The normal method of settling questions of inheritance in Babylonia was not by testament but according to a division among the male heirs. In legal terms, then, inheritance was normally ab intestato in Babylonia. The regulation of the size of the portions of the various heirs in a family varied according to local custom and regulation. Testaments are known sporadically from Old Assyrian and Middle Assyrian sources but are not found among the documents from Babylonian proper. In place of testaments we find posthumous regulations of inheritance among the heirs and parental regulation of inheritance by means of gift, i.e. donatio mortis causa. Such documents are infrequent, and we must assume, not only that normal inheritance was ab intestato, but also that frequently, and perhaps as a general rule, the parental estate was administered jointly by the heirs.

For the hisory of religions the rise of Marduk, city god of Babylon, is one of the most striking phenomena known from ancient Mesopotamia. From being an utterly insignificant god in third-millennium Sumer, he had risen to be head of the Babylonian pantheon by the first millennium. The Münster thesis of Walter Sommerfeld, written under W. von Soden, is the first book-length treatment of this topic. As the subtitle indicates, it is largely restricted to the second millennium, the significant period because the rise took place within it. In fact third millennium evidence is dealt with briefly, but the first millennium is omitted. This is unfortunate because most of the religious literature dealing with Marduk is known from first-millennium copies only, though much of it was presumably composed during the second. In view of this uncertainty most of the religious texts about Marduk cannot be used within precise chronological frameworks.

Compared with the heyday under the Fāṭimids, the position of the non-Muslims, or dhimmīs, in the late Mamlūk period was bleak. Victims of the general demographic and economic decline, objects of considerable hostility on the part of Muslim theologians, and targets of frequent persecution, the Jews and Christians of Egypt found life more difficult and more oppressive in the fifteenth than in the eleventh or twelfth century. For the Jews, hard times were reflected both in tensions with the surrounding Muslim society and in the depressed condition of community life.

One of the less prominent episodes associated with the conquest of Mecca in the year 8 is an encounter between the Arabian Prophet and a Persian cheese. A tradition quoted by Bayhaqī (d. 458) from Abū Dāwūd al-Ṭayālisī (d. 203) tells the story as follows: ‘When the Apostle of God conquered Mecca, he saw a cheese. He asked what it was; they told him that it was a foodstuff made in Persia (arḍ al-'Ajam). The Apostle of God responded: “Take a knife to it, invoke the name of God, and eat”.’ Similar encounters take place in Ṭā'if in the same year, in Tabūk in the following year, and at places and times unknown.

The study of Muslim rule and its vestiges in medieval Sicily has a long and distinguished pedigree. In the nineteenth century the impetus was both scholarly and political, to which the monumental works of Amari and De Mas Latrie bear eloquent witness. In more recent times the motive has been simple and straightforward curiosity about a remarkable instance of cultural symbiosis. The parameters are now either linguistic or historical or both, and the gain is substantial. With the reprint exactly a century after its original publication in Palermo of Salvatore Cusa's I Diplomi greci ed Arabi di Sicilia one might be permitted to suppose that a reassessment of the earlier scholarship is underway. But the commemoration is itself curiously unhelpful: we are offered a typographically reduced replica of the original innocent of comment save for two pages of very general observations by Albrecht Noth on the significance of Cusa's compilation for students of Islamic history. Neither reference to subsequent work nor indication of a present project is included, a circumstance that only with generosity could be regarded as tantalizing.

Works of fiqh often have chapters or sections concerned with various questions related to the topic of entering the Ka'ba, usually signalled by headings such as Fī dukhūl al-Ka'ba or Al-ṣalāt fī (jawfi) 'l-Ka'ba. In them a number of ḥadīths are referred to, many of which are to be found in the classical collections and some of which occur as well in ‘historical’ literature such as sīra and ta'rīkh. This paper discusses the way in which this material is presented and developed, both in fiqh and in ḥadīth and ‘historical’ literature, what sort of questions it is concerned with, and what reasons there may be for its existence. This last question is taken up at the end of the paper but here it may be said that I think that the fiqh and ḥadīth material is relevant to an understanding of the development of the Muslim sanctuary and that it illustrates a tension, which is also observable in other traditional material, between two concepts of the sanctuary: is it ‘open’, comparable to a temple or church, or is it ‘closed’, like an ark or sacred stone? Both concepts exist within Muslim tradition, and it seems to me likely that the material discussed in the following two sections has been generated, originally, by the tension between them.

La loi musulmane n'admet, en principe, que des baux à courte durée pour les awqāf. Toutefois, les juristes dans les différentes parties du monde musulman admettaient, dans certaines circonstances, des baux divers à long terme équivalant à une quasi-aliénation. Quelques-uns de ces contrats, par exemple le ḥikr égyptien, l'inzāl tunisien, les djalsa et djazā' marocains, ont été traité d'une manière approfondie. Le contrat d'‘anā’ — le bail à long terme le plus répandu à Alger à l'époque turque — n'a cependant pas suscité une attention analogue de la part des chercheurs, à cause, peut-être, du manque d'intérêt dans un contrat, qui ne signifiait plus grand chose sous l'égide de la législation française, laquelle supprima le caractère inaliénable des awqāf.

While interest in early exegetical works concerned with the Qur'ān has certainly increased in the last few decades, no clear consensus seems to have emerged concerning how to establish the genesis of a supposedly early text. The basic problem to be faced is whether the texts we have today are compilations extracted from later works and then put in the name of a single, early authority or whether they are genuinely transmitted works from early teachers and writers, albeit with the definite possibility of some reformulation and intrusion from a later date by editors and copyists. The question to be discussed is one of both the date and method of composition.

The term ‘Object Marker’ is used to refer to analytic particles or prepositions which signal the direct object status of a nominal. These are attested in a variety of forms in Semitic languages. For instance: 'eṯ, which is used in Hebrew and in the language of the Moabite stone, 'yt, which is attested in Phoenician and also in early Aramaic (e.g. Zakir inscription 5; Sefire I B/32, III/11, III/13; Aššur Ostracon 6). wt, which is found with a 3rd person pronominal suffix in the Old Aramaic Hadad inscription 28. yt, frequently employed in the Aramaic Targums (generally in slavish imitation of Hebrew 'eṯ) and also in other Western Aramaic dialects, e.g. Nabataean, Palmyrene, and Galilean Aramaic; in Christian Palestinian Aramaic it occurs regularly before pronominal suffixes but not before full nouns. It is only sporadically found in the Eastern Aramaic dialects, e.g. in early Syriac (about 12 times in the Peshitta, once in the ‘Hymn of the Soul’) and in Biblical Aramaic (once— Dn 3/12). l-, used in many dialects of Aramaic as an Object Marker, also occasionally in the Hebrew of the Priestly Source (e.g. Num. 32: 15) and quite frequently in Late Biblical Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew. Akkadian ana, sometimes employed as an Object Marker in the later periods of the language, viz. Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Late Babylonian, also sporadically in other periods, e.g. Middle Assyrian. In the South Semitic area may be listed Arabic 'iyyā and Gə'əz kiyya, both of which are used only with pronominal suffixes; Gə'əz lā-; the suffix particle -n in Amharic and Gafat, and the prefix particles n- in Tigrinya and nä- or yä- in Soddo.

The book under review here is to be compared with the volume published over ten years ago under the editorship of Michael Cook, Studies in the economic history of the Middle East (London, 1970). It covers essentially the same subject over the same period of time in the same fashion, by a series of papers contributed to a major international conference. It differs first of all in the length of time it has taken to produce the work, seven years from the original conference at Princeton in 1974, compared with three from the conference at S.O.A.S. in 1967 to the publication of the earlier collection. It is in fact much longer, with more space and time allowed to the contributors to rewrite their papers and annotate them, in great and often discursive detail. The editor is to be complimented on the very high standard of the production of the mammoth tome which results. The weight is heavily on the countryside and the agricultural economy; neither trade, nor industry, nor urban life make much of an appearance except as their adjuncts. Only historical demography (4 articles) stands in any way as a separate subject. More usual is the emphasis upon Egypt, which once again receives the greatest attention, in ten or eleven out of the total twenty-four contributions. Atypical as the Nile valley may seem, its source materials continue to influence the pattern of research in the much wider field of the book's title. Elsewhere it is something of a shock to find, in the papers of Morony on seventh-century Iraq, Talbi on ninth-century Ifrīqiya, Burns on fourteenth-century Valencia, and Rafeq on eighteenth-century Syria, the wealth of detail that comes from a legal literature, an archive or court records, and to realize how few and far between such studies are outside Egypt.

The land sale contracts of the late eleventh century published here are important for several reasons. First, they are the oldest known legal documents written in Turkish. Very many Uighur-Turkish civil documents were found in the more eastern parts of the Tarim basin, but none of those appear to be older than the thirteenth century. On the other hand, there are Central Asian legal documents in several non-Turkish languages from as early as the first centuries of our era. After the Turks had penetrated the area in alternately warlike and peaceful manner and become owners of land, they may have gone on using the local vernaculars for such purposes, as they adopted many other facets of local life. The present texts have a fairly rigid structure, but this should not be taken as an indication that they were preceded by a Turkish legal tradition: the Persian text of A.D. 1107 published by Minorsky (1942) shows a rather similar form, which may simply have been borrowed by the Turks. Formally, our documents differ from the non-Muslim deeds of land sale in Turkish, which appear to follow Chinese models; this also speaks against a common Turkish tradition. There is nothing surprising about this: the Turks were probably relatively new both to the area and the occupation.

The re-establishment of the 'Abbāsid caliphate in Cairo after its overthrow on the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in 656'1258 was, as is well known, accomplished by the Mamlūk sultan, al-Ẓāhir Baybars, who installed successively two refugee 'Abbāsids as caliphs in his capital. What is perhaps not always realized is that the two pretenders did not appear in turn and out of the blue at the beginning of Baybars's reign, and that the sultan's reasons for installing the first, al-Mustanṣir, were not identical with his reasons for installing the second, al-Ḥākim. In certain respects the official account by Baybars's court biographer, Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn 'Abd al-Ẓāhir, needs to be supplemented and corrected.

The purpose of the present article is to examine the available data on Bedouin dialects in Israel and to attempt to classify them with a view to placing them in the larger framework of Bedouin dialects in the region as a whole. Section I below presents a geographical-demographical review of Bedouin groups in Israel as background information to support the linguistic material. The linguistic discussion which follows is based mainly on material from the following sources: for the Negev dialects, Bergsträsser's Sprachatlas (1915), Bauer (1913), Blanc (1970), and Piamenta (1979); for the Rashāida dialect in the Judean Desert, Katz (1980); for North Israeli Bedouin dialects, Rosenhouse (1980, 1982); for Bedouin dialects outside Israel, in Jordan, Syria and Northern Najd, Cantineau (1936–7), Cleveland (1963), Palva (1976, 1980), Abboud (1964), and Ingham (1982).

‘Apocalyptic’, it has been pointed out, ‘is only another word for “revelation”, and apocalyptist for “revealer”. Essentially, therefore, prophecy and apocalyptic [are] identical.’ Prophecy in its turn has been defined as ‘the declaration of knowledge which cannot be apprehended through the ordinary faculties, but is acquired either by revelation from a deity or by some other mantic power inherent in te seer himself’. Through the accidents of history a distinction came to be drawn by students of Jewish sacred literature between ancient prophecy and later apocalyptic, the latter flourishing in the intertestamental period; and in the Jewish tradition it is apocalyptic which, it has been said, ‘was the first to grasp the great idea that all history, alike human, cosmological and spiritual, is unity. … Apocalyptic sketched in outline the history of the world and of mankind, the origin of evil, its course, and inevitable overthrow, and the final consummation of all things’.

The Ālu Kuṟumbas are a tribe of shifting cultivators, food-gatherers and (casual) hunters. Numbering about a thousand souls they inhabit the steep slopes and glens of the south-western, southern, south-eastern, and eastern ranges of the Nilgiri Hills of South India. They speak a tribal language of its own which holds a kind of mid-position between the Tamil-Malayalam and the Kannada group of the South Dravidian family of languages.

In the following, I will analyse a lost text from the Shang shu the ‘Ancient documents ’. The story recorded in this text that of an ominous portent—seven years of drought which occurred at the beginning of the Shang Dynasty, of a divination in which human sacrifice was demanded of the Shang founder Tang, and of the ritual in which he offered himself as a sacrifice to the Lord on High. I will argue that this text provides a conceptual link between the role of the king in Shang times as a medium between the spirits above and the earth below and the Zhou theory of the king as the recipient of a changing mandate of Heaven.

One major problem which comes to the fore in comparing Omotic languages is the wide diversity seen in the inflectional morphology of the verb. To the linguist coming from Ethiopian Semitic or East Cushitic the variety encountered from language to language in Omotic is bewildering. The problem may be illustrated by comparing paradigms of three languages of the Ometo cluster—a group which on the basis of lexicostatistic calculations is considered to be fairly close-knit. Two of the languages, Zayse and Koyra, have been classified (together with Haruro, Ganjule, Harro and Zargula) as East Ometo, a label which is intended to convey a genetic as well as a geographical affiliation. The third language is Gofa, which, as a member of the dialect cluster which includes Wolaitta, Kullo, Konta, Gemu, Zala, Malo, Oyda, etc., is classified as Central Ometo. The paradigms compared are: (i) the perfect (or past) declarative, (ii) the perfect (or past) interrogative, (iii) the imperfect (or present) declarative, (iv) the imperfect (or present) interrogative. The verb employed in the illustration is wod'-‘kill’.

Althouth the Ādi Granth (AG) is rightly renowned for the number and the variety of its contributors, the great bulk of its contents is in fact formed by the compositions of Gurū Nānak (d. 1539), and those of his successors Gurū Amar Dās (d. 1574), Gurū Rām Dās (d. 1581), and Gurū Arjan (d. 1606).

Judged in the context of the 18 Purāṇas, or even the 180 Upa-, or Subsidiary Purāṇas, the title, Pāṇḍava-Purāṇa, must seem unusual, since the Pāṇḍavas are neither gods nor avatāras, nor sages; for it is the exploits of these divine or semi-divine figures that form the subject matter of the traditional Purāṇas. The Jainas' choice of this title would therefore appear to be a deliberate effort to present a Jaina version of the Mahābhārata story, a version which would show how the virtuous Pāṇḍavas and the rather harmless Balarāma are reborn in heaven, whereas Kṛṣṇa, the ‘nārāyana’, and Jarāsandha, the ‘pratinārāyaṇa’, are consigned to hell.