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’.

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.

Abū I-Walīd Jonah ibn Janāḥ is undoubtedly one of the greatest Hebrew grammarians. Born in Al-Andalus at the end of the tenth century he was active during the eleventh century, but his exact dates are not known. His best known works, a grammar, Kitāb al-Lumaՙ (The book of variegated flowerbeds) and a dictionary of biblical Hebrew, Kitāb al-'Uṣūl (The book of roots), represented the most important development in the knowledge of Hebrew of the Middle Ages. Other important works on grammar include Kitāb al-Taswi'a (The book of annexation), a short grammatical treatise which he composed as a response to critics of a previous work entitled Kitāb al-Mustalḥaq (The book of annexation).

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.

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.

Sěrat Cabolek is a problematical but very interesting work concerning the court of Kartasura in the reign of Pakubuwana II. It tells of a religious controversy which became the subject of debate at the court, involving some of the most important figures in the realm, including the young king himself.

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.’

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 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’.

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 Arab literary establishment of the period immediately preceding the nineteenth century had reached such stability in social status, such homogeneity in education, and such unanimity in cultural values that it was no longer searching for innovative ideas, and of its men of letters—poets and prose writers alike—it expected not originality but consummate skill in the use of words. The prose that it favoured was not only rhymed, but laden with tropes, especially those developed in the branch of Rhetoric known as badī, which concerns itself not so much with imagery as with verbal artifices2 (such as the paronomasia, the double entendre, the palindrome) of which by then over 150 varieties had been devised.

In contrast to its description in available grammars and manuals, the converb -las in Old Tibetan is used primarily to mark off the following clause as surprising given the background of the preceding clause. The converb -las enters into two distinct syntactic constructions: after a reduplicated verb it indicates the interruption of a continuous event; and in a three-clause pattern with the converb -kyis, -las introduces a surprise or contrast in the second clause, but -kyis in the third clause returns the sentiment to that of the first clause. Although the examples which demonstrate the use of -las are drawn from Old Tibetan texts, this use continues in later texts.

This article is a description and analysis of the twelve-day renovation ritual or kumbha¯bhiseka (‘water-pot bathing ritual’) celebrated in the Mi¯na¯ksi¯ Temple in the south Indian city of Madurai in 1995. After briefly discussing the historical background, the article describes the priests' division of labour at the kumbha¯bhiseka, the preliminary rituals—including the transfer of the deities' power from their images into water-pots—and the most crucial rituals: the series of ya¯gapu¯ja¯ (‘sacrifice-worship’) rituals, which mainly consisted of fire-sacrifices to enhance the power in the water-pots, and the culmination of the entire event, when the pots were emptied over the Temple's towers and images, so that the power flowed back in. The article concludes that despite its extreme elaborateness, the kumbha¯bhiseka's symbolic logic and purpose, especially as displayed in the spectacular destruction of the fire-sacrifices and then the final water-pouring, are unusually transparent compared to many other temple rituals.

It has been generally accepted by modern scholars that al-Qāḍī al-Nu'mān was in the beginning either a Mālikī or a Ḥanafī and that he subsequently became an Imāmī and finally adopted the Ismā'īlī faith. The Imāmī savants, from al-Qāḍī Nūr Allāh Shūshtarī to Āghā Buzurg-i Tihrānī, maintain that al-Qāḍī al-Nu'mān was one of their co-religionists. Ismā'īlīs, on the other hand, regard him as one of the pillars of their da'wa. In the light of recently discovered sources and of the consequent revaluation and reinterpretation of earlier works, a re-examination of the question of al-Qāḍī al-Nu'mān's madhhab becomes necessary. The present article attempts to do precisely that, and show how and when the theory of al-Qāḍī al-Nu'mān's conversion originated.

A study of the dialects of Fula (the language of the Fulɓe or Fulani) can be of interest both to the linguist and to the sociolinguist: partly because of the sheer scale of the undertaking, with what is essentially the same language being spoken by Fulani from Senegal, Gambia, and Guinea on the Atlantic coast to Nigeria and Cameroon on the east; and partly because of the complexity of the movements that have taken place over the centuries, and of the resulting varied pattern of social, cultural, and economic relationships between different Fulani groups and between Fulani and other peoples. It could also be of interest, not simply as a dialect study as such, but also for the light it might throw on comparable phenomena in multilingual situations.

Classical Arabic Ḥadīth literature is largely composed of micro-narratives recording the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muḥammad. This study seeks to examine their literary form by focusing on selected examples listed in the canonical Ḥadīth compendia under the heading of adab, a term which may be rendered here as “practical ethics” but which is also commonly used to designate classical Arabic belles-lettres. While the latter is a type of literature quite distinct from the literature of Ḥadīth the texts here studied point to a certain interface between them. The ethical dimension of adab as it appears in Ḥadīth is examined further in the light of Haydon White's theory on the relation between narrativity and law. Contrasting the micro-narrative of Ḥadīth with the “macro-narrative” of the epic provides further insight into its approach to adab and serves to highlight its distinct literary and religious aesthetic.

In this article we review the newly published fourth-century bce manuscript of the Book of Odes (Shi jing 詩經) in the collection of Anhui University. We describe the preservation and material features of the manuscript, discuss issues of provenance, and compare the text with the received version of the Odes. We conclude that the text of the Odes was already fundamentally stable by the date of the manuscript, and that written versions like the Anda manuscript provided important support for the stability of the text. However, we also argue that the manuscript shows signs of having been produced from memory, rather than sight-copying from another manuscript. We suggest that the function of the Anda manuscript was to support the learning and memorization of the Odes.

Most scholars in Japanese studies (history, linguistics, literature) tend to accept in one form or another the ancient legend that the phonetic writing system of ancient Japan, known as man'yōgana, came from Paekche. This legend about the ancient Korean kingdom—Paekche—appears in the Kojiki and Nihon shoki, Japan's two oldest chronicles. To date there have been few attempts to use concrete data from the peninsula either to prove or reject this legend. This article supplies information from all epigraphic data on the Korean peninsula to show that Paekche spread the use of Chinese (sinographs) to be used phonogrammatically and that Koguryo educated the rest of the peninsula in the use of this script.