The MS of this poem came to me among the same collection of miscellaneous Hausa and Arabic MSS kindly loaned to me by Alhaji Nasiru, which contained B of the Song of Bagauda. As in the case of this latter, all that could be told me was that the manuscript had come from a malam in Kano City. The poem was attributed to 'Abdullh b. Muḥammad by several local savants learned in astrology whom I consulted. The initial invocation al-'abd al-faqr il raḥmat rabbihi is of course characteristic of 'Abdullh, and Bivar has pointed to the significance of these invocations.

A good deal of effort and ingenuity has been devoted to the problem of establishing the historical identity of Palṭiel, an enigmatic figure in the eleventhcentury chronicle of Ahima'as. In this work, the author relates what purports to be the history of his family over the previous two centuries and gives pride of place to one Palṭiel ben Shefaṭyah, an astrologer who rose to high office under the Fṭimid Caliph al-Mu'izz in Tunisia and Egypt. The family, according to Ahima'aṣ, had lived in Oria, in southern Italy, for generations. Then came the Fṭimid raids on the Italian mainland. With al-Mu'izz as their commander, 'they devastated the entire province of Calabria, and reached Oria, on the borders of Apulia; they besieged it, defeated all its forces; so that the city was