This article examines Buddhist and Jaina attitudes towards the salvation of the Magadhan king Ajātaśatru (alias Kūṇika), a narrative character found in both Buddhist and Jaina traditions. A number of Buddhist texts prophesy that Ajātaśatru, despite his next birth in hell, will attain liberation in his final birth. Jaina sources also speak of Kūṇika's descent into hell, but give no prophecy of his ultimate liberation. While the Buddhists offered various solutions to Ajātaśatru's sinful condition, the Jainas proposed no remedy to mitigate the consequences of Kūṇika's sins. The Buddhist prophecies of Ajātaśatru's eventual liberation indicate that some Buddhists in ancient India were particularly concerned with the salvation of an archetypal villain such as Ajātaśatru. The Jaina silence on Kūṇika's destiny suggests that the Jainas in general had little interest in bringing this violent figure to liberation, and deemed him incapable of overcoming his “false view of reality” (mithyātva) due to his strong passions.

This paper is a first attempt at understanding the impact of Islam on families in eighth-century rural Ṭukhāristan (modern-day northern Afghanistan), at the periphery of the late Umayyad and early ʿAbbāsid caliphate. Tukhāristan lay in the ancient region of Bactria, which became the land and city of Balkh after the Islamic conquests of the early seven hundreds ad. My analysis is based on a fascinating corpus of legal documents and letters, written in Bactrian and Arabic in the fourth to eighth centuries ad, which were discovered, edited and translated relatively recently. Scholars of Central Asia have tended to discuss the region's early Islamic history within a politico-military framework based on chronicles and prosopographies written in Arabic and/or adapted into Persian centuries after the Muslim conquests. Such narrative sources describe an ideal state defined by genres of Islamic historiography, and come with the usual menu of distortions, simplifications and exoticisms. The documents under review, on the other hand, were written to serve immediate and practical uses; the evidence they offer is devoid of rhetoric, recording aspects of life and social groupings to which we would otherwise have no access. This paper argues that during the transition to Islamic rule (c. ad 700–771), Bactrian and Islamic administrative systems co-existed, and significantly affected family life and marriage traditions. Specifically, it is suggested that the early ʿAbbāsid tax system eclipsed the age-old practice of fraternal polyandry here: more by default than by design.

Research to date on the Yuan Dynasty painter Wu Zhen (1280–1354) has concentrated on his paintings, but his poetic inscriptions on paintings have been relatively neglected, even though they are of a high standard. This article seeks to redress the balance by focusing on Wu Zhen's poetic inscriptions on paintings by his own hand and those of past masters, and argues that inscriptions and colophons are an essential key to understanding Chinese literati art. It examines the literary functions of Wu Zhen's poetic inscriptions, and includes an exploration of the depiction of objects, the narrative, discursive and symbolic aspects, the lyrical qualities, and the expansion of time, space and vision of the paintings, as well as the relationship between the two media, in order to appreciate their wholeness.

In 1958 an Arabic inscription written in monumental angular script was found in the woods next to Aqua Bella-‘Ayn Hemed, on the road between Jerusalem and the coast. The inscription was misfiled in the archives of the Israel Antiquities Authority, remaining unknown to the public for almost fifty years. Following a thorough search of the archives during doctoral research, the author found the original documentation relating to the long-forgotten inscription. The fragmentary inscription is incised into a marble slab, of which only the end of the last three lines remains. The surviving words are in line with the formula found on other milestones dated to the Umayyad period, allowing a reconstruction of the last sentence, and even of the missing upper parts of the inscription. The lines read: “From Jerusalem to this milestone, five miles”.

Despite noteworthy critical editions of each having appeared within the last twenty-five years, the textual states of Jubilees, the Testaments of the Three Patriarchs, and the Ascension of Isaiah remain in flux due to the continued discovery of previously unknown exemplars. Nowhere is this more evident than in their Ethiopic versions, as copies of a multitude of manuscripts attesting these pseudepigrapha have become readily accessible in recent years. Consequently, it is now possible to append twenty Ge‘ez manuscripts to the hitherto recognized evidence for Jubilees, and five and two further witnesses to the published lists for the Testaments of the Three Patriarchs and the Ascension of Isaiah respectively.

Like many other religions, Zoroastrianism frequently restructured its priestly organization during its long history, largely because of the environmental changes to which it was exposed. A major shift in status – from being the state religion in the Sasanian Empire to holding only a minor position in the early Islamic period – challenged the Zoroastrian hierarchy of authority. The Abbasid state provided Zoroastrianism with an opportunity to initiate a new office, which was called hu-dēnān pēšōbāy “Leader of the Zoroastrians”. This article is the first to deal with this office in detail and scrutinizes the concept of leadership (pēšōbāyīh) in Sasanian and Abbasid Zoroastrianism. It sheds some light on the priestly structure of Zoroastrianism in this period and investigates the position of the office within the overall religious organization. It re-examines, moreover, evidence for the officiating Zoroastrian theologians in this office at the Abbasid court in Baghdad. Finally, it searches for the parallels between this office and that of the East-Syrian catholicos and the Jewish exilarch.

Three bilingual Chinese and Sogdian epitaphs have been discovered and published in recent years. The first of these forms part of the tomb of Wirkakk, alias Shi Jun 史君 “Mr Shi”, and his wife Wiyusi, who were buried in 580 ce in Chang'an, the capital of the Northern Zhou. This article provides some corrections to the previous editions of the Sogdian version and attempts to elucidate points which have so far appeared obscure.

In 1963 I was given leave by the School to make a preliminary study of Bachama, a language spoken in the east of Northern Nigeria, and in parts ofthe adjacent territory of the Cameroons Republic. In general the topics onwhich people were most willing to talk freely to me, and to record, were storiesabout the folk-lore and their history. Besides being good language material, some of these accounts may be of interest to historians and others working inthe Nigerian field. The text given below is from a tape recording made at Lamurde on 3 May of that year, by Nikodimu Sondo Bukumdi, a local manof some 50 years or more. Lamurde, or Bácámá as the Bachama call it, is thenormal home of the chief of the tribe, and is one of their most important cultural centres. It is here that a new chief is elected, and given instruction in his duties. It is here that many of the objects connected with the religious festival of Nzeanzo at Farei are kept during the rest of the year. Recently, the chiefhas found it more convenient for his administrative duties to live at Numan, and he is now seldom at Lamurde. In his absence on the occasion of my visit, the head of the town assembled a number of elders in the open air who sataround and talked together of the remembered history of their people.

This article identifies and examines processes of othering in an early Indian Buddhist ascetic text, the Pali Vinaya of the Theravādins. By means of: (1) a critical discussion of the fact that the Pali Vinaya holds several terms for the early Buddhists' ascetic others; and (2) a close reading and analysis of a small group of – easily overlooked – Pali Vinaya passages with explicit references to supposed practices of the early Buddhists' ascetic others, I make explicit two aspects of the processes of othering of the early Buddhist ascetic community. I show how through processes of othering Buddhist bhikkhus, or at the very least the monk-editors of the Pali Vinaya, both negotiated a collective identity notion, and reflected on the significance of their own practices and values in direct relation to those of their ascetic others, whether real or imagined.

This paper suggests a different approach in the study of Qing dynasty yongwu poetry, which is to analyse the cultural significance of the object in this literary subgenre instead of its lyrical essence. Taking eyeglasses as an example, this paper surveys the general development of imported and domestic eyeglasses in China from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and presents various literary interpretations assigned to this object through time. It further discusses Western and Chinese materiality, the economy and scholars' lives, political and social justification, as well as literary complexity and object identity, which are vital to the development of poetry on eyeglasses in the late imperial period.