The silver libation-bowl (phialē) to be described in this note was purchased in London about five years ago by the Hon. Robert Erskine, and now forms part of his collection. To the owner's most generous co-operation we owe this opportunity to publish the piece, and the excellent photograph which appears on plate I. At the time of the purchase, no information was available as to the place and circumstances in which the bowl was found. The only conclusions to be reached are therefore those based on internal evidence.

There is in the British Museum an Arabic MS (Or. 5670) of some 32 folios entitled Kitāb qarā'in al-qaṣr wa-maḥāsin al-'aṣr fī madḥ amīr al-muslimīn [sic] Abī 'Abd Allāh ibn Naṣr and ascribed to the adīb Ibrāhīm b. 'Abd Allāh b. al-Ḥājj. This ascription arouses no suspicion at first sight, for the kunya of the Nasrid sultan of Granada Muḥammad V was indeed Abū 'Abd Allāh, and there was at his court a poet and littérateur of repute named Ibrāhīm b. al-Ḥājj. The description of the MS in the catalogue takes this ascription at its face value. The purpose of this paper is to set forth as much as can be discovered about the poet Ibn al-Ḥājj and his works and to discuss the ascription of the extant fragments bearing his name.

The history of Baghdad in the second half of the eleventh century is dominated by the name of the great Saljūqid minister, Niẓām al-Mulk, a name linked to an extensive network of institutions founded by him throughout the lands of the eastern caliphate: the Niẓāmīya colleges. Most widely known among them was the college in Baghdad, founded in 457/1065 and inaugurated in 459/1067. The renown of the Niẓāmīya of Baghdad, both in medieval oriental sources as well as in studies undertaken by modern Oriental and Western scholars, is such that it is the first institution likely to come to the mind of a person familiar with the period's history. Whenever historians have put their efforts into the field of Muslim education in the Middle Ages, whether in a general or specialized way, they have seldom failed to mention the fame of the college. Efforts have been made to establish the list of its professors and the most famous among its students; approximations have been made as to the date of its disappearance; investigations have been pursued to determine its exact location on Baghdad's east side; causes of its decline have been proposed; a whole treatise and other learned articles have been devoted to the history of this college alone.

IN a previous article, we noted that by the time of the death of Shāh Isma'īl I (19 Rajab 930/23 May 1524) it is possible to observe certain trends in the development of the principal offices of the Ṣafawid state. During the last decade of the reign of Isma'īl I, there had been a movement away from the theocratic form of government which obtained at the time of the establishment of the Ṣafawid state, and this was reflected in changes both in the scope and function and in the relative importance of the principal offices of state: there was a tendency to lay less emphasis on the paramount position of the wakīl as the vicegerent of the Shāh (wakīl-i nafs-i nafīs-i humāyūn), and to regard him rather as the head of the bureaucracy; there was a decline in the power of the ṣadr; and Isma'īl himself took steps to curb the power of the amīr al-umarā.

Among the numerous Islamic documents preserved in the Venetian State Archives are a few which come from the chancery of Mamluk Egypt. One of the most interesting of these is a letter from Sultan Qaitbay to the Doge Nicolo Trono, dated 10 Sha'bān 877/10 January 1473, which is to be presented here in its original Arabic together with a contemporary Italian translation found in the enormous diplomatic register known as the Libri Commemoriali.

The following story occurs on folios 26r. to 33r. of a MS in the British Museum, catalogued ‘Codex Additional 24048’ in the handwritten List of Oriental MSS, Vol. iii (1854–66). There is another copy in the Staatsbibliothek, Munich, which was noticed long ago by Wilhelm Geiger, who edited and translated from it parts of the story given here in full.

For a long time now the Falashas have, with questionable justification, been dubbed the ‘Jews of Abyssinia’. A good deal of legendary information about the Falashas appears already in such medieval writings as Sefer Eldad and in an account given by Benjamin of Tudela who gathered some news on the Falashas while on his way from the Yemen to Egypt. The great seventeenth-century scholar Job Ludolf included some notes and questions in his monumental work on Ethiopian history—based, to a large extent, on information supplied by Abba Gregory who thought that the Falashas dialecto Talmudica corrupta inter se utuntur (no doubt a reference to their Agaw vernacular which Gregory did not understand). Thus misled, Ludolf is understandably curious to know quando vel qua occasione Judaei isti primum in Aethiopiam venerint? Karraeorumne vel aliorum Judaeorum sectae sint addicti? James Bruce of Kinnaird provides a fairly detailed, though not necessarily accurate, picture of Falasha life which became the stimulus of subsequent interest in this peculiar form of ‘Judaism’.

The period of nearly three centuries which lies between Selīm I's overthrow of the Mamluk sultanate in 1517, and Bonaparte's landing at Alexandria in 1798 is one of the most obscure in the history of Muslim Egypt. For the latter part of the period, from the early twelfth/eighteenth century, there are ample materials for the reconstruction of the political history in the famous chronicle by Jabartī. The Ottoman invasion, and the years which immediately succeeded it have also received some attention, thanks to the detailed information provided by the chronicler Ibn Iyās. In contrast, there has been virtually no investigation of the last seventy-five years of the sixteenth century and the whole of the seventeenth.

THE two ceremonial speeches which are given below were recorded for me in 1956 by an old Samoan talking-chief (tūlāfale) in the village of Amanave on the island of Tutuila. The text is an edited transcription made from those tapes.

Both speeches form part of a house-building ceremony known in Tutuila as le usuga i le fale (the visitation of the house), which commemorates the building by a matai (head of a family group) of a round-house (fale tele). The fale tele is used mainly as a meeting place for the village council and for the entertainment of travelling parties (malaga) from other villages. It is an expensive undertaking to build such a house as it involves the employment of a master-carpenter (matai tufuga, or, ceremonially, agai-o-tupu) and members of his guild (?āiga), who must be entertained lavishly during the work and paid with cash and fine-mats at a later ceremony (le umusāga). A Samoan who builds his village a fale tele is making a major contribution to their prestige, and the usuga ceremony is held as a mark of gratitude and respect.

The dialect material set out in this article was collected mainly from two informants of the Dōsiri (pl. Duwāsir < > Dawāsir) tribe living in Kuwait. Although the dialect is described as Dōsiri, there is no doubt that the informants had been influenced by the local form of ‘Ajmi, a dialect of high social prestige. This influence was particularly noticeable when the informants were conversing with one another.

The use of seven names for Hell in the Qur'ān, though often noted as proper to Muhammad, has never been fully explained. Yet the notion they stand for is an important element in the preaching of the Prophet of Islam and runs through the whole context of his message. A solution of their problem therefore may provide increased understanding not only of their author's inner sentiments during the Meccan years of persecution but also of the external influences that moulded his thought and expression over the two decades in which the Qur'ān was announced as a divine revelation to the people of Arabia.

In a picturesque set of Avestan verses the converted Vštaspa now champion of the daēnā faith is described as a warrior making free way for the religion. This passage occurs twice: in the list of faithful early believers in Yašt 13.99 and with different introduction in Yašt 19.85.

In his phonemic analysis of Lhasa Tibetan in Love songs of the sixth Dalai Lama Jaw Yuanrenn (Y. R. Chao) notices ‘variations’ of some of the phonemes, and ascribes some of these ‘variations’ to differences in tempo or to chance: of the phoneme that he writes as ‘e’ he says ‘ i, 10 3 khrel gzhung tş'ilcuῃtş'ilcuŋ’ [it may sometimes change to l, e.g. in song 10, line 3, khrel gzhung tş'cuῃ is pronounced tş'ilcuῃ]; of the phoneme ‘a’, ‘ә 1 2 lam buhi lamp'ø lәmpø’ [it may change to ә in rapid speech, e.g. in song 4, line 2, lam buhi lamp'ø is pronounced lәmpø]; and of the phoneme ‘o’, ‘u, 36 3 rlung po luŋpo luŋbu’ [it may occasionally be pronounced u, e.g. in song 36, line 3, rlung po luŋpo is pronounced lunbu]; but a phonological analysis of the speech of Rinzin Wangpo (rig-'dzin dbang-po) (R.), a Lhasa-dialect-speaking Tibetan, overwhelmingly suggests that vowel alternations such as these should be attributed to vowel harmony.

I PROPOSE in this paper to discuss only pure Turkish words, that is I specifically exclude all words which were borrowed from some other language at one time or another, and what I shall try to establish is one segment of the phonetic make-up of the oldest form of the Turkish language which we can reconstruct, that is the Turkish spoken appreciably earlier than the eighth century A.D., the date of the earliest substantial specimens of the language which still exist.

In the Saṅgītaratnākara, a thirteenth-century musical text by Śārṅgadeva, listed under svaraprastāra (lit. extension of notes) is a complete enumeration of all the possible combinations of the 7 notes of the Indian musical scale. This enumeration begins with the single note (ārcika) and is followed by all the possible combinations of two notes (gāthika), three notes (sāmika), four notes (svarāntara), five notes (auḍuva), six notes (ṣāḍava), and seven notes (pūrṇa). Each of these series of kūṭatānas (series of notes in which the continuity of the sequence is broken) develop in the same logical order based on the precedence of the ascending line over the descending line. In Śārṅgadeva's arrangement the first of the 7 note series is the straight ascending line, sa ri ga ma pa dha ni, which, for easy comprehension will be rendered as l 2 3 4 5 6 7 in this paper; and the last of the 7 note series is the straight descending line, ni dha pa ma ga ri sa, rendered 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 here. The changes in the order of the notes take place from the beginning of the series, at first involving only the first two notes, then the first three notes, then the first four notes, and so on. In fact, the progression for the 7 note series includes the progressions for all the smaller series within it. Thus the 7th note of the 7 note series remains constant until the progressions of one, two, three, four, five, and six notes have been exhausted. Only then is the 7th note replaced by the 6th. The chart on p. 308 is an abbreviation showing the nature of the progression. The 2 and 3 note series involving the first 2 and 3 notes respectively are complete. Beginning from the 4 note series, the chart is abbreviated as follows. The 4 note series is divided into four groups determined by the terminal note, each involves change in the first 3 notes, and each of these groups corresponds to the previous 3 note series, which is in fact the first group of the 4 note series. Of the remaining groups only the first and last sequences are given with an indication as to the number of sequences comprising that group. Similar abbreviations are used in the longer series that follow. Commas have been placed to indicate that the preceding numbers now replace the original ascending sequence (mūlakrama) and that the progressions which follow in that group involve change in only these preceding numbers. For example, if one wishes to determine the complete series from 1 2 4,3 5 6 7 to the end of its particular group 4 2 1 3 5 6 7 the comma after 4 indicates that only the first three numbers change.

It seems impossible at present to publish an investigation into a problem of the grammar of a language without becoming involved in the disputes which are being conducted between adherents of different methodological schools. In his review of my monograph Zur Funktion einiger Hilfsverben im modernen Hindi (Mainz, Akademie, 1958) in BSOAS, XXIII, 3, I960, 602–3, Mr. Burton-Page has made statements which indicate clearly enough that there is a difference of opinion between him and me on matters of principle. Moreover, he points to his article ‘Compound and conjunct verbs in Hindi’ (BSOAS, XIX, 3, 1957, 469–78), which seems to be typical of a kind of structuralist approach. This article, in connexion with the judgments and programmatic and methodological statements of the review, implies a particular challenge for discussion. I am grateful to Mr. Burton-Pago for this challenge.

The Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies has recently acquired an autograph MS by Aḥmad 'Urābī al-Miṣrī, the leader of the Egyptian revolt of 1881–2.

In or about 1925 or 1926, three stones which were said to have been brought from Lo-yang, and which contain parts of a Kharoṣṭhī inscription, were shown to the Lazarist missionaries in Peking; and in 1926 a priest of the mission, Georges Prévost, who had come to the conclusion that the script was Palmyrene and the language Hebrew, produced an interpretation on this basis in a pamphlet of 31 pages. Such an explanation naturally involved its author in numerous difficulties both of language and palaeography; and since the pamphlet was printed only in a limited edition for private circulation, it might seem kinder to pass over in silence a mistake so unfortunate. Prévost was indeed aware of some of the difficulties, although he appears to have entertained no doubts at all about the identification of the script and language. But in spite of the restricted circulation of the original pamphlet, its existence has been recorded in several other publications; and the mention in print of these ‘Hebrew inscriptions’ from China, when the photograph is not easily accessible, is a potential nuisance to scholars. It is therefore desirable to prevent any future misunderstanding by making it clear that the inscription which is republished here is in fact the same as Prévost's ‘inscriptions sémitiques’.