-present an old solution to a small problem that was noted by Arthur Waley a little over fifty years ago.2 In the course of doing so, I shall also challenge the view that the Analects does lend support to the view that Confucius maintained that it was important for the gentleman (jun zi) to secure a reputation. Finally, I shall comment briefly on the significance that my overall analysis has for the view that the Analects, despite its composite nature,3 can nevertheless be read as a text which has been consciously edited such that it presents internally consistent themes.

For a long time now the Falashas have, with questionable justification, been dubbed the ‘Jews of Abyssinia’. A good deal of legendary information about the Falashas appears already in such medieval writings as Sefer Eldad and in an account given by Benjamin of Tudela who gathered some news on the Falashas while on his way from the Yemen to Egypt. The great seventeenth-century scholar Job Ludolf included some notes and questions in his monumental work on Ethiopian history—based, to a large extent, on information supplied by Abba Gregory who thought that the Falashas dialecto Talmudica corrupta inter se utuntur (no doubt a reference to their Agaw vernacular which Gregory did not understand). Thus misled, Ludolf is understandably curious to know quando vel qua occasione Judaei isti primum in Aethiopiam venerint? Karraeorumne vel aliorum Judaeorum sectae sint addicti? James Bruce of Kinnaird provides a fairly detailed, though not necessarily accurate, picture of Falasha life which became the stimulus of subsequent interest in this peculiar form of ‘Judaism’.

Because of the growing interest in Buddhist hermeneutics in recent years, the subject of p'an-chiao (classification of teachings) has lately attracted increasing attention in the West. P'an-chiao is essentially an attempt to distinguish and to integrate various trends of Buddhist thought, various systems of Buddhist praxis and various kinds of Buddhist texts, with a view to highlighting their individual characteristics and to reconciling their apparent disparities. Different Chinese Buddhist schools, each with its own particular idea of the essence of the Buddha Dharma, naturally consider the significance of the heterogeneous elements of their spiritual heritage differently. Hence, examining and comparing their p'an-chiao theories is a convenient and reliable way to assess their doctrinal positions and to determine the respective places of their teachings in the bewildering labyrinth of Buddhist dogmatics. This article is an attempt to bring out the basic orientation and special concerns of Chi-tsang's (549–623) thought as reflected in his opinions about a number of central Buddhist sūtras and their interrelation. Chi-tsang, as is well-known, was the pivotal figure in the revival of Chinese Madhyamaka in the late sixth century, and it was the common consensus that his teaching represented the apex of the development of Madhyamaka thought in China.

Among the peoples of Mongolia at the advent of Chingiz Khān the Karaits () stand out for several reasons. First, We can trace them for more than three centuries, roughly A.D. 1000 to 1300. Second, in them we have the unusual phenomenon of a Far Eastern nation professing Christianity. Third, they have the interest of being connected with the story of Prester John, of Which the attraction has not altogether vanished. In what follows the attempt is made to give a connected account of these Karaits. From the nature of the sources it will be confined largely to the history of their ruling house.

The following chant, one of a series recorded in central Morocco in the summer of 1967, exemplifies a type of oral tradition found among the Imazighen, the Berbers of that region. It is a socio-religious poem, called a tanšhat: (plural tinšhadri). The poet-performer is an anšhad (pl. inšhadn), although like other musical performers he is addressed as ‘Shaykh’. The genre, known by other names in other regions, is characterized by its form and language, its composition and execution, its subject-matter and the poet's attitude toward it, and finally by its role in the life of the community.

When Thomas Stamford Raffles published his seminal text The History of Java in 1817, ruins were a favourite leitmotif in British art, forming an important element within the visual vocabulary of the picturesque. Given the fascination in this period for the ruin, fuelled by a tradition of antiquarian enquiry, the newly developing science of archaeology, and the increased possibilities for travel in the wake of imperial expansion, it is not surprising that Raffles chose to devote a whole a chapter of his publication to Java's ruined candis. The plates and vignettes which illustrate the chapter, created according to pictorial conventions that were ordinarily applied to the crumbling remains of Europe's classical past, are amongst the most beautiful portrayals of South-East Asia's architectural remains. This paper examines how these images elicited set emotional responses associated with the idea of ruins and ruination and confirmed key stereotypes associated with the region, linking the candis, and by implication the Javanese themselves, with a vanished past rather than with a dynamic and forward-looking present.

The Kwara ‘Ae language is spoken by a hill people who live in the neighbourhood of the mountain called Ala Saa, North-West Alite Mountain, on North Mala, Solomon Islands. The present grammar has been compiled from a translation of the Gospel according to St. Matthew (1930), the translator being Mr. N. C. Deck, of the South Sea Evangelical Mission on North Mala, and the publishers the British and Foreign Bible Society. Use has been made also of a booklet of 32 pp. entitled “Kwara ‘Ae Questions”, and notes kindly supplied by Mr. Deck have been used in the compilation of this grammar.

Of maimonides' (1135–1204) prinicpal philosophical work Dalā al-Hāirīn (More Nevuxim) four autograph fragments are known, each from a different Geniza collection:

The first discovery was made at the beginning of the century by H. Hirschfeld, Who identified two unjoined leaves in the Geniza collection of the University Library, Cambridge, and Published them, with photographs, in JQR, xv, 1902–3, 677–81 under the title: ‘The Arabic portion of the Cairo Geniza at Cambridgem IV. Two autograph fragments of Maimonides’ Dalālat al Ḥārin, These leaves cover Book I, chs. 64–65 and Book II, Chs.32–33

The expression taḥannuth mentioned in some traditions in connexion with the first revelation of the Prophet was variously interpreted by Muslim philologists and commentators of ḥadīth. Several meanings have been attached to it by modern scholars. A re-examination of the material seems to give us a clue for elucidation of the meaning of taḥannuth and the ideas connected with it. This may also be helpful towards understanding the circumstances of the ‘Call to Prophecy’ of Muḥammad.