In his article ‘Lecture de la Fātiḥa’ Muhammad Arkoun develops principles for a contemporary rereading of scripture which differ markedly from those of classical exegesis. The latter rests upon the dogmatic certainty that scripture constitutes the only truth and the whole truth; hence it sees its task as rendering this truth accessible by recourse to a wide range of explanatory techniques. Arkoun's principles, on the other hand, are based upon the realization that in the present circumstances man's understanding of himself must be acquired not by remaining within the fold of one assumed source of truth but by transcending the panoply of ‘biophysical, economic, political, linguistic constraints’ which delimit his condition. As result, such knowledge must consist in repeated and risky forays ‘beyond the enclosures which all cultural traditions tend to erect after a phase of intensive elaboration’ (Arkoun, 1982: 50).

This article argues that the opposition between Old Iranian *č and *ǰ was preserved in Manichaean Parthian not only word-initially, but also in postvocalic position, at least at the time of the introduction of the Manichaean script. The approach is phonological, and attempts to show that Pth. /č/ (< OIr. *č), written <c> and <>, and Pth. /ž/ (< OIr. *ǰ and *ž), written <j>, are consistently distinguished in the Manichaean script. Pth. /č/ may have developed a postvocalic allophone [ǰ] (not affecting the phonematic opposition), which might have been a motivation for the use of the letter <>. Transcriptions into Sogdian script and the cantillations suggest a coalescence of the Pth. phonemes, but it is not clear whether this is a later development of the Pth. language itself or a peculiarity of the liturgical pronunciation of Parthian as practised by Manichaeans in Central Asia.1

The land sale contracts of the late eleventh century published here are important for several reasons. First, they are the oldest known legal documents written in Turkish. Very many Uighur-Turkish civil documents were found in the more eastern parts of the Tarim basin, but none of those appear to be older than the thirteenth century. On the other hand, there are Central Asian legal documents in several non-Turkish languages from as early as the first centuries of our era. After the Turks had penetrated the area in alternately warlike and peaceful manner and become owners of land, they may have gone on using the local vernaculars for such purposes, as they adopted many other facets of local life. The present texts have a fairly rigid structure, but this should not be taken as an indication that they were preceded by a Turkish legal tradition: the Persian text of A.D. 1107 published by Minorsky (1942) shows a rather similar form, which may simply have been borrowed by the Turks. Formally, our documents differ from the non-Muslim deeds of land sale in Turkish, which appear to follow Chinese models; this also speaks against a common Turkish tradition. There is nothing surprising about this: the Turks were probably relatively new both to the area and the occupation.

There is evidence that a particular musical instrument was used by various Sino-Tibetan groups to convey speech, both for courting and for religious purposes. The Proto-Sino-Tibetan etymon for this gourd reed-organ is reconstructible as *s-jan. Its use as a speech surrogate is widely reported, from the earliest sources to the present. It is still used thus by many Tibeto-Burman groups.

Early in the sixth century A.D. the Greek author known generally as Cosmas Indicopleustes records in his ‘Christian Topography’ that he visited Adulis on the western Red Sea coast and there saw two Greek inscriptions, one on a marble throne and one on a stela standing behind it. The monuments have long ago disappeared, but we have the texts as copied by Cosmas. The stela belongs to Ptolemy III Euergetes (246–222 B.C.), but the throne text begins in mediis rebus without name of author, and is introduced by Cosmas with the slightly mysterious words ‘Then, as if sequentially, there is further written on the throne as follows’. Whatever he may have meant by this, it is certain, as modern scholars recognize, that the throne text is not part of the stela one: the former is drafted in the first person, the latter in the third; and the throne text was drafted ‘in the 27th year of my reign’, whereas Ptolemy HI died at the beginning of his twenty-sixth regnal year. This leaves the field open to speculations about the authorship and date of the throne text.

The vocabulary of Khotan Saka of ancient Khotan, Gostana-deśa of Buddhist Sanskrit, has a large fund of basic words; for the philosophy of Buddhism too they made full use of the Buddhist Sanskrit vocabulary, beside a number of north-western Prakrit forms. Many words, however, stand isolated. Their meanings are indeed often assured by bilingual texts or parallel passages in Buddhist literature, but other words are translated speculatively from contexts.

This paper, by means of original Bedouin documents relating to matters of personal status, attempts to disclose interaction between custom and sharī'a and to illuminate some of the mechanisms tending to complete the islamization of a tribal society in process of sedentarization. The Bedouin dealt with here are a group of tribes in the Jerusalem-Bethlehem region: al-Sawāhira (c. 6,000 persons now) east of Jerusalem, al-'Ubaydiyya (c. 5,500) east of Bayt Saḥūr, the 13 al-Ta'āmira tribes (c. 20,000) extending over a sector east of Bayt Saḥūr in the north to Bayt Fajjār in the south, and al-Rashā'ida (c. 500) south-east of Taqū'a. Most of these tribes originate from Ḥijaz and Najd. They appeared in the region in small groups from the sixteenth century and in time developed into tribes, while absorbing local fallāḥs. Their main numerical increase took place in the twentieth century.

Most of the available specimens of Paiśācī are recorded in Lacote′s Essai sur Gunādhya et la Brhaikathā, pp. 201 f., and in my article “ The Mysterious Paiśācī”, JRAS., 1943, 217 f. They comprise about a hundred words. I am now able, by the courtesy of Muni Punyavijayajī of the Svetambara Jaina Dharmasala, Baroda, who has sent me photostats of an early MS., to publish the longest extract extant in Paisaci from an unpublished portion of the Kuvalayamālā.

In Le Maître Phonétique for April-June, 1940, I gave some notes on the pronunciation of Mr. Su Cheng, a native of Fengtuhsien, Szechuan. I have recently been able to make further observations in his case, and also to study the pronunciation of Mr. Chao Che Shen, a native of Ipin, Szechuan, which lies some 200 miles to the west of Fengtuhsien.

As a serious subject of scholarly investigation modern Middle Eastern history is very young. It was only 50 years ago that the subject began to be studied by historians who were adequately equipped for the work. Its subsequent rapid progress to the position of respectability which it now occupies within the discipline of history owes much to the work of a handful of scholars among whom Albert Hourani and Elie Kedourie were especially conspicuous. The deaths of these two notable historians should not pass without an acknowledgement of the debt which we owe them and an appreciation of their contribution to the happy revolution in the branch of history which they adorned.

The Zawāyā, the lettered fraternity of the Westren Sahara, besides contributing works of merit to Arabic scholarship have also taken an active part in the evolution of Moorish oral and written folk-literature, in the subject-matter, the systemization and classification of poetic metres, the selection of Arabic verse in the various musical styles, and in the way that Islam, and in particular the ideas of the Ṣūfī orders of the Sahara and the Sudan, has become an integral part of the daily lives of the nomad and the oasis dweller alike.

The Shahbazgarhi Inss. of Aśoka distinguish the three sibilants ś, ṣ, s. Hultzsch remarks ‘While at Kalsi these three symbols are used indiscriminately, the Shahbazgarhi text generally employs each of them where it would have been in its proper place in Sanskrit’ [v. Hultzsch, Inss. Aś., p. lxxxvi]. The dialect of the Mansehra text is nearly identical with the Shahbazgarhi one [v. id., p. xcvii].

A thorough and scientific treatment of the historiography of the African Muslim peoples and institutions south of the Zambesi is a long-felt and eminent want. As yet, this particular field of research has hardly been explored, and its results, if collected and evaluated, would add tangibly to our contemporary knowledge of Oriental penetration in lands where Europeans have founded new homes and fostered a vitalist conception of Occidental civilization.

I. Tuḷuva, a Dravidian speech spoken by about 400,000 people within a comparatively small area in the district of south Kanara, on the west coast of Madras Presidency, has preserved its individuality from a very early time, despite its being an uncultivated dialect with no literature of its own. The Mangalore missionaries were the first to reduce this unwritten language to writing, and they published in the closing decades of the last century a grammar and a dictionary of this speech, besides a few scriptural texts. An attempt is now being made by educated Tuḵuvas to cultivate their mother tongue as a literary speech through the composition of essays, stories, and poems.

It is too well known to need more than a formal repetition here that two of the Rock Edicts of Aśoka mention as his contemporaries a number of kings of the West, the foremost of which is a certain Antiochus. The most important passage is that of the Edict XIII (P–Q), which I quote from the only version that is here wholly preserved, viz. that of Shāhbāzgaṛhī:—

ayi ca mukhamutavijaye Devanaṃpriyasa yo dhramavijayo ║ so ca puna ladho Devanaṃpriyasa iha ca sareṣu ca aṃteṣu[a] ṣaṣu pi yojanaśateṣu yatra Aṃtiyoko nama Yonaraja paraṃ ca tena Atiyokena cature 4 rajani Turamaye nama Aṃtikini nama Maka nama Alikasudaro nama ║