During all periods of Islamic history, subjects with a grievance were free to address petitions to the ruler, one of whose traditional functions was to remedy injustice personally (al-naẓar fi'l-maẓālim). From Egypt we have a series of extant petitions from the Middle Ages. The practice of the Fāṭimids has been described in the detailed commentary accompanying my edition of three petitions from the time of that dynasty; the information which can be derived from the documents is there completed by accounts in literary sources. Here I publish all those petitions from the Ayyūbid period which are known to me. In another study I hope to perform the task carried out for the Fāṭimid period for the Mamlūk period also, comparing the detailed statements of the historians with the extant documents. For the Ayyūbid period there are no detailed descriptions of the procedure followed in submitting petitions, and the little which is known will be set out in the course of our discussion.

One of the interesting features of the Pahlavi Bundahišn, the great work on cosmogony and cosmology completed in the ninth century A.D., is the manner in which traditional, orthodox beliefs derived from the Zoroastrian scriptures appear side by side with later and even contemporary scientific opinions. While in some parts, notably the astronomical chapter II, the resulting incongruity is undisguised, in others there has been a conscious effort of syncretism. The astrological sections are a case in point.

How deeply questions of irrigation affect the daily life of the peoples of southern Arabia was first impressed upon me when the summer floods came down to am-Fajarah in Ṣubaiḥī country lying west of Aden, where I happened to be stationed at the time. The villagers turned out to argue, with some violence, over the distribution of the flood-waters. It was, however, as Shaikh Durain, a Lahej official with us in the village, pointed out, without weapons that the villagers had come to the fray, and though the women stood behind, disputing the issue no less fiercely than.the men, egging them on, so that all would doubtless have come to blows, men and women alike, there would have been no stabbings or shootings. Shaikh Durain cynically implied that there was more of sound than fury in the rencontre, but of course this is not always so, and disputes arising over rights to the use of water can lead to blood-feuds. Since those days I have made some investigation into irrigation and its wealth of technical vocabulary in various parts of the Aden Protectorate, studying some systems in more or less detail, especially those near Mūdiyah village in Dathīnah.

The body of rules translated below was first discovered by a Park Ranger employed to restore the erstwhile gold-mining town of Barkerville, British Columbia, as an historical monument. Searching for authentic artefacts in an abandoned ‘Chinese Frėemason’ hall in the neighbouring town of Quesnel Forks, he came upon some tattered ceremonial robes, a Chinese book of codes and signs, and a board approximately 10 feet in length inscribed with Chinese characters. These (with some other items) were stored by the ranger at Barkerville, in a box marked ‘unidentified materials’, which was found by the authors in the summer of 1961, while carrying out field research on Chinese social organization in the Cariboo region of British Columbia. Mr. Ho identified the calligraphy on the board as a set of rules of the Chih-kung T'ang.

The ‘Song of Bagauda’ (WB) is apparently known to Joseph Greenberg, for he quotes two hemistichs from it in his article on Hausa prosody. He refers to the work briefly, among a list of unpublished Hausa poems as a ‘qaṣīda History of Kano’, but gives no further details of subject-matter or provenance.

The existence at Shīmbār in the Zagros Mountains of ancient sculptures and inscriptions was first reported by A. H. (later Sir Henry) Layard, in his classic study, ‘A description of the province of Khuzistan’. The research of succeeding years has made surprisingly few additions to this account of the archaeological sites of the province, which though nowadays less well known than some of Layard's other archaeological work, is none the less remarkably careful and complete. In a travel narrative published many years later, his Early adventures in Persia, Susiana and Babylonia, Layard gives another short account of his journey to Shīmbār, which helps to fill in the details of his visit. Shīmbār is an enclosed valley with high mountain walls, situated about 35 miles north-east of the oilfields centre of Masjid-i Sulaimān, in the province of Khuzistan. The name is said by the Bakhtiāri to be the equivalent in their Luri dialect of the Persian Shῑrῑn Bahār ‘Sweet Spring’. The valley is celebrated amongst the tribes as a resting-place on their spring migration to the upland pastures. Its regular inhabitants are mostly members of the Mauri clan.

This article presents the results of further work on the Dōsiri dialect of Arabic, a preliminary study of which appeared in this Bulletin some time ago.

Since this first article appeared, I have been able to examine more closely the extent of 'Ajmi influence on the phonology of the dialect spoken by my Dōsiri informants, and to place their dialect more accurately within the group to which it belongs. It now seems certain that, although this Dōsiri dialect does not share all the distinguishing features of the Nejdi group, the parent dialect does belong to the south-central type of Nejdi dialect. As a result of the placing of the dialect of the Duwāsir a little more exactly, and of the comparative studies this has involved, a more precise formulation of some important phonological and syntactical features can now be made.

The name of Aḥmad Bābā first became known to European scholarship through the articles of the French scholar M. A. Cherbonneau in the years 1854 and 1855. In 1857, when Heinrich Barth published his Travels and discoveries, Aḥmad Bābā achieved a spurious fame which lasted for over 40 years as the supposed author of the Ta'rīkh al-Sūdān. It was not until 1897 that the learned German's attribution was scornfully refuted by the French journalist Felix Dubois, in his Tombouctou la mystérieuse, and the work was correctly assigned to al-Sa'dī the Timbuctoo scholar who died in 1656. During the twentieth century the name of Aḥmad Bābā has frequently been mentioned by writers about the medieval Western Sudan, usually as the symbol of all that was finest in sub-Saharan Islamic learning in the Middle Ages.

The names of the principal officers of the early Ṣafawid ṣtate are well known and need only a brief recapitulation here. They were: (1) the wakīl; (2) the amīr al-umarā; (3) the qūrchībāshī; (4) the wazīr; (5) the ṣadr. Of these, the wakīl was the vicegerent of the Shāh, representing him in both his temporal capacity as pādishāh and in his spiritual capacity as murshid-i kāmil. He was thus the most powerful official in the early Ṣafawid state. The amīr al-umarā was, as his name denotes, the principal amīr; he was the commander-in-chief of the qizilbāsh Turkomān tribesmen who constituted the military basis of Ṣafawid political power. The function of the qūrchībāshī during the early Ṣafawid period is extremely obscure. As commander of the qūrchīs or qizilbāsh; tribal cavalry his authority would appear to have been in conflict with that of the amīr al-umarā. The office of qūrchībāshī was from the beginning distinct from that of amīr al-umarā, and during at least the first 30 years of Ṣafawid rule it was of less importance than the latter. From about 940/1533–4 onwards, however, there was a decline in the power of the amīr al-umarā, and a corresponding increase in that of the qurchībāshī, and under Isma'īl II and Muḥammad Khudābanda the qūrchībāshī became the most influential officer in the state. The wazīr was the head of the bureaucracy, and was traditionally the principal officer of state. Up to the time of 'Abbās I, however, his authority was restricted by the overriding authority of the wakīl, by the intervention of the amīr al-umarā in political affairs, by the existence of the ṣadr, who deprived him of the possibility of exercising general supervision over the religious institution, and by the predominantly military character of the early Ṣafawid state in general, which placed the ‘men of the pen’ at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the ‘men of the sword’. The ṣadr was the head of the religious institution, but since in practice the religious institution was subordinated to the political institution, the authority of the ṣadr was necessarily subordinated to that of the wakīl. The main function of the ṣadr was the imposition of doctrinal unity, namely Shi'ism, throughout the Ṣafawid empire. Once this object had been achieved, the power of the ṣadr declined, although from time to time the ṣadr made attempts (largely unsuccessful) to intervene in political matters.

The maqāma genre has had a place in Arabic literature for nearly a thousand years. With the maqāmāt of Badī' al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī (357–98/969–1007), it appears as a fully developed, independent literary form, although precursors of it have been traced back beyond al-Hamadhānī to the argot and cant of thieves and beggars as displayed, for instance, in the Kitāb al-bukhalā’ of al-Jāḥiẓ and the qaṣīda al-sāsāniyya of Abū Dulaf Mis'ar b. Muhalhil, and possibly back to the model of a lost Kitdb al-arba'īn of the philologist and lexicographer Ibn Duraid. The history of the maqāma in its classical form closes only with the productions in the last century of such writers as the Baghdādī scholar Shihāb al-Dīn Maḥmūd al-Alūsī (1217–70/1802–54) and the Lebanese Christian Nāṣīf al-Yāzijī (1800–71). It is true that in the early decades of our own century, such Egyptian writers as Muḥammad Ibrāhīm al-Muwailḥī and the poet Muḥammad Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm used a very free adaptation of the maqāma form for the entirely novel purpose of social criticism; but with the disappearance to-day of the florid and artificial style of Arabic writing, it is unlikely that anyone will ever resuscitate the classical maqāma and we may safely conclude that it has died out.

Among Sinhalese verbal forms, those which may be called nominal or participial verb-forms have received little attention hitherto from grammarians, either in Europe or in Ceylon. They present problems both of form and of usage.

The basic forms considered here are of the following types in early Sinhalese prose:

The existing grammars of Sinhalese give no adequate account of the difference between the pair balanu—balana in col. 1, nor of the syntactical contexts in which these forms occur.

The field-work for the present article was begun in Kuwait in December 1958 and continued for a longer period in the spring of the following year. Besides making measurements on a fairly large būm, the Muhallab, lying in Kuwait harbour, we had many interviews with sailors and shipbuilders, all of the older generation of Kuwaitis.

The following paper does not set out to be a comprehensive comparison of tonal systems—it is rather an account of my own experiences with various methods, with special reference to tone-marking in dictionaries and vocabularies. For this reason a certain amount of biographical detail is inevitable.

The Anglo-Saddozai government in Afghanistan was overthrown by a series of risings in 1841–2. The first of these risings was that of the eastern Ghilzai tribes, who broke the line of communīcatīons between Kabul and Jalālābād at the end of September and the beginning of October 1841. On 1 November disturbances began in Kabul and these were followed by risings in the Kohistān, in the area of Ghaznī, and, sometime later, at Qandahar. In January 1842 the Kabul garrison withdrew, under treaty, but was entirely destroyed. In March 1842 the garrison at Ghazni surrendered and was destroyed. The garrisons at Jalālābād and Qandahar held out and were reinforced from Peshawar and Quetta respectively. In August and September they advanced and reoccupied Kabul, but soon afterwards the British withdrew altogether from Afghanistan. Between January and August 1842 there was a struggle for power among the various groups in eastern Afghanistan, which ended in the victory of Muḥammad Akbar, son of Dost Muḥammad. Although Akbar and his supporters were forced to fly at the time of the reconquest they were soon able to return, resume power, and prepare for the restoration of Dost Muhammad in May 1843.

In the sixth Article of Impeachment brought against him by the House of Commons, Warren Hastings was accused of disobeying the Regulating Act of 1773 and the orders of the Court of Directors of the East India Company by accepting presents from various Indians. These presents included a sum of three lakhs of sicca rupees, or £37,500, described as a loan from Maharaja Nabakrishna, or ‘Nobkissen’ as he was usually known to his European contemporaries. Both the prosecution and the defence agreed that Hastings had originally borrowed the three lakhs, subsequently keeping them and using them to repay money which he claimed was owed to him by the East India Company. The prosecution maintained that Hastings had ‘fraudulently’ extracted the loan and that he had ‘corruptly and illegally’ retained it as a present, inventing the pretext that the Company owed him money. Hastings replied that Nobkissen had converted the loan into a present of his own free will, and that he had accepted it on the Company's behalf and had used it to repay money genuinely spent on its service in the past. His version convinced a majority of those members of the House of Lords who took part in the verdict at the end of the trial, and he was acquitted by 20 votes to 5 on that particular section of the Presents Article. The episode did not, however, end with the Impeachment. Nobkissen filed a Bill against Hastings in the Court of Chancery for the return of his money, and, although he was unsuccessful, much new evidence was disclosed which would have had an important bearing on the Impeachment. The purpose of this article is to review Hastings's relations with Nobkissen in the light of this new material. It may still be possible to accept the peers' verdict that Hastings had acted neither ‘fraudulently’ nor ‘illegally and corruptly’, but before this verdict can be accepted, very much more will have to be taken into account than was discussed at the Impeachment.