There are two schemes of creation in Zoroastrianism. According to one, Ohrmazd fashions the world in the manner of a skilful craftsman. According to the second, Ohrmazd gestates and gives birth to the world. This article is about the latter. The relevant Pahlavi texts are presented and discussed. The article argues that Pahlavi authors used macrocosm-microcosm correspondence theory to elaborate the doctrine from Avestan rudiments.

This study takes a new look at a number of obscure passages in the Aramaic incantation bowls and related texts discussed in Christa Müller-Kessler's article “More on puzzling words and spellings in Aramaic incantation bowls and related texts”, published in BSOAS 75/1, 2012, 1–31. Among the words discussed are ברזא ‘wild boar’, מנוביא ‘wailing’, מסחיפתא ‘overthrower (type of demon)’, ספסיפא ‘burning’ and פרהזני ‘protectors’, all new to the Jewish Babylonian Aramaic lexicon, ככא ‘tusk’ and תברי “‘broken’ sounds of the shofar (as a maleficent force)”, which show new meanings for previously attested lexemes, and the new plural form שולניתא ‘maidservants’. Additional evidence for the words or expressions פגיתא ‘attack (a type of demon)’, אידיורא ‘helper’ / אידיורותא ‘help’, חי חי מץ (a divine epithet), מרוביא (a type of demon), נירבא (a hard metal) and שיפורי ‘shofars (a type of demon)’ is also adduced and a preliminary edition of the magic bowl Nippur 12 N 387 is presented.

Aramaic-speaking Jewish communities used to be found in various towns and villages throughout north-eastern Iraq, north-western Iran and southern Turkey before the mass exodus of Iraqi Jewry to the state of Israel in 1950–51. In Iraq, the Aramaic speakers were found in an area that may be denned as the land lying above a line drawn on a map across the country through the towns of Musil and Kirkuk. Aramaic was not the first language of all Jews of the area. In the large towns of Musil, Kirkuk, Aqra, as well as Arbel, Arabic was the Jewish vernacular. In some villages the Jews spoke Kurdish as their first language. In Iran, Aramaic-speaking Jewish communities were found as far south as Kerend. The northern limits of the Jewish Aramaic area were formed by communities in the region of lake Van in southern Turkey and those around lake Urmia in north-west Iran (Hopkins, 1993: 62–4).

Although the presence of Nestorian Christianity in China under the Tang dynasty is a familiar enough matter to students of religion, many scholars in Chinese studies were until very recently reluctant to undertake substantial research into this topic, for the very good reason that they had been expecting the appearance of posthumous work on one of our main sources for this episode by Paul Pelliot (1878–1945), who was probably the greatest Asianist of the twentieth century. In 1984 Pelliot's translation of the source in question, the ‘Nestorian stele of Xian’, originally erected in 781 but first rediscovered in the seventeenth century, was actually published as part of a posthumous publication by another scholar, J. Dauvillier, who had been concerned primarily with the Syriac portions of the stele inscription. Since, however, Dauvillier's volume did not include any of Pelliot's copious notes to his translation, sinological scholarship was not substantially advanced by the appearance of this monograph.

Khargushi (d. Nishapur, 407/1016?), Tahdhīb al-asrār, is a fairly large collection of sayings in the renunciant/Sufi tradition, comprising over twice as many items as Sarrāj, al-Lumaʿ and Sulamī, Ṭabaqāt al-sufiyya. A first printed edition appeared in 1999. Examination of the Tahdhīb confirms that Khargūshī was Shāfiʿi in law, Ashʿari in theology, but mainly a preacher devoted to piety. It also tends to confirm current common wisdom about the history of Sufism: that it developed out of the earlier renunciant tradition, that Malāmatism was a distinctive Nishapuran school of mystical piety with such affinities to Baghdadi Sufism as make it easily assimilable to it, and that Khargūshī's time was still that of the teaching master, the training master not appearing till half a century later. Its similarities to Sarrāj, al-Lumaʿ and Abū Nuʿaym, Ḥilyat al-awliyā’ make both of those appear more mainstream than has sometimes been feared.

The present paper discusses the hypothesis according to which a devoicing sound shift *sb- > sp-, *sd- > st-, *sg- > sk- took place in pre-Tibetan. I show that all examples supporting this putative sound shift have better explanations, and that this hypothesis creates more problems than it solves. In addition, I discuss data from modern Tibetic varieties, showing that no typological parallel for such a sound shift is attested.

A traveller in distress vows to God, piously but apparently pointlessly, that he will never eat elephant flesh. Subsequently, the oath would seem to be his perdition, yet in the end he is saved because of it, unlike his fellow travellers. This entertaining story is told by al-Tanūkhī (d. 384/994) in two almost identical versions. It is also found in other sources, both Arabic and Persian, among them translations or adaptations of al-Tanūkh¯ (by ‘Awfī and Dihistānī), works on lives of the Sufis (Abū Nu‘aym, Jāmī), a travelogue (Ibn Baūa), anthologies (al-Damīrī, al-‘Āmilī), and a collection of mystical and moral tales in verse (Rūmī). These versions, spanning at least six centuries, differ in the name of the protagonist, plot, language, style, length, ‘outlook’, and quality. In general, it will be argued, travelling has done the story little good: unlike al-Tanūkhī's tale, its beginning is happier than its ending.

This article focuses on Georges Balandier's autobiographical essay Afrique ambiguë (1957). Its translation into English, Ambiguous Africa: Cultures in Collision (1966), provides the basis for an examination of the concept of translation in its linguistic but also, and above all, transcultural dimensions. As a text, Ambiguous Africa does not quite render the subtlety of the French original but beyond its translational shortcomings, Balandier's book is also shown to conduct an in-depth analysis of late colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa. This era is characterized by a high degree of cultural anxiety on the part of the colonizers and the colonized. Echoing other anti-colonial thinkers of the period – Balandier was a regular contributor to Présence Africaine – he records the environmental, artistic, psychological, and linguistic devastation generated by the colonial process in this part of the world. Balandier's assessment is pessimistic, but he identifies the ability of some unassimilated African intellectuals and members of messianic movements such as Matswanism and Kimbanguism to challenge the hegemonic status of the colonial Ur-Text. This emancipative move relies on vernacular intellectual and cultural resources and is driven by an attempt to re-write and translate biblical stories anew. It is argued here that this process of indigenous re-appropriation, however ambiguous it might have been assessed by Balandier, is postcolonial for it bears witness to a partial de-canonization of the colonial source text.

This article is an introduction to the writings of two significant but little-studied Sufi thinkers of fourteenth-century Cairo. Muhammad Wafā' and his son ‘Alī were poets and mystical philosophers. They founded a new branch of the Shādhiliyya Sufi order, and their descendants went on to become one of the most important families in Egypt. The numerous writings of this father and son, in the tradition of Muhy al-Dīn Ibn ‘Arabī, have as yet received little attention from scholars of Islamic thought. This study introduces these thinkers and surveys their extant writings, almost all of which remain in manuscript form. Beyond describing the contents, the article also seeks to position their thought within the wider context of Islamic mysticism.

The field of the various regional theatres, ti-fang-hsi which represent a substantial part of the traditional Chinese theatre, still remains largely unexplored. It has always been outside the scope of the interest of Chinese and European scholars, who have paid most attention to Yüan-ch'ü the drama of the Mongol era, to the K'un-ch'ü theatre, and lately also to Ching-hsi or Peking opera. The Peking opera is in fact one of the regional theatres by origin, but it occupies an exceptional position because it is distributed throughout China and is not localized in a specific part of the country like other ti-fang-hsi.

By the treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of 1774, which marked a disastrous defeat of the Ottoman empire by Russia, the Russians were accorded the right to build a church in Istanbul, in the Galata quarter. The treaty further specified that the church was to be under the protection of the Russian minister, who could make representations concerning it to the Sublime Porte. This church, and the Russian right to protect it and to make representations about it, furnished much of the basis on which Russian governments, in later years, built a claim to a broader right to protect the Greek Orthodox Church, even the Greek Orthodox people, in the Sultan's domains. The claims were exaggerated, but since the church in Istanbul was to be ‘of the Greek ritual’, as article 14 of the treaty said, the connexion seemed logical. The Turkish text of the treaty, however, as Cevdet Pasa reproduces it in his history, makes no mention of a church ‘of the Greek ritual’. Instead, his article 14 specifies that this church is to be called the dusugrafa or dosografa church ().