The ’go ba'i lha – usually translated with “personal protective deities” – are often approached as an integral part of Tibetan popular or folk religion. Typically five in number, these gods are said to be born with an individual, to reside in his or her body, and to protect various facets of his or her existence. As for the etymology of ’go ba'i lha, while “protective deities” is the dominant translation, it remains a highly communicative and contextual gloss of ’go, whose attested meanings do not include “to protect”. The present contribution offers a new analysis of the verb ’go based on attestations in Old Tibetan texts from Dunhuang from the ninth and tenth centuries. In doing so, the article not only proposes a new etymology of ’go ba'i lha, but also touches on the changing relationship between Tibetans and their gods over time.

‘Kusemai’ was the name given to a particular type of musical entertain- ment which flourished in Japan, mainly around Kyōto and Nara, in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.1 The name implies dances (mai) which were peculiar and unconventional (huse), but the peculiarity of the performances lay not so much in the dance as in the music. The musical style of Kusemai put overwhelming emphasis on the beat at the expense of melody, and the novel effect to which this gave rise was sufficient, it seems, to warrant the rather disparaging name. The dance itself was of very minor importance and probably consisted of little more than the performer turning and stamping in time to the music. In Kusemai the song was more important than the dance, and the music of the song more important than the words.

It is well known that the Mahābhārata sometimes contains narrative inconsistencies. In this article I consider a number of these, particularly certain cases in which one or more characters appear to be presented in an inconsistent manner. After considering possible explanations for the existence of such seeming discrepancies, I put forward the possibility that they are more apparent than real, and that the Mahābhārata was never intended to be read as a smooth-flowing temporal sequence.

Different readings of the first and the last phrase of the short Middle Persian text Šahrestānīhā ī Ērānšahr are suggested; these show that its beginning and end are not as strange or exceptional as is suggested in its latest edition. In particular, it is argued here that a Middle Persian translation of the title of the ‘Abbāsid caliph al-Manṣūr can be found in the text.

This paper offers an analysis and a new translation of an Atharvanic hymn addressed to the goddess of Night, Rātrī, attested in both recensions of the Atharvaveda (AV), in the Śaunakīya, and in the Paippalāda. The translation is accompanied by a philological and text-critical commentary as well as an analysis of some linguistic features of the Vedic language of this period, such as the use of emphatic reflexive pronouns and the periphrastic progressive tense (usually disregarded in standard Vedic grammars).

This article introduces an English version (translator unknown) of a Burmese law report: Judge Hpo Hlaing's ruling in Ma Hla v. Ma Wa, delivered in Mandalay in 1877. The judgement contains a paragraph dealing with the sources of Buddhist Law which appears to be a riposte to work published earlier that year in Lower Burma. That the judge was Burma's leading political philosopher gives special resonance to his views on law. His list of five law reports from the Pali canon and related texts is of interest. A reading is advanced in which the five cases link to Burmese ideas about legal pluralism.

The special importance of the Ādi Granth as the defining scripture of the Sikhs has encouraged the production of commentaries whose language and approach reflect changing understandings of the Gurus' teachings over the last four centuries. The oral style of the earlier commentaries which typically demonstrate a catholic inclusiveness towards the wider Indic tradition came largely to be replaced in the twentieth century by the more exclusive approach of Sikh reformist commentators, in part aroused by the dismissive attitudes of the first English translation by Trumpp. Continuing to shape most modern understandings of the scripture, these highly organized commentaries composed in the new idiom of Modern Standard Panjabi are only now beginning to be challenged by new styles of exegesis being pioneered in the Sikh diaspora.

This article offers a comparative examination of the literary responses of four leading early modern Pashtun authors to an armed clash in the Momand tribe in 1711. The responses include a chronicle record in prose (Afżal Khān Khaṫak) and three poems – an elegy (ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Momand), a satire (ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd Momand), and a war ode (ʿAbd al-Qādir Khaṫak). Discussed as both authentic historical documents and creative writings linked to a local social discourse, these Pashto texts enable us to reassess the intensity of everyday literary communications in Pashtun tribal areas in early modern times and append new factual material to the study of ethno-cultural processes within the Persophone oecumene. The salient stylistic and rhetoric diversity of the texts not only highlights the authors’ individual mindsets and literary techniques, but also provides an insight into a variety of social moods, political attitudes and ethics in the Pashtun traditional society.

The notion of text, along with the issues relating to how variable or fixed a text may be, has been a central issue in the study of oral literature for some time. In this article it will be argued that the notion of the poetic text as being unchangeable is central to Somali maanso poetry, and that such poems are instances of what become, through the composition process, ‘definitive texts’. Arguments in favour of this will be presented from a number of different perspectives. Maanso poetry will be contrasted with traditional hees and the characteristics of both outlined, with a view to showing how the ‘texts’ of each type of poetry differ from an extra-textual viewpoint, that is from the point of view of people's expectations regarding the different types of poetry. Intratextual characteristics will also be mentioned with a view to showing the objectivity and autonomy of maanso definitive texts. The development of modern hees from the heello and also the development of the use of writing in Somali poetry will also be considered and shown to support the idea of the maanso definitive text.

This paper constitutes the first linguistic analysis of nominal possessive constructions in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Hasidic Hebrew hagiographic tales. Such analysis is necessary because it sheds much-needed light on the grammatical structure of this prominent but largely unstudied early modern Eastern European form of Hebrew. Hasidic Hebrew possessive constructions exhibit a variety of noteworthy features, namely non-standard uses of the construct chain including definiteness of the construct noun, double definiteness, and split construct chains; construct chains with adjectives in the absolute position; the productiveness and widespread use of the construct chain; the tendency to favour the post-Biblical Hebrew possessive particle של shel only in certain syntactic contexts; and the employment of the Aramaic particle ד- de- specifically to express geographical and temporal relationships. These phenomena reflect a mix of various strata of Hebrew as well as Aramaic, Yiddish, and independent elements that combine to form a unique system distinct from other varieties of Hebrew.