An attempt is made here to evaluate the various versions that have been put forward for the more complex abstract melodic structures outlined by the Arab philosopher and music theorist al-Kindī (d. c. 874); to propose new interpretations in the context of a re-examination of the source text; and to locate their origin and meaning less within the general mathematical orientation of theory than in the elaboration of a descriptive metaphor.

This article is concerned with the influence of Mesopotamian myths on the Old Testament Book of Esther, with particular reference to the role of the Enūma Elish. The Book of Esther has been the subject of numerous studies, some of which have asked the questions posed in this article. Although full account is taken of these important studies, the present article contends that previous scholars have misguidedly focused their attention on Ishtar-legends to the exclusion of the Marduk-legends that are at least as important in this context. The article is divided into two parts: first, it is argued that the central figure in the Book of Esther is Mordecai (=Marduk) and it is his triumph that is being commemorated in the story. Second, similarities between the Enūma Elish (being the foremost Marduk-legend of Mesopotamian culture) and the Book of Esther are drawn, with the evidence being arranged under three rubrics: ‘the plot’, ‘themes and motifs’ and ‘language’.

This article seeks to gain a better understanding of a famous ode by the ‘Abbāsid court poet al-Buhturī (d. 897) by comparing it with two other works which exhibit a similar thematic development. One is an extract from The Aeneid by Virgil (d. 19 BC), the other a poem by Wilfred Owen (d. 1918). The three texts emanate from imperial identities (Roman, Arab and British) in a state of crisis, which in turn paves the way for cathartic encounters with an alien other that each involves an act of recognition. The comparison uncovers certain similarities in the psychological impact of this encounter and thereby throws a new light on the carefully crafted structure of al-Buhturī's ode. The experience described by the three texts emerges as an expression of man's universal quest for his lost self, and its recovery—however momentarily—in the very heart of his supposed foe.

‘Abdallāh b. Mu‘āwiya b. ‘Abdallam h b. Ja‘far b. Abī Tālib, great-grandson of ‘Alī's brother Ja‘far, rose up in Kufa in Muharram of 127/October 744. He was defeated by Umayyad forces in 130 (747–748), and killed by Abū Muslim in Khurāsaān. During the two years of his uprising, Ibn Mu‘āwiya established himself in the Jibāl and Fārs, where he appointed governors, collected taxes and struck his own coins. Ibn Mu‘āwiya's coinage is an important source for the revolt, which is among the most important uprisings of the late Umayyad period. It presents evidence for a strong and unified movement, and corroborates the interpretation of a ‘dress rehearsal’ for the ‘Abbāsid Revolution. This article suggests some alternatives regarding the chronology and geography of Ibn Mu‘āwiya's revolt through a re-examination of textual sources and new coinage, and shows the usefulness of numismatics for the historical study of early Islam.

In the history of Hindi literature, the oldest extant text of medieval Hindi prose is the collection of hagiography known as the as the vārtā literature which, since the seventeenth century, has been central to the religious life of the Hindu devotional community known as the Puṣṭi Mārga. This article argues that a close examination of these texts in their proper social and historical context reveals that the vārtā literature was written and revised during a time when the Puṣṭi Mārga was slowly expanding its sphere of religious influence in Western and Central India. The result was a body of literature whose principal purpose was to shape the religious self-identity of the Puṣṭi Mārga by stressing the community as a close-knit and exclusive fellowship of believers who owed their final allegiance to Kṛṣṇna and the community's religious leaders who were known as mahārājas.

The history of the industrial and commercial district between al-Raqqa and al-Rāfiqa is reconstructed on the basis of literary sources, numismatic finds and aerial views from the early twentieth century. It probably came into being during the 160s/780s when the ‘old market of the caliph Hishām’ was transferred from within al-Raqqa to the free land between the two cities. The decision of Hārūn al-Rashīd to reside in al-Raqqa created a new demand, and consequently glass furnaces and pottery kilns were set up for mass production. A road running from the east gate of al-Rāfiqa connected this area. After 198/213 the governor of the west, Tārhir ibn al-Husain, erected a wall north of the area in order to protect it from Bedouin raids. During the third/ninth century at the latest the area developed into a third urban entity. Al-Muqaddasī mentions an al-Raqqa al-Muhtariqa. The identification with the commercial and industrial area is proposed. The decline of al-Raqqa al-Muhtariqa began in the 270s/880s and 280s/890s. The devastating rule of the Hamdânids probably marks its end.

This article is intended as a contribution to the debate on the nature of the early Islamic state (especially 1–70 AH/622–690 AD), as regards both its government and its ideology. It presents and discusses new documentary evidence that sheds light on these subjects and tries to advance a little further the discussion of two questions that have been particularly hotly debated in recent years. These are: whether the Muslims merely continued the administrative practices of the Byzantines and Persians or introduced innovations, and why recognizably Islamic messages do not appear in the material record before the reign of the caliph ‘Abd al-Malik (65–85 AH/685–705 AD). Finally, this article attempts to draw attention to the relative under-use of documents, whether papyri, coins, rock inscriptions or the like, and to illustrate the different ways in which they might be deployed to enhance our knowledge of this very important topic.

Early modern Basra is often portrayed as the end of an Ottoman chain of command that grew successively weaker as it stretched from Istanbul to the Persian Gulf. This article complicates the picture of an imperial outpost over which the metropole was unable to impose effective control by discussing seventeenth-century Basra as the point of convergence of various regional and trans-regional spheres of influence and jurisdiction. Basra remained contested territory long after the city was supposedly incorporated into the Ottoman framework in 1546, and in its subsequent history we see multiple actors engaged in a fierce struggle over power and income. Local authorities, regional tribal forces, and outside elements—the Portuguese and the two imperial powers with claims on the region, the Ottomans and the Safavids—participated in this struggle through alliance building and mutual manipulation.

Bengali has some unusual negation patterns which have not yet been examined from a syntactic point of view. There are two negative verbs nei and noy, and a tensed negative ni, a past tense version of na. This article challenges some traditional misconceptions of these structures, it looks at the syntactic environments of each of these negators in the context of actual language use, examines the areas of overlap between them, and arrives at a new understanding of these patterns.

While Abdülhamid is usually represented as an extreme example of a ‘censorship sultan’, this article seeks to redress the balance and to present a more nuanced picture of Abdülhamid's relationship with the press. Based largely on archival material from Istanbul, the article investigates how press magnates sought to use their relationship with the palace in order to ensure their survival and to gain the concessions they wanted, and how, in turn, the sultan manipulated the press and used it to cultivate his own image and to present the empire and his sultanate in the way he wished, both to his own subjects and to other states outside the Ottoman frontier.

The recent publication of The Cambridge Encylopedia of the World's Ancient Languages provides an occasion for assessing the present state of our knowledge of ancient languages. Any assessment, however, will inevitably be influenced by methodology and point of view, depending upon whether the reader is a linguist or a philologist. The present author would broadly define the difference in the following way, at least as far as ancient languages are concerned: linguists tend to focus on the rules of language and general theories about language which can be generated from these rules, while philologists, although concerned with formal grammar, tend to scrutinize the textual evidence upon which a grammar is based. These two approaches are sometimes difficult to reconcile.

Yunjusi has, over the past few decades, earned a worldwide reputation for the immense repository of Buddhist scriptures carved on the stone slabs that are stored there (the so-called Stone Canon of Fangshan [Fangshan shijing]). The heroic enterprise of carving the whole Buddhist canon into stone had already been initiated during the Daye era (604–617) thanks to the resolve of the monk Jingwan (?–639) and support from Empress Xiao (d. after 630) of Sui Yangdi (r. 604–617) and her brother Xiao Yu (574–647). However, it did not accelerate until 740 when Xuanzong, as urged by his sister Princess Jinxian (689–732), ordered two eminent monks from the capital monastery Great Chongfusi (one of them being the great Buddhist historian and cataloguer Zhisheng [fl. 740s]) to deliver over four-thousand fascicles of Buddhist translations, which constituted the main body of the newly compiled Kaiyuan Buddhist canon, to Yunjusi to serve as base texts for the stone scriptures. This event is remarkable and puzzling for at least three reasons. First, although Yunjusi, a local temple situated far from the capitals, was not a Kaiyuan monastery, it still had the honour of being chosen as a recipient of the Kaiyuan canon. Second, one cannot help but wonder why and how two Chongfusi monks, who were of obvious prestige, should have demonstrated such enthusiasm in escorting so many Buddhist texts to this apparently marginal temple. Finally, it is difficult to understand why Princess Jinxian, who was then an ordained Taoist nun, played such an active and decisive role in this project. Such a remarkable and important event inevitably invited considerable attention from scholars, who have noted, and attempted to explain, several aspects of the mystery surrounding Princess Jinxian's Yunjusi ties. This article attempts to address this old issue from a perspective that has never been explored. It broaches and elaborates on the possibility that the great AvatamD saka master Fazang's (643–712) possible ties with Yunjusi form a major missing piece in this complex puzzle.

For over a millennium, the issue of the Shu-Han succession during the Three Kingdoms era (220–265 CE) has served as a proxy for debates about the relative merits of territorial control, blood relationship, and moral qualifications as grounds for imperial legitimacy in China. Debate reached a new height after the fall of north China during the twelfth century, a period when a revitalization of Confucian studies led to a greater interest in the publishing of private histories. This article deals with two little-known revisions of the official history of the Three Kingdoms period, the Sanguozhi, that sought to reflect the legitimacy debate at a time of alien conquest. It is argued that revisionist historians deviated from the norms of traditional historiography by devising new narrative strategies to further their political agenda. These innovations in turn influenced the formation of a new genre of historical fiction.

In this paper, a synchronic study of the syntax and the semantics of the causative verb shi in Han period Chinese, particularly in combination with negatives, is at issue. Two different structures involving negation of this verb exist in Han period Chinese: first, (NP1) NEGshi NP2 V2P and second (NP1) shi NP2NEG V2P. A thorough analysis of the first structure ‘(NP1) NEGshi NP2 V2P' shows that two different semantic interpretations are required to account for the syntactic differences between the two structures. The article proposes that the first structure has to be analysed as an analytic causative construction with a visible causative verb which, in its negated form, contrasts with an affirmative causative construction. The negative has scope over the entire causative construction including V1 and V2P, whereas in the second structure the negative has only scope over V2P

The Bornu quranic manuscripts with interlinear ajami glosses in a Kanuri dialect were discovered by A. D. H. Bivar in the late 1950s. The unique corpus of written evidence for the Kanuri language as spoken over 300 years ago has never been analysed in any depth. The first part of the paper contains a general description of the collection and a discussion of codicological and palaeographical characteristics of the manuscripts. The second part comprises a brief note on the Kanuri language and a description of the Bornu writing system used for quranic commentary in this language. The third part explores the phonological and morphological properties of selected examples of glosses. Finally, a preliminary view on the dialect affiliation of the language of the glosses is suggested.