On 3 January 1868, when an Imperial decree announced the Emperor's intention of resuming direct responsibility for the administration of Japan, those who had done most to bring this about had no detailed plans for the future of their country's governmental structure. In fact it was not until 15 August 1869 that the new system took anything like a stable shape. In the interval Japan's leaders worked largely by trial and error, partly in a search for a form of government which would meet their needs, partly in accordance with the dictates of political necessity, the final result being to place both power and office in the hands of what is often called the Meiji oligarchy: a handful of Court nobles (kuge) of relatively low rank and a slightly larger group of former samurai from the fiefs of Satsuma, Chōshū, Tosa, and Hizen.

The frequent Vedic construction exemplified by ṚV 5, 31, 4 indram … arkaír évardhayann éhaye héntav u ‘they strengthened Indra with hymns to slay the serpent’ has since Delbriick's days been the subject of some discussion and difference of opinion. Whitney expressed the view that the frequent use of the dative beside a so-called infinitive dative to denote the subject or the object of the action constitutes a case of attraction: in the above sentence one would, in accordance with the implication of this term, expect the accusative ahint, whereas in ṚV 1, 24, 8 cakira sryāya pánthām ánvetav u ‘he made a track for the sun to follow’, the dative of the noun denoting the being on whose behalf the path is made is understandable at first sight. Hence no doubt the comment made by Whitney before quoting the latter line: the construction is in part a perfectly simple one, but is stretched beyond its natural boundaries by a kind of attraction.

In a previous article discussing the text entitled al-Lughāt fī'l-Qur'ān attributed to Ibn 'Abbās, mention was made of two manuscripts of Gharīb al-Qur'ān also attributed to Ibn 'Abbās. A recent visit to Istanbul allowed an examination of these works, leading to the discovery that, in fact, these manuscripts contain two additional copies of al-Lughāt fī'l-Qur'ān and that an independent text Gharīb al-Qur'ān attributed to Ibn. 'Abbās does not exist. A proliferation of titles has taken place regarding this text and, most significantly of course, around the figure of Ibn 'Abbās and his role in Qur'ānic lexicography.

In his interesting and provocative book Hindu and Muslim mysticism (Athlone Press, 1960), Professor R. C. Zaehner has discussed at length the part which lie believes Abū Yazīd al-Bistāmī played in introducing Vedāntin ideas into Muslim mysticism. In this paper it is proposed to re-examine some of the crucial texts upon which this theory has been based.

After the Islamic conquest, the Greek Orthodox, so-called Melkite ( = Royalist), church fairly early adopted Arabic as its literary language. Their intellectual centres in Syria/Palestine were Jerusalem, along with the monaster ies of Mar Sabas and Mar Chariton in Judea, Edessa and Damascus. A great many Arabic manuscripts stemming from the first millennium, some of them dated, copied at the monastery of Mar Chariton and especially at that of Mar Saba, have been discovered in the monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai, the only monastery that has not been pillaged and set on fire by the bedouin. These manuscripts are of great importance for the history of the Arabic language. Because Christians were less devoted to the ideal of the ‘arabiyya than their Muslim contemporaries, their writings contain a great many devi ations from classical Arabic, thus enabling us to reconstruct early Neo-Arabic, the predecessor of the modern Arabic dialects, and bridge a gap of over one thousand years in the history of the Arabic language.

Among the thousands of Jaina images found throughout India, those from Mathura produced during the Kuṣāṇa period are unique, for they alone contain representations of unclothed Jaina ascetics holding a single small piece of cloth in such a way as to cover their nudity. These curious figures cannot be identified with monks of the present-day Jaina sects of the Digambaras, who practise total nudity, or of the Śvetāmbaras, who wear two long pieces of unstitched white cloth wrapped around their bodies and occasionally a white blanket over their left shoulders. The veteran art-historian, the late Dr. U. P. Shah, in Aspects of Jaina art and architecture briefly mentions these figures, noting that ‘nowhere in the above references from Śvetāmbara as well as Digambara texts do we come across a reference to those figures on the siṃhāsanaof a Jina which we find in a number of sculptures of the Kuṣāṇa period from the Kaṅkāli Tīlā.’ Subsequently, in Jaina-Rūpa-Maṇḍano, he calls these figures ardhaphālakas (monks with partial covering) and speculates that these figures might be Yāpanīya monks, another Jaina sect that is now extinct, and states that these figures need further investigation. In addition to Shah, N. P. Joshi has also discussed these ardhaphālaka images. He states that ‘all the monks seen in the bas-reliefs, except one known to me, seem to belong to the Ardhaphālaka sect. … Besides the monks seen in the bas-reliefs, those hovering in the air (vidyā cāraṇas) or seen on some of the śilāpaṭṭāsare all Ardhaphālakas. This suggests that during the pre-Christian and early Christian centuries a large number of Jainas at Mathura followed this sect’.

Whereas during the earlier part of South Arabian history dating is effected only by reference to the year of office of an eponymous magistrate, from about the 1st century A.D. we begin to find texts dated by a fixed era. The earliest inscriptions so dated are R.3958 of ‘ the year 144 ’, and R.4197b of ‘ the year 172 ’. Although these two texts are in Sabæan dialect, both have associations with the Beiḥān area, and Albright is probably right in suggesting that they do not refer to a ‘ Sabæan ’ era. The majority of the dated texts which are unquestionably Sabæan belong to the 6th and 7th centuries of that era.

Throughout the history of Indo-Aryan the tendency towards a particular sound-change might continue to be active over a long period of time, being manifested first in words of frequent use or lesser import or where other surrounding phonetic conditions favoured the change and subsequently appearing in particular areas throughout the general vocabulary.

A Buddhist practice existed whereby a dānapati, patron, had a manuscript of a Buddhist religious text copied, into which at the appropriate place his personal name was inserted with Sanskrit inflexion. In the Buddhist Sanskrit Sitātapatra-sūtra, the ‘Book of the white umbrella’, Stein manuscript S 2529, two personal names are inserted. In lines 45–6 occurs aṣṭānā mahāgrrahāṇā vaidhvasanakara hu ttrū 〈rakṣa rakṣa〉 mama vaṣayānasya ‘O destroyer of the eight great ravishers, hūṃ trūṃ. Protect, protect me Yaṣayāna’. In lines 48, 70, 88, 117 the name is Sīdyākaraca. Here we read:

48 auma svasta〈ka〉ra bavattū mama sīdyākaracasya

70 rakṣa rakṣa mama sīdyākaracasya:

88 ye ke cai salvā mama sīdyākaracasya ∥

117: rakṣa rakṣa mama sīdyākaracasya:

Instead of a name in line 122 occurs the word īthanāmasya ‘of so-and-so’.

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.

This essay analyses the sole extant chapter of a fourth/tenth-century Faḍā'il al-Ṣaḥaba work by the ḥadı̄th critic and scholar Al-Ḥasan ʿAlı̄ ibn ʿUmar ibn Aḥmad Ibn Mahdı̄ ibn Masʿūd al-Dāraquṭnı̄ (d. 385/995). As scholars have noted, faḍā’il literature beyond the chapters on religious merits of the Companions in the Ṣaḥı̄ḥayn is among a number of sub-genres of tradition-based literature (alongside, for example, targhı̄b wa tarhı̄b), which tends largely to be comprised of weak, non-canonical ḥadı̄th. This has generally been interpreted as evidence of the acceptability of “lower standards” for the inclusion of ḥadı̄th in exhortatory or edifying literature (lower when compared to standards for the authentication of ḥadı̄th in relation to law). This conceptualization both centres law as the dominant lens through which to view the reception of ḥadı̄th in general, and contributes to the marginalization of faḍā’il literature as merely folkloric. Using a history of emotions perspective to elucidate the nature and mechanisms of edification and pious instruction in faḍā’il texts, this essay argues that far from being marginal, faḍā’il works were central to the formation of emotional communities and to the construction of pious subjects in the Būyid period. Al-Dāraquṭnı̄'s fragmentary text reflects how a well-known and highly respected fourth-century ḥadı̄th scholar capitalized on the emotional resonances and sectarian ambiguities made available by the abundance of non-legal and non-prophetic ḥadı̄th generated during the second and third centuries ah.

This article proposes that *Magas, capital city of the North Caucasian Kingdom of Alania, can be identified with the gorodishche (hillfort) of Il'ichevsk, in Krasnodar Krai in the modern Russian Federation. The Kingdom of Alania was the most powerful polity in the North Caucasus in the tenth and eleventh centuries; however, the location of its capital has never been satisfactorily established. This article reviews the evidence of written sources on *Magas – notably Masʿūdī, Juvayni, Rashid al-Din, and the Yuan-Shi – and identifies four criteria which can be used to identify the site of *Magas. These are its occupation between the tenth and thirteenth centuries; the influence of the Alan kings over it; its massive fortifications; and its capture by the Mongols in 1239–40. All of these features can be identified at Il'ichevsk, in contrast to previously proposed sites of *Magas.