As a normative discipline Qur'anic exegesis shares both principles and terminology with the other Islamic sciences, and as such is not likely to have been articulated before the third/ninth century. Prominent in the fully elaborated system, as for example exhibited in the work of al-Zamakhshari (d. 538/1143), are the complementary principles of qiyās and taqdīr. While the former is commonly understood to represent the hermeneutical instrument called analogy, a typological description of qiyās will distinguish between applications of the principle which depend upon a textual similarity, and those which are derived from a rational or causal relation. Of the first type it may be said that there are as many kinds of analogy as there are means of establishing external (grammatical and lexical) affinity between different scriptural contexts. Underlying the second type of analogy is a unifying principle (ratio) independent of textual similarities, both explicit and implicit. In theory, if not always in practice, one may differentiate the two types of qiyās by reference to the incidence in each of what I have called the complementary principle of taqdīr. This term, of which the most common rendering ‘supplementation’ (Ergänzung), alluding to only one aspect of the procedure in question, is not quite satisfactory, signifies reconstruction or restoration (Wiederherstellung: restitutio in integrum), namely, of a scriptural context or passage. Now, while the elaboration of grammatical qiyās by the so-called ‘Basran school’ was characterized by an almost unlimited application of that principle, two reservations must be made.

The pots which form the subject of this note are among the Indian collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum. They were presented to the museum in 1921 by Lt.-Col. F. C. S. Lamborne-Palmer, C.B.E., and a note in the accessions register recalls that they were discovered during the digging of the foundations of a house in the early years of the century, at Owin (Ayun) in the Chitrāl valley, now in West Pakistan. What was striking from the outset about at least one of the three vessels was its resemblance to a form of jug occurring in early contexts in Iran. But when my attention was first directed to the collection, in the early 1950's, enough was not known of the prehistory of the North-West Frontier to allow any further evaluation. During the past decade several new and interesting discoveries have been made, and one may now draw more confident inferences regarding the collection. There are three pots only.

A total eclipse of the sun is rare enough in any one place and spectacular enough to leave a profound impression on those who observe it. From very early times it was regarded as a portent of disaster and carefully recorded. Advances in the field of geophysics, together with the advent of the high-speed computer, have made it possible to compute early solar eclipses with a new degree of precision, and we may now expect to find a significant correlation between literary and astronomical evidence for solar eclipses in areas where a sufficiently representative bloc of literature has survived. The region around Has Shamra (ancient Ugarit) is one such area, and it was decided to compute the principal solar eclipses visible there during the period covered by the Ugaritic texts (c. 1450–1200 b.c.), and scan the texts for possible references.

The manuscript Qarawīyūn 727 in Fez contains on folios 37b–38a a tradition reported by Yūnus b. Bukayr on the authority of Ibn Isḥāq. The tradition tells of a meeting between the Prophet and Zayd b. ‘Amr b. Nufayl, one of the ḥunafā' in Mecca. During the meeting Zayd b. ‘Amr was offered meat which he, however, refused to eat, arguing that he never ate meat sacrificed before idols.

Le terme mazdayasna-, familier à ceux qui ont quelque pratique de l'Avesta ou une connaissance même somraaire des croyances mazdéennes, tient une place importante dans le vocabulaire religieux de l'Iran, depuis les temps anciens jusqu'à la fin de l'époque sassanide. Il désigne ceux que nous appelons ‘Mazdéens’, les fidèles de Mazdāh, par opposition aux fidèles des daivas, qui portent la qualification de daēvayasna-.

Structural anthropology is the attempt to describe the data of social anthropology, especially kinship and myth, by means of structural models. It has been pioneered by Professor Claude Lévi-Strauss and applied to the Old Testament by Dr. Edmund Leach. Obviously, the work of Leach is of most direct interest to Old Testament scholars, but it is impossible either to understand or evaluate it without reference to Levi-Strauss. Accordingly, this paper will begin with the latter before turning to Leach's articles on the Old Testament.

A total of 32 poems, including some of doubtful authenticity, are ascribed to Hassān b. Thābit in his Dīwān or elsewhere, which can be wholly or partly classified as elegies. It is remarkable, however, that in this total there is not a single poem on an Ansārī while no less than eight are on 'Uthmān b. 'Affān, as compared with only four on the death of the Prophet. Equally remarkable is the fact that there is a wide variety of style and method of treatment not only among the poems as a whole but among poems on the same subject.

The view has more than once been mooted amongst archaeologists, though dissenting voices have frequently made themselves heard, that the art of the ‘Graeco-Buddhist’ School of Gandhāra is contemporary with the zenith of the Kuṣāṇa dynasty under the rulers Kaniṣka, Huviṣka, and perhaps Vāsudeva. A further analysis is naturally required to convert this proposition into terms of absolute chronology. Yet the basic thesis is one that would find justification in an argument developed by Ibn Khaldūn in his masterpiece of historical theory, the Muqaddima:

‘The monuments of a dynasty are its buildings and large (edifices). They are proportionate to the original power of the dynasty. They can materialize only when there are many workers, and united action and co-operation. When a dynasty is large and far-flung, with many provinces and subjects, workers are very plentiful, and can be brought together from all sides and regions. Thus even the largest monument can materialize’.

It has always been said of Mehri that it has no dual forms of the verb. Thus Bittner, in what seems to be the most recent statement on the subject, says, discussing Śḥeri dual forms, that they ‘umso interessanter sind, als das Mehri im Bereiche des Zeitwortes keinen Dual besitzt’. It had, however, been suggested tentatively by Leslau, and later more positively by Wagner, that Ḥarsūsi (Ḥarsi) had dual forms of the verb.

The year in which 'Alī Bey al-Kabīr, Mamlūk ruler of Egypt (1760–72), first came to power as shaykh al-balad, the most important office in Egypt from the middle of the eighteenth century to Bonaparte's expedition, has been a matter of some disagreement. The Western contemporary accounts of Lusignan, Savary, and Volney give 1763, or the Muslim equivalent 1177. Later historians, Marcel, Cattaui, Combe, Heyworth-Dunne, Rossi, Mahmūd al-Sharqāwī, Wiet, and Shaw accept this date—though in another article Shaw changed his earlier date of 1177/1763 to 1171/1758 for the rise of 'Alī Bey al-Kabīr to the office of shaykh al-balad. Ahmad Haydar al-Shihābī and Masson also chose 1758. Other dates for this event have been given: 1757 by Dehérain, 1766 by 'Alī Pasha Mubārak and François Charles-Roux, and finally 1760 by the contemporary chronicler 'Abd al-Rahmān al-Jabartī. Muhammad Ramadān and P. M. Holt accept al-Jabartī's date. The object of this article is to show that al-Jabartī's dating and account of 'Alī Bey al-Kabīr's rise to power are accurate, and in so doing, to explain the sources of confusion in so many of the studies that have treated 'Alī Bey al-Kabīr's early history.

The fact that Zoroaster was a priest, a zaotar, is likely to have been of considerable influence in nurturing and shaping his spiritual life; and in more than one study of Zoroastrianism it has been given due prominence, without, however, its implications being fully explored. There seems room, therefore, for a further attempt to assess, as far as the evidence allows, the relevance of Zoroaster's priesthood for the evolution of his doctrines.

The curious fact has long been known that the greatest single festival of the Zoroastrian year, Nō Rōz, is celebrated twice over, with almost identical observances, on two separate days, namely Rōz Ohrmazd of Māh Fravardīn, and Rōz Hordād of the same month, i.e. on the first and sixth days of the first month of the year. As al-Bīrῡnī recorded, writing c. A.D. 1000: ‘On the sixth of Fravardīn, the day Hordād, is the Great Nō Rōz, for the Persians a feast of great importance’. The first of this month was celebrated as the Lesser Nō Rōz. Sasanian melodies were named for both Nō Rōz ī wuzorg and Nō Rōz ī xwurdag; and later the two days were also known respectively as the ‘special’ Nō Rōz (Nō Rōz-i xāṣṣa) and the 'general’ Nō Rōz (Nō Rōz-i ‘āmma). Among the Parsis the Great Nō Rōz ‘is kept with as much pomp and rejoicing as…New Year's Day’; and in Persia orthodox priests still do not recite Rapithwin Gāh, the daily prayer which marks Nō Rōz and the return of summer, until noon on Rōz Hordād of Māh Fravardīn, on which day the faithful there gather together for communal services to celebrate the beginning of the new religious year.

Some years ago, I published in this Bulletin an article, one of the main purposes of which was to propose a hypothesis concerning the dating of the Kharoṣṭhī documents discovered by Sir Aurel Stein at the ancient sites in Chinese Turkistan, the so-called ‘Niya’ site (Cabta), and Lou-Ian (Kroraina). At almost the same time, Professor Enoki Kazuo independently published an article which, while covering a much wider historical period, nevertheless dealt also with a certain number of topics included in my own article; and it was gratifying to find that on most of these points we had reached similar conclusions. More recently, Dr. Michael Loewe published an article which was largely a critique of certain points in my own, for which purpose he drew upon the evidence of the Chinese histories. I bow to Dr. Loewe's superior knowledge of these sources and of the Chinese language; and it would be presumptuous of me to attempt to assess or criticize his article as a whole. Nevertheless, I venture to continue to disagree with him on a number of points, on which I maintain my original views, or have modified them but slightly.

The likely reaction of a Semitist on reading for the first time a Mehri grammar or text, is to assume that, in forms like ɧayd (ḥayd) ‘hand’, ɧawguur (ḥawgûr) ‘slave’, ɧəyuum (ḥeyûm) ‘sun’, the ɧ(a)– element represents a definite article. A later reaction might be that the ɧ(a)– element, since few forms so affixed occur without this prefix, is perhaps a fossilized definite article.

Khwarezmian linguistic studies have progressed but slowly since their inception in 1927, when A. Z. V. Togan published his discovery of some Khwarezmian (hereafter Xw.) sentences in an Arabic fiqh book. W. B. Henning's first article appeared after nine years and a quarter of a century later H. W. Bailey could still refer to ‘the slowly emerging Chorasmian’. The latest bibliography cannot boast more than two dozen titles. It is our tragic loss that Henning, having studied all the available Xw. material in the course of four decades, should have left ready for publication only the first 260 entries (from '– to ' kiv) of the Khwarezmian dictionary on which he was working at his most untimely death. Of course, Togan's publication in 1951 of the facsimile of a manuscript of Zamakhshari's Arabic dictionary Muqaddimatu 'l-adab, almost completely glossed in Xw., made the greater part of the extant Xw. material generally available, but, not least because of the labour involved, few have cared to duplicate or anticipate Henning's work. Now suddenly, however, in the words of a colleague, ‘everyone has become a Khwarezmologist’, through the publication of a transliteration and translation of this same linguistic material by Johannes Benzing.

According to Vārttika 5 on Pāṇini, 4.2.36—aver dugdhe soḍhadūsamarīsacaḥ—the ‘suffixes’ soḍha-, dūsa-, and marīsa- are added to the stem avi- ‘sheep’ in the sense of ‘milk’. These elements cannot be suffixes in the ordinary sense of the term, but rather words appearing as the second members of the respective compounds. The reason that they were treated as suffixes by the grammarian was no doubt the fact that the words were not used independently, but only as members of these compounds. Originally, however, they must have existed as independent words.

The following chant, one of a series recorded in central Morocco in the summer of 1967, exemplifies a type of oral tradition found among the Imazighen, the Berbers of that region. It is a socio-religious poem, called a tanšhat: (plural tinšhadri). The poet-performer is an anšhad (pl. inšhadn), although like other musical performers he is addressed as ‘Shaykh’. The genre, known by other names in other regions, is characterized by its form and language, its composition and execution, its subject-matter and the poet's attitude toward it, and finally by its role in the life of the community.

Clauses of the kind described in this article as topic clauses occur commonly in both spoken and written Malay. However, such clauses have not so far been fully accounted for in formal analyses of Malay syntax, nor, except in Miss M. B. Lewis's recent book, have they been described by the use of Topic as an additional element in clause structure. The purpose of this article is to give a much fuller description of such clauses, and to suggest that analyses of them using Topic as an additional clause-element have advantages over the alternative analyses in terms of Subject, Predicate, and Complement alone.

The Great Mosque at Harāat ranks among the largest religious buildings still standing in Iranian lands. In the past it has been referred to as an example of Ghūrid architecture heavily restored at various periods. In fact, anyone standing inside the four-ayvān courtyard and looking at the typical arches (plates I-II) or at the marble columns so similar to the stone work at the Gāzargāh, and the mausoleum of Gawharshād, would be inclined to regard it as a typically Tīmūrid mosque. But as soon as one walks into the ayvān this vault takes on unusual proportions: on each side are passages with remarkably strong pillars; and the points of the arches differ from the usual Tīmūrid modulum. The same is true of the complex passages leading from the eastern façade, almost entirely rebuilt in recent years: here also strong square pillars support arches the spans of which come closer to twelfth- or thirteenth-century models rather than those of the late fifteenth century. It would be unwise, of course, to reappraise the period of such an important structure on the basis of a passing impression; a thorough study on the spot, including the drawing of the over-all plan and elevations, and accurate measurements, is necessary.

The religion of Cao-Dai is fundamentally, and deliberately, syncretic. Since it includes Christ and Moses (but for some reason, not Muhammad) in its pantheon, the Western student might be tempted to see it as essentially an attempt to bridge the gulf between East and West by finding a sort of middle way between Christianity and Buddhism. It is possible that some Caodaists who have acquired a thorough Western education in France but maintained their religious belief do in fact see it in those terms, but most of the Caodaist literature indicates that the real basis of the syncretism is an attempt to bring together the three religions of the Sino-Vietnamese tradition. In this attempt, Christianity has only a peripheral position, and nothing has been adopted from Christian teachings that would seriously clash with the underlying doctrinal tolerance of East Asian religions. The most important feature of Caodaist syncretism is that it brings together elements of Taoist spirit-mediumship with a concept of salvation that was originally Buddhist. If any one of the three Sino-Vietnamese religions may be said to be dominant in Caodaism it is religious Taoism; but since the Caodaists themselves frequently refer to their religion as ‘reformed Buddhism’, that is a point which must be demonstrated rather than taken for granted. I propose to analyse some of the most obvious elements of Caodaism under four headings: spirit-mediumship; the Cao-Dai and other spirits; salvation and the apocalyptic aspect; and hierarchy and organization. A concluding section will deal briefly with the possible relationship between Caodaism and certain religious sects in China.