According to the medieval medical concept, ultimately going back to Galen, memory is a psychical faculty located in the posterior ventricle of the brain. When this faculty is affected by a disturbance of the balance of the four bodily humours, i.e., by too much moisture and/or coldness of the brain, forgetfulness will be the result. One way to treat this affliction is to restore the humoral balance by administering warm drugs. A popular but also notorious drug for forgetfulness was balādhur (Semecarpus anacardium L; marking-nut), indigenous in India, and called by the Arab physicians ‘ḥabb al-fahm’ (nut of apprehension). The popularity of the marking-nut is sometimes explained from the fact that its juice when exposed to the air turns into a black corrosive fluid which was used as an indelible ink for marking linen and woollen clothes. Another explanation is that the nut has the shape of a heart, cf. the Latin ‘anacardia’ and the Arabic epithet ‘ḥabb al-qalb’. The black, resinous, viscid and acrid juice of the nut is called ‘honey’ by the medieval physicians; it is, according to them, hot and dry in the fourth degree and is recommended for a variety of diseases, but above all forgetfulness.

Despite their period from the tenth to the twelfth century, at the height of the Middle Ages; despite their position in Egypt, at the centre of the civilization of the Near and Middle East; and despite their prominence as the third Caliphate of Islam, the Fāṭimids lack a satisfactory modern history of their dynasty. This is partly because of the length of their life, which covers the histories of so many hundreds of years; partly because of the span of their empire from North Africa to Egypt and Syria, stretching across the histories of so many regions; and finally because, at the level of Islam itself, their empire was divided between their dawla or state and their daՙwa or doctrine. The doctrine, which focused on the Fāṭimid Imām as the quṭb or pole of faith, gave the dynasty its peculiar strength and endurance. The failure of that doctrine to supersede the Islam of the schools, however, left the Fāṭimids increasingly isolated and ultimately vulnerable. Standing outside the mainstream of Islamic tradition, the dynasty's own version of its history was disregarded. Instead, its components passed out of their original context to be incorporated into the regional or universal histories of subsequent authors. Maqrīzī was alone in compiling his Ittiՙāẓ al-ḥunafā' as a history of the dynasty in Egypt, introduced by a miscellany of information on its origins and previous career.

The conversion of Ghazan Khan to Islam in A.H. 694/A.D. 1295 was an event of great importance for both the Mongol ruling class and the Muslim subjects of his kingdom. The story of this conversion, based primarily on semi-official Persian works emanating from the Īlkhānid state itself, has been retold and analysed in varying detail by several modern scholars. Recently, Dr. Charles Melville, using contemporary Arabic sources from the Mamluk Sultanate, has enriched our knowledge of this event; in addition, he has suggested that the Islamization of the Mongols may have been well advanced even before Ghazan's conversion. Melville deals mainly with Ghazan's conversion per se, as well as the events that led up to it. As for the nature of Ghazan's Islam, he writes: ‘It is beyond the scope of this paper to speculate on the sincerity of Ghazan's conversion, which we can never know, or on what he actually understood of Islam …’. He does show, however, that Ghazan's conversion to Islam was more than just a personal decision based on religious conviction: one motive behind this move was a desire to attract those Mongols who had already become Muslims, and thus to win their support in his struggle against Baidu.

The tenth/sixteenth century was undoubtedly one of the most turbulent periods in the history of Morocco. Throughout the century the country was ravaged by civil strife, foreign occupation of some of its coastal regions and widespread social turmoil. Dynastic conflict between the two main contenders for the throne—the Wattasid vizierate and the Saՙdiyans—did not cease until the middle of the century. The prolonged warfare drained the economic resources of the country and crippled commercial activity. The crisis was especially acute in the countryside where the protracted political unrest disrupted agricultural activity. Sizable tracts of farmland were left uncultivated or were ruined by marauding gangs of brigands who plundered the peasants of their crops and cattle. As well as man-made damage, agricultural output was hit by a series of natural calamities (drought, plagues and scarce harvests), while intermittent outbreaks of epidemic decimated the population of certain districts. The results were catastrophic: famine became endemic in certain regions; previously fertile lands were abandoned and their soils became unsuitable for cultivation; trade in agricultural produce gradually ebbed; the price of foodstuffs rose to exorbitant levels and traders resorted to speculative practices, hoarding grain and other agricultural produce to inflate their value. The stagnation of agriculture led to a sharp demographic decline in the rural population and a substantial influx of migrant peasants into urban centres or rural areas less affected by scarcity. Entire rural communities were uprooted. Pauperism and mendicity proliferated in many regions as scores of impoverished peasants and herdsmen abandoned their indigenous lands and roamed the countryside in search of food.

The modern Japanese tourist visiting the Topkapi Sarai may well be struck by a display of sixteenth-century samurai armour and helmet held there. It was presented, along with a sword, to the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II in 1892 by Yamada Torajirō (1866–1957), an important pioneer in the history of Turkish-Japanese relations and the subject of this paper. Yamada, who was to remain in the imperial capital for almost twenty years, was witness to the history of the Hamidian era of conservative modernism under the despotic regime of the so-called ‘Red Sultan’, and the subsequent dramatic transition to constitutionalism that came with the Young Turk revolution of 1908. He was one of only two Japanese resident in the city (possibly in the whole empire) in this period. The other was Nakamura Ejirō, owner of the first Japanese shop in Istanbul, and Yamada's friend and partner.

It is some time since a book has been published which focuses entirely on Sasanian Zoroastrianism, and one from Professor Shaul Shaked, who has studied the religion at this period for many years, is sure of eager attention. The Sasanian epoch naturally attracts scholars approaching Zoroastrian studies from the Persian or Semitic fields; and the author points moreover to its interest for students of religions more generally, since this was a time when a number of other faiths were jostling for place within Iran, from Judaism, Buddhism and Christianity to the ill-fated but then vigorously expanding Manichaeism, and lesser ones of diverse hues. All this, and ‘an openness to Greek scientific and philosophical ideas’, made for as ‘lively and diversified a period of intellectual and religious activity as could ever be found in ancient Iran’ (p. 12).

In the Hindu pantheon the goddess Rādhā, Krsna's milkmaid lover and consort, is a relative newcomer. Notwithstanding her ‘youth’, she has already attracted scholarly attention (Hawley and Wulff, 1982; Olson, 1983; Kinsley, 1986 and 1989). The interest in this goddess has to do with her ambiguous relation with the male god with whom she is associated; though she has no independent existence from her ‘Viṣṇu’, she is not completely submissive to him either. In fact, Rādhā's devotees affirm her superiority over Kṛṣṇa. The relation between Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa certainly is not always portrayed as one eternal happy fulfilment (saṃbhoga-śṛṅgāra). One of the basic traits of this goddess is her suffering, mainly on account of his (real or imagined) unfaithfulness. It is in fact the very stubborn strength of her love that forms the basis for Rādhā's exaltation as a model of devotion. Ironically, with the rise her status, the need to provide an end to her suffering increases. Blissful union with her lover is clearly felt to be the prerogative for a great goddess, and with that the inevitable marital status is only one step away. In this paper I propose to discuss the historical moment when this ‘happy ending’ becomes important.

The Portuguese presence in Sri Lanka dates back to the early sixteenth century and lasted some hundred and fifty years. It gave rise to a Creole language based on Portuguese, Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole (SLPC), which Dalgado (1936) considered to be the most vigorous of the Portuguese Creoles.

It is well known that some goddesses are worshipped in both the Buddhist and Hindu Tantric traditions. A form of the Buddhist Vajrayoginī, accompanied by Vajravarṇanī and Vajravairocanī, is the prototype of the Hindu Chinnamastā accompanied by Ḍākinī and Varṅinī. Forms of Ekajaṭā and Mañjughoṣa were adopted from the Buddhist pantheon into the Hindu and worshipped by the same name. Usually it is not easy to trace how and when these adaptations took place. In the case of Mahācīnakrama-Tārā, a special form of Tārā, it has long been suspected that the goddess was imported from the Buddhist Tantric pantheon into the Hindu pantheon. In this paper I demonstrate, on the basis of clear textual evidence, how the goddess's description in a Buddhist sādhana was incorporated into the Hindu Phetkāriṅītantra, which was then quoted as an authoritative source regarding the goddess by later Hindu Tantras. I further examine representations of the goddess in art, and provide a new edition and translation of two sādhanas of Mahācīnakrama-Tārā.

Students of ancient China learn early on the story of Yao and Shun . The great emperor Yao (traditional reign dates, 2356–2255 B.C.) chose the virtuous Shun as his replacement over his own son Tan Chu . Shun was the model of filial piety: when his parents and brother tried to kill him a number of times, he saw the fault as his own and tried all the harder to win their love and approval.

Once upon a time, scholars believed that tracing the history and diffusion of folktales led to knowledge of a shared human culture. The enlightenment of the twentieth century, however, rooted out this superstition, with its evolutionary and devolutionary premises, and replaced it with a rigorous identification of tales, descriptions of their contents, and, more recently, analyses of the circumstances of their telling. The textual precision and ethnographic depth of these studies, not to mention the increasing number of folktale indexes, have taken us far beyond the naiveté of those nineteenth-century claims for a Buddhist or mytho-poetic origin to virtually all folk narrative. Deriving, for example, an English proverb (‘Don't count your chickens before they hatch’) from a Sanskrit story about a man whose dreams destroy him is almost as entertaining as it is untenable. One wonders, however, if, in reaction to such excesses, research did not retreat into a safer but more limited sphere by studying the stories of a single society. Without wishing to return to the hyperbole of those early folktale scholars, this essay acknowledges their comparative vision, bold hypotheses, and dedication to the international study of the folktale.

The Pali Text Society has most usefully brought together as Collected papers, v, another 16 of K. R. Norman's recent articles on MIA and Pali philological problems; and as Selected papers on Pāli studies, 18 of O. von Hinüber's German-medium articles which, published between 1967 and 1987, have also signally advanced our understanding of the origins and transmission of Pali texts. For the reissue, the latter have been rendered into English, partly by their author, and updated mainly by annotation.

Most people are born with the natural ability to see and distinguish the colours of objects and things in everyday life, but to explain in words what colour is, is a more complicated matter. Scientists have generally accepted that, physically, colour is the visual aspect of electromagnetic radiant energy having a spectral composition ranging in wavelength from about 380 to about 720 nanometres. From the psychological point of view, it is a sensation produced on the eye and in the brain by rays of light when resolved by selective reflection. The problems raised by the study of colour use are thus interdisciplinary.

Noun plurals showing partial reduplication appear sporadically in a wide variety of Afroasiatic languages, particularly in the Chadic, Cushitic, and Semitic groups. In past treatments it has generally been assumed that these examples are remnants of a widespread proto-Afroasiatic process of plural formation by reduplication. The following paper argues on empirical and theoretical grounds that it is more likely that reduplication as such was not a means of plural formation in proto-Afroasiatic and that a reduplicated plural only occurred as a morpho-phonologically conditioned variant of the prosodically extended stem (or ‘nternal-a’) plural. This paper seeks to demonstrate that in those languages where reduplication does occur as a major means of plural formation it is more easily interpreted as an innovation rather than as a conservative retention.

Among the numerous extant manuscripts of the Lao-tzu, Tao te ching perhaps the best known, apart from the famous Ma wang tui manuscripts discovered in Hunan province in 1973 and the Hsiang erh chu manuscript from Tun Huang (important primarily for its commentary), is the long fragment known as the So Tan manuscript, currently in the private collection of Mr. John B. Elliott and through his generosity on extended loan to the University Art Museum at Princeton. The manuscript is said to have been a part of the Tun Huang finds of the turn of the century. It appears to be one of the few of those manuscripts that remained in China after its discovery rather than immediately finding its way to France, England, or some other Western country. It moved from private collector to private collector, from Peking to Hong Kong to Japan and back again, only becoming a part of the John B. Elliott collection relatively recently.

Mrs. A.K. Fatunsin's Yoruba pottery (Lagos, 1992) is the outcome of a project funded by the Ford Foundation (grant no. 875–1066) as part of its continuing programme ‘to preserve and interpret diverse aspects of West Africa's cultural heritage’. The intention of the project as suggested to them in 1985 by this author was that it should ‘go beyond the mere collection of artefacts’. Emphasis was to be ‘placed on techniques of pottery manufacture, sources and types of raw material, methods of forming the pots, decoration and firing, as well as forms and functions including the designated names for the pots in the different parts of the Yoruba speaking area.’ Also investigated would be the uses to which the pots were put; and the organization, beliefs and customs of the potters themselves. The monograph resulting from the work would be designed to show pots ‘not just as art objects but as basic components of the entire economic, social, and religious life of the people’.

A picture of the phonology of the Hangzhou dialect at the turn of the century is found in a short book entitled Sound-table of the Hangchow dialect that was published in 1902 by the Church Missionary Society in Shàoxīng. The author of the book is not identified, but its production was no doubt associated with Bishop George Evans Moule, who for over 40 years, beginning in 1864, operated a mission in Hángzhōu affiliated with the Church Missionary Society. The spellings used in this book, which presents a syllabary of the Hángzhōu dialect, presumably reflect the system used in two textbooks on the dialect and a prayer book in colloquial Hángzhōu all written by Bishop Moule. The same spelling system was also used in a Hángzhōu vernacular translation of Matthew from the New Testament which was published sometime in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.

Galland's translation of the Arabian Nights in the eighteenth century brought to the wider European readership an awareness of the wealth of written folk literature of medieval provenance in the Near and Middle East. During the Romantic movement, popular translations or rewritings from Arabic, Turkish and Persian medieval folk literatures proliferated (see Appendix 1 below, Chauvin, no. 6; Marzolph, no. 10).

Like many other rhythmic terms, ‘free rhythm’ is widely enough used to be recognized as part of the vocabulary of musicology, without ever having been convincingly studied or even denned. In general, this term and its various synonyms refer to music without metrical organization. ‘Free rhythm’ is an important musical phenomenon which has been largely neglected by the field of ethnomusicology. This paper discusses the deeper theoretical and methodological problems underlying this neglect.

The language described in this chapter is spoken by at least three million people who call themselves Qafar, though earlier European writers and travelers usually referred to them as Danakil. The Qafar inhabit that vast tract of land which stretches from the Red Sea coast south and west as far as the scarplands of the Ethiopian Plateau, an area generally referred to as the Danakil Depression. With the exception of narrow belts of luxuriant jungle along the banks of rivers, such as the Awash and the Mille, which descend into the Depression, the country is largely desert; though even quite short spells of rain can bring grass and other transient plant life back into some parts. Although Qafar living in large coastal towns such as Djibouti and Assab and those on the Red Sea coast who live by fishing have clearly abandoned past oralism as a way of life, the majority of Qafar remain pastoralists, and pastoralism is strongly reflected in the lexicon of their language.