A new edition of the astronomical compilation MUL.APIN follows closely upon the recent publication of two sections of the large compendium of Babylonian astronomical omens known as Enūma Anu Enlil. The text of MUL.APIN likewise includes a section of astronomical omens, as well as a catalogue of stars, including the ‘fixed’ (ziqpu) stars, and information regarding the planets, heliacal risings, the path of the moon, calendrical intercalations, and a shadow table and water clock. This modern edition is clearly presented nd well-translated, and includes notes on both the philology and astronomy of the text.

The long-awaited first volume of the astronomical diaries, the life-work ofthe late Abraham Sachs, has been admirably brought to fruition by HermannHunger, in Sachs and Hunger, Diaries and related texts from Babylonia.2Although one laments the passing of Abraham Sachs before the completion ofthis momentous task, Hunger has earned the acclaim of his colleagues for thepolished presentation of the finished product, particularly as the Sachs Nachlasswas not yet in publishable form when he died. The importance of these diariesreaches far beyond the narrow confines of philology, since they includecalendrical and astronomical data, lists of commodity prices for the particularday or month, weather reports and often a tantalizing allusion to a currentevent, being the closest ancient counterpart to a modern news report.

Islamic tradition records many precedents for expulsion of Jews and other non-Muslims. The authors of the two most important collections of ḥadīths, al-Bukhārī and Muslim, have chapters entitled ‘On exiling the Jews from Arabia’ or ‘On exiling the Jews from the Ḥijāz’. Similar chapters exist in other collections of traditions. These statements testify to Muḥammad's expulsion of ‘the Jews of Medina—all of them’, or report his will to expel the Jews—or in variants, the Jews and Christians or the Polytheists—from the Arabian Peninsula. Clearly, the traditions are interpreted with the widest possible reference regarding who is to be exiled: no non-Muslim is allowed to remain. But the geographical extent of the area from which non-Muslims are to be exiled is interpreted in narrow fashion: ‘What is meant by ‘the Arabian Peninsula” in this tradition is the Ḥijāz, not the entire Arabian Peninsula.’ This is so despite ample potential for broad interpretation in the language of the texts. In a tradition which supports a projected exile of the Jews of Medina, Muhammad tells the Jews, ‘Know that the land is the Lord's and his Apostle's.’ The word arḍ ‘land’ in the ḥadīth is understood to refer specifically to the plots of land the Jews had owned, now considered lo be held by them in tenancy. This could easily have been taken out of context by some interpreters and applied to all lands. A tradition used to support the prohibition of dhimmī residence in Ḥijāz reads, in some versions, ‘two religions (sometimes using the term qiblas—directions faced in prayer) may not exist in one land,’ in others, ‘two qiblas may not exist in Arabia’. In practice, this tradition was applied only to Ḥijāz and was not extended to all of Arabia or any other ‘land’. Chapter headings are often our only indication of how traditions were understood by those who collected them; Mālik's chapter heading has this tradition refer only to the expulsion of Jews from Medina.

Since the beginnings of Neo-Aramaic studies in the second half of the last century, with the work of pioneers such as Stoddard (1855), Sachau (1865) and Noldeke (1868) in East-Neo-Syriac, Prym and Socin (1883) in West-Neo-Syriac (Tur ‘Abdln) and Parisot (1898–9) in West-Aramaic of Ma'lūla and related dialects, research in the field of Neo-Aramaic dialectology has never known such an intensive upsurge as there has been in the second half of this century. Although harsh religious persecution by the Muslims and other unendurable hardships, particularly in this century, exterminated a large proportion of the speakers of these dialects or drove them from their original sites to Russia, America, various European countries and even Australia, where their idioms are likely to die within the next few generations, the interest in their more or less modest remnants is increasing. It is as if Aramaists had finally responded to an earnest last-moment appeal and understood the need to save this linguistic heritage before it disappears totally. However, it is symptomatic that researchers trying to record a dying dialect in situ (Krotkoff, Aradhin in Iraqi Kurdistan 1959, published 1982; Jastrow, Hertevin in East Turkey 1970, published 1988) were unable to find more than a single reliable informant on the dialects of the villages of their respective research

Qur'ān 2: 198 states that it is no fault in the Muslims that they should seek the faḍl of their lord: laysa ‘alaykum junāḥun an tabtaghū faḍlan min rabbikum. This verse occurs within a series of godly ordinances pertaining to the Muslim ḥajj, and it is therefore quite obvious why Muslim exegetes thought that the faḍl of Allāh in our verse ought to be sought by the believers during the ḥajj. In order to convey this view, the exegetes used a simple device, they added the following clause at the end of the verse: fī mawāsim al-ḥajj—during the rites of, or, in the stations of the ḥajj. Several traditions in al-Ṭabarī contain this addition. Most of the isnāds of these traditions are Meccan, which implies that the scholars of this place were particularly interested in encouraging the believers to come to the holy places of the Meccan ḥajj. Thus, tradition no. 18 in al-Ṭabarī which contains the addition fī mawāsim al-ḥajj is transmitted from the Meccan ‘Ubaydallāh b. Abī Yazīd (d. 126 A.H.), who quotes Ibn al-Zubayr. In fact, the clause fī mawāsim al-ḥajj gained the rank of a qirā'a. In some traditions it is transmitted as such from the Meccan ‘Aṭā’ b. Abī Rabāh (d. 114 A.H.) on the authority of Ibn ‘Abbās. ‘Aṭā’ is quoted through the Meccan Talḥa b. ‘Amr (d. 152 A.H.), as well as through Ḥajjāj b. Arṭāt (d. 145 A.H.). The Medinese ‘Ikrima (d. 105 A.H.) also spread the same qirā'a. In al-Ṭabarī he is quoted by the Basrian Ayyūb al-Sakhtiyānī (d. 131 A.H.).

If there has been one dominant, quasi-official theory for Turkish classicalmusic in the second half of the twentieth century, it is that particularlyassociated with Ezgi and Arel. Their notational conventions have becomestandard, supplanting earlier norms, and the framework they developed is theone still employed in recent general accounts of the modal system, whether thesimplified introductory survey of Yilmaz (1983), for example, or the moredetailed and comprehensive coverage of Ozkan (1984). Both of these follow theanalytical models provided by their predecessors, and begin with an expositionofintervals and the various species of tetrachord and pentachord formed from them before moving on to describe the structure of the makams themselves. Thesequence interval, scale, mode, nevertheless forms a conceptual continuum: theintervals denned are restricted to those deemed to occur in Turkish classicalmusic, and the nomenclature of the various species, for all that they appear asabstract assemblages of intervals, identifies them with characteristic segments ofwell-known and important makams.

A discussion of the mathematical manuscripts of Mauretania requires an overall introduction to this almost completely unexplored literature.

Its foundations must first be established. Between the years 1978 and 1985 a project financed initially by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (BRD), then by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, was entrusted to Dr. Rainer Oßwald and myself by the Mauretanian Ministry of Cultural Affairs. Its objective was the collection and protection of the selected Arabic manuscript literature of Mauretania.

At Sāmarrā’ there are the remains of a number of ‘Abbāsid walled tracks which appear to be racecourses. Ernst Herzfeld found one track in the course of the German expedition of 1911–13 to the ‘Abbāsid capital at Sāmarrā’, and the outline of two more became known from a series of maps of the Sāmarrā’ district made by the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force in 1917. Herzfeld published his first brief discussion of these courses in 1948 in his Geschichte der Stadt Samarra’, and a further description was published posthumously in his Persian empire in 1968. At about the same time in 1948, a fairly extensive discussion was published by Ahmad Susa in his Rayy Sāmarrā’, though without much illustration. Sūsa enumerated five courses, but it has proved necessary to exclude two, for they seem not to have been for racing. One further course has been added here, not identified before.

Muhammad b. Muhammad b. ‘Alī Abū Bakr al–Khawāfī al–Harāwī was born in Khurāsān in 757/1356 and he died at Herat in 838=1435. Praised by Jāmī as one who personified wisdom, both exoteric and esoteric, he was, without doubt, an important master of the Suhrawardiyya Sūfī order, though he established his own silsila, the Zainiyya. None the less, he was schooled in a number of other Sūfī orders. Dr. Leonard Lewisohn has revealed in his studies of the mystic poet, Mawlānā Muhammad Shīrīn, otherwise known as al–Maghribī, that al–Khawāfī is listed at the end of the Ṭaifūrī silsila by Ḥājj Zain al-‘Ābidīn al-Shirwānī. According to Ibn Karbalā'ī, he was a part-time student of Ishāq Khuttalānī and he was also affiliated to ‘Ala’ al-Dawla Simnānī, though it is ultimately to Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī that his silsila is usually traced.

Zoroaster is said to have lived in the sixth century B.C. This has been a tradition, within Zoroastrianism itself, for around two thousand years. Up until recently in the West its accuracy was widely considered an established fact.

Western scholars came across the evidence for this tradition in the nineteenth century. Many immediately gave it a warm reception. After all, such a late dating was far better suited to the forward-looking, evolutionary spirit of the times than the much earlier one that had been favoured up until then, but which risked losing sight of Zoroaster in a suspiciously distant past. Also, as well as sounding eminently reasonable it seemed to have the pedigree of a genuine Zoroastrian tradition.

The various documents concerning Emperor Dāwit's embassy to the Republic of Venice in 1402 have been brought together in Carlo Conti Rossini's article of 1927 on European influence upon Ethiopian art before the coming of Jesuit missionaries in the mid sixteenth century. The purpose of this brief paper is to expand the story of Dāwit's embassy with a short document, which sheds some light upon the motives for this and subsequent Ethiopian embassies to European nations during the period before the Adalite invasions that began in 1529.

The controversy as regards the genuineness of the allegedly seventeenth-century Ethiopian philosophers Zär'a Ya‘qob an Waldä Haywät and their two opuscula, known as hatäta ‘examination, inquiry’, has for close on a century generated scholarly discussion. In the footsteps of C. Conti Rossini (RAL, vm, 1899, 43 and RAL, xxix, 1920, 213—23) Mittwoch has adduced weighty arguments against the authenticity of the two tracts, and in his Amharische Version der Soirées de Carthage (Berlinand Leipzig, 1934) he has cited the relevant literature. I do not propose, in the present context, to traverse the same ground once again. The Ga‘az texts of the two hatäta were edited and translated by E. Littmann (CSCO, Scriptores Aethiopici, vols. 1 and 2, Leipzig 1904) and rendered from Ga‘sz into Amharic by Zämänfäs Qaddus Abraha (Asmara, 1955).

In the 1920s Eugen Mittwoch's pupil, Dr. Hans Schlobies,2 wrote to Alaqa Dästa,3 who was considered a notable student of Ethiopic literature, to enquire about indigenous knowledge of those two works. Part of the learned Aläqa's reply was published by Mittwoch in the Soirées de Carthage, 3–4, but Mittwoch's Ethiopian Nachlass (now in my possession) contains the original of Alaqa Dästa's letter which I propose to set out here in its entirety:

To the honoured Dr. Yohannes Schlobies. While I say ‘let my respectful greetings be to you and your entire family’, I present the compliments appropriate to your distinction. Honoured Sir, so far from being-as you wrote to me-' famous

Section 1. Introduction 1.01. All the above-mentioned categories have been the subject of considerable interest in the last few years. T. Gotō (1987) has devoted a book to Class I presents (thematic presents with normal grade of the root and stable root accent) in Sanskrit, and H. Rix has published a monograph on Indo-European moods (1986) and an article on the middle voice (1988). B. Barschel (1986) has addressed the question of the antiquity of the subjunctive and optative, and their absence from the Anatolian branch of IE. The question of the special primary endings of the singular active in the thematic conjugation was reopened by W. Cowgill (1985). Yet despite all this attention some questions still remain puzzling.

The subject of the Indianization of the Indian languages has occupied the thoughts of scholars for more than a century. But during the last four decades it has become a field of intensive investigation. The study of the process of convergence in the Indie area began with a hesitant study of common lexical items in Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Munda. The initial conviction was that grammatical traits may not travel across genetic boundaries. However, scholars like Kuiper and Emeneau not only proved the contrary but also laid the foundation for future research on the ‘unexpected’ structural similarities among the above–mentioned three major language families of the Indian subcontinent.

Many Kharoṣṭhī documents have been unearthed from the buried cities in the shifting sands of the Taklamakan Desert in the last thirty years. I went to the south of the Desert and conducted an archaeological survey along the Silk Road in the summer of 1986. A Kharoṣṭhī wooden tablet happened to be on display in the Khotan Museum when I visited there, but no serial number had been given to the new document. It was allegedly collected by Mr. Li Xuehua, an officer of the Min Feng county, when he explored the way to the Niya site for the shooting of a television programme on the Silk Road in 1981. However, he did not leave any further information on the exact place where the tablet was found in the vast area of Niya.

Sixty-five years ago, in brief remarks devoted to the Shina of Dras, Bailey noted an unusual construction associated with the verb lezhonu ‘to get’:

Until recently, Kavi Karṇapūra has generally been accepted without question as the author of a book on the life of Śrī Kṛṣṇa Caitanya entitled ŚrīCaitanyacaritāmṛtamahākāvya [CCMK]. The date of this work is given as 1542 by the author himself in its final verse. In the two penultimate verses of the work, he identifies himself as the youngest son of Śivānanda Sena and as a mere child (śiśu). If Kavi Karṇapūra is indeed the author, it is certainly a matter of great interest as he is one of the most prolific and authoritative writers amongst the followers of Caitanya. His father, Śivānanda Sena, was a rich and influential devotee of Caitanya, responsible for the management of the yearly trips to Puri which played such an important role in the latter part of the great saint's life. Unfortunately, with the exception of a few such autobiographical words in Karṇapūra's own compositions, such as the Ānandavṛndāvanacampū [AVC], Caitanyacandrodayanāṭaka [CCN] and Gauragaṇoddeśadīpikā [GGD] the only information that we have about Karṇapūra's life is from Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja's Caitanyacaritāmṛta [CC].

The Kiranti languages are spoken in eastern Nepal and western Sikkim. What I call Eastern Kiranti in this article includes the languages Limbu, Yakkha, Yamphe, Yamphu, Lohorung and Mewahang. Further study will probably demonstrate that other languages spoken to the east of the SĀlpĀ watershed, such as Sam, underwent the same developments described here and must also be included in Eastern Kiranti. The autonyms used by the Limbus, Yakkha, Yamphe, Yamphu and Lohorung are indicative of a close historical relationship between them. The Limbu call themselves Yakthuŋba; the Yakkha call themselves Yakkha; and the Yamphe, Yamphu and Lohorung refer to their language as Yakkhaba.

The Chin-so liu-chu yin is a text of twenty-nine fascicles preserved in the Taoist canon in the form of a revelation to Chang Tao-ling, the late Han founder of the Taoist religion, to which comments by Li Ch‘un-feng (602–670) are attached. Though scholars have not so far addressed the question of the origins of the text itself, a certain willingness to accept the attribution of the commentary has already been made manifest. Yet to the eye of the expert in Sung Taoism this attribution raises serious doubts: text and commentary display features much more reminiscent of Sung religion than that of the early T'ang. It has already been noticed that Li Ch'un-feng provides information on the cult of the city gods (ch'eng-huang shen) and on Thunder magic; the former religious development may be traced back before the T‘ang but only achieved prominence towards the end of the dynasty, while the latter is unattested in T‘ang Taoist literature. One might add that Li displays a detailed knowledge of the legend of Hsü Sun in a developed form—again a cult v with early origins hardly noticed until the late T‘ang. The text also provides information (though separately) on the Buddhist warrior-king Vaisravana (P‘isha-men PI) and on the seventh-century warrior-hero Li Ching (571–649): these two figures were eventually to merge.