This present study is the result of observations I made on the speech of Mr. S. M. Ahamba, while he was at the School in 1946. Mr. Ahamba is an Igbo, and was born and brought up in Lorji, a small rural village situated near the western bank of the Imo River, some twenty miles east-south-east of Owerri town. He has spent some time at Obosi and Awka, both in Onitsha Province, and also at Egbu, three miles from Owerri. It must be emphasized, however, that the type of Igbo he speaks is not that of Owerri town itself. It could be most nearly described as the Lorji dialect spoken by a school teacher who has spent some years away from home.

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.

In 1989 Jadranka Gvozdanović published data of the ‘Yakkhaba’ transitive verbal paradigm. In the present paper these data are identified as Yakkha, re-arranged and interpreted. Comparisons are made with other Kiranti verbal agreement systems and with my model of the Proto-Kiranti verb.

1. Yakkhaba, Yakkha and Yakthungba

Kiranti languages are native to eastern Nepal and the western fringe of Sikkim. The Kiranti branch of the Tibeto-Burman is characterized by verbal morphologies which by Tibeto-Burman standards may be called complex. The Kiranti languages are traditionally divided into Limbu, Yakkha and the Rai languages. Limbu, at the far eastern extent of the Kiranti homeland, has several dialects, of which (Weidert and Subba, 1985) and Phedāppe (van Driem, 1987) are the best described. Yakkha occupies an intermediate position and is spoken in the vicinity of Cainpur in Saṅkhuvā Sabhā district on the slopes east of the Arūṇ river. Rai (Nep. Rāī) is a highly heterogeneous group of languages. This has to do with the fact that the name Rai, although convenient, is not a proper linguistic designation, but represents what in Nepal is perceived to be an ethnic grouping.

It is remarkable that no Syriac inscriptions have been discovered hitherto at Harran or in its immediate vicinity. Cuneiform tablets have been unearthed, and these reflect the prominence of the city in ancient times.But written records in Syriac have been strangely absent. And yet we know that for more than a millennium—certainly until the eleventh century—the indigenous inhabitants of Harran spoke Syriac. Lying only about 30 kilometres south of Edessa, the home of classical Syriac, Harran was nevertheless able to maintain jealously its distinctive character and traditions.

§ 1. Muhammad Nasawi, the biographer of the Khwarāzm-shah Jalāl al-dīn, several times refers to the story of Nuṣrat al-dīn Muhammad (*Mahmūd) b. *Bīshkīn. When in 614/1217 the atabek of Azarbayjan, Özbek, was expelled from Isfahan by the Khwārazm-shāh Muhammed, Özbek's vassal Nuţrat al-din led the army back to Azarbayjan and thus enabled his master to escape with a small detachment. In Miyāna Nuṣrat al-din was taken prisoner by the Khwarazmians and brought to Hamadan. Wishing to humiliate him and other distinguished prisoners, the Khwārazm-shāh ordered them to stand on their feet while he played polo on the hippodrome. One day the conqueror's interest was aroused by the pair of unusually large ear-rings which Nusrat was wearing. Nu๣rat explained (p. 18) that his grandfather was captured by Alp Arslan during his expedition into Georgia (possibly that of 456/1064). Later, Alp Arslan liberated the prisoners but ordered them (as his slaves) to wear ear-rings with his name.

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 ║

The Chin-so liu-chu yin is a text of twenty-nine fascicles preserved in the Taoist canon in the form of a revelation to Chang Tao-ling, the late Han founder of the Taoist religion, to which comments by Li Ch‘un-feng (602–670) are attached. Though scholars have not so far addressed the question of the origins of the text itself, a certain willingness to accept the attribution of the commentary has already been made manifest. Yet to the eye of the expert in Sung Taoism this attribution raises serious doubts: text and commentary display features much more reminiscent of Sung religion than that of the early T'ang. It has already been noticed that Li Ch'un-feng provides information on the cult of the city gods (ch'eng-huang shen) and on Thunder magic; the former religious development may be traced back before the T‘ang but only achieved prominence towards the end of the dynasty, while the latter is unattested in T‘ang Taoist literature. One might add that Li displays a detailed knowledge of the legend of Hsü Sun in a developed form—again a cult v with early origins hardly noticed until the late T‘ang. The text also provides information (though separately) on the Buddhist warrior-king Vaisravana (P‘isha-men PI) and on the seventh-century warrior-hero Li Ching (571–649): these two figures were eventually to merge.

The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan has, in recent years, attracted an ever-growing volume of research. In part, this may be attributed to the easier access to archival sources, both in England and—to a lesser extent—in the Nile Valley. In addition, there has evolved an increasing interest in bilateral relations between Egypt and the Sudan, prompted in part by the political outlook of Presidents Sadat and Numayri, and even more important, by the apparent decline in the Nile waters, especially in the 1980s. The Integration Charter {takamut), first announced by Presidents. Sadat and Numayri in 1974 and signed by Egypt and the Sudan in 1981, sought to establish co-operation, in a wide variety of spheres, which would—so it was hoped—ultimately lead to unity. These anticipations failed to materialize following the chatige of regime in the Sudan in 1985, and seem even less realistic under the present Sudanese fundamentalist dictatorship.

Figures of repetition occur very early in Sanskrit literature. In the oldest stratum, the hymns of the Rgveda, this phenomenon seems to be restricted to the repetition of words with the same meaning, its function being either to express continuation or regularity, i.e. in the case when a single word, normally an adverb, is duplicated (āmreḍita, e.g. dive-dive), or to give a special emphasis to a phrase, preferably at the end of a number of stanzas of a hymn (refrain type). Both kinds of repetition continue to be used in later literature, such as the Pāli Jātakas and the two epics, Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa.

§ 1. The Sanskrit MS. Oxford 1442, inaccurately described in the catalogue, contains the larger part of the Bhiksunīkarmavācanā. This text is interesting (1) as one of the most important parts of the Sanskrit Vinaya hitherto discovered, and (2) because the rules concerning the Nuns have not been much studied even from Pali sources. As far as we know no Bhikkhunlkammavakya has been published. The MS. is incomplete;

The purpose of the present article is to examine the available data on Bedouin dialects in Israel and to attempt to classify them with a view to placing them in the larger framework of Bedouin dialects in the region as a whole. Section I below presents a geographical-demographical review of Bedouin groups in Israel as background information to support the linguistic material. The linguistic discussion which follows is based mainly on material from the following sources: for the Negev dialects, Bergsträsser's Sprachatlas (1915), Bauer (1913), Blanc (1970), and Piamenta (1979); for the Rashāida dialect in the Judean Desert, Katz (1980); for North Israeli Bedouin dialects, Rosenhouse (1980, 1982); for Bedouin dialects outside Israel, in Jordan, Syria and Northern Najd, Cantineau (1936–7), Cleveland (1963), Palva (1976, 1980), Abboud (1964), and Ingham (1982).

The Makonde language is spoken by a tribe inhabiting the plateau between the Lukuledi and Ruvuma Rivers (in the southern part of Tanganyika territory), conjointly with the Ndonde, Mavia, Maraba, and (near Newala) the Matambwe, Ngoni, and Makua. With the exception of a short grammatical sketch by the late Bishop Steere and a vocabulary included in Sir H. H. Johnston's Comparative Study of the Bantu and Semi-Bantu Languages, little or nothing relating to this language has hitherto been published. (See Cust, Modern Languages of Africa, ii, 341, where it is called, mistakenly, “Konde.”) A good deal of information as to the above group of tribes is to be found in the works of K. Weule (Negerleben in Ostafrika, 1908, and Wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse meiner ethnographischen Forschungsreise, 1908).

The religion of Cao-Dai is fundamentally, and deliberately, syncretic. Since it includes Christ and Moses (but for some reason, not Muhammad) in its pantheon, the Western student might be tempted to see it as essentially an attempt to bridge the gulf between East and West by finding a sort of middle way between Christianity and Buddhism. It is possible that some Caodaists who have acquired a thorough Western education in France but maintained their religious belief do in fact see it in those terms, but most of the Caodaist literature indicates that the real basis of the syncretism is an attempt to bring together the three religions of the Sino-Vietnamese tradition. In this attempt, Christianity has only a peripheral position, and nothing has been adopted from Christian teachings that would seriously clash with the underlying doctrinal tolerance of East Asian religions. The most important feature of Caodaist syncretism is that it brings together elements of Taoist spirit-mediumship with a concept of salvation that was originally Buddhist. If any one of the three Sino-Vietnamese religions may be said to be dominant in Caodaism it is religious Taoism; but since the Caodaists themselves frequently refer to their religion as ‘reformed Buddhism’, that is a point which must be demonstrated rather than taken for granted. I propose to analyse some of the most obvious elements of Caodaism under four headings: spirit-mediumship; the Cao-Dai and other spirits; salvation and the apocalyptic aspect; and hierarchy and organization. A concluding section will deal briefly with the possible relationship between Caodaism and certain religious sects in China.

Among the British Indian merchants engaged in trade with Persia in the first half of the nineteenth century was Hjj Nr al-Dn Muhammad b. Ahmad al-Dn Muhammad, a native of Masulipatam. He was a rich and highly respected merchant, holding at one time a position of influence at Shrz, where he had settled at the beginning of the century and married. He was a Sh' and reputed to be pious and well versed in the tenets of Sh'ism. He had intercourse with Husayn 'Al Mrz Farmn Farm (the son of Fath 'Al Shh and governor of Frs from 1214179980 to 12501834), Fath 'Al Shh, and Muhammad Shh; he also enjoyed the favour of the latter's prime minister Hjj Mrz Aqs, who referred to him in 1843 as his esteemed friend,2 but eventually forfeited this because of the partiality which Muhammad Shh showed him for many years.3 In due course Hjj Nr al-Dn acquired possession of two estates in Frs. His title to them was subsequently questioned and the dispute led to a long and complicated case with the Persian government.

While I preparing an edition of Matrceta's Hymn of 150 Verses (Satapañcāśatka) I learnt of the existence in the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin of a quantity of unpublished manuscript fragments of poetry identified as Mātrceta's, included among the material brought back by four successive German expeditions to Central Asia. Through the good offices of Professors H. W. Bailey and F. W. Thomas, photographed copies of these pieces eventually reached me. They proved to consist of about 120 leaves or portions of leaves, practically without exception in “Slanting Gupta” script, from at least seventeen separate MSS., ranging from almost complete folios to fragments containing only two or three legible syllables.

The collection was placed unconditionally at my disposal by the authorities of the Academy, to whom are due my most grateful acknowledgments of their generosity, the more so because a complete transcription by Dr. W. Siegling accompanied the texts. It is hardly necessary to add that this transcription is a work of the highest care and competence which could only have been carried out by an expert in the deciphering of Central Asian documents. In doubtful cases I have compared his readings with the originals and have checked several lengthy passages systematically, but additions or corrections thus introduced could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The text which follows can, therefore, be presented with a confidence which I could not have felt in a decipherment of my own; for apart from the normal difficulties of this script, blurred and mutilated characters abound.

Our European words ‘gum’ go back to one common source, cf. English gum, German Gummi, French gomme, Italian gomma, Russian σýΜΜИ, etc. As is well known, this source is Latin commi ∼ cummi, vulgar Latin gummi ∼ gumma, which was borrowed from Greek κ⋯μμι.

With this article are presented the inscriptions upon nine fragments of tablets belonging to the royal library of the Assyrian kings which was found at Nineveh, its remains being now in the British Museum (and the writer is indebted to the Trustees for permission to publish these specimens). He had already taken the liberty to quote from them in the course of his Inaugural Lecture at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and it is therefore appropriate to include them in a volume in honour of Professor Sir Ralph Turner, Director of the School, whose great services will be more fittingly celebrated by others, but the present writer gladly uses this opportunity to testify his gratitude for many acts of personal kindness, of which the Director's presence and publicly-expressed approval on the aforesaid occasion were not the least appreciated.