In 1972 Fr Charles Coüasnon, O.P., gave the Schweich Lectures to the British Academy on this subject. As consultant architect to the restoration work he seemed well qualified to do so. But work continued until 1980, and it was not until 1982 that Fr Virgilio Corbo, O.F.M., published a definitive account of the work, Il Santo Sepolcro di Gerusalemme, in three handsome volumes. I did not succeed in obtaining a copy until 1984. Thus it was not surprising that Canon Ronald Brownrigg's Come, See the Place: the ideal companion for all travellers to the Holy Land, 1985, still treats Fr Couasnon as having had the last word, and prints plans some of which are erroneous. Only since then has an article in Le Monde de la Bible, Mars-Avril, Paris, 1984, no.33, in a number devoted entirely to the Holy Sepulchre, by Fr Florentino Dfez Fernandez, O.S.A.,3 reached me, describing in a summary form his excavations for the Greek Orthodox Community on the site of Golgotha, and for the Armenian Community behind the Crusader Chapel of St Helena. A definitive account of his work is eagerly awaited, for his work adds to our knowledge and corrects some previous misconceptions of the chronology of the site.

The two Yemens are still that part of the Middle East which most vividly retains the manners and customs of ancient Arabia. The majestic mountain ridges, the barrenness of the desert, the torrid shores of the Red Sea, the proud Yemeni tribesmen with their traditional janbīya, the picturesque palaces and houses pitched on towering peaks, the lone columns of the temples of Saba' (Sheba) in forgotten sands, all this cannot fail to convey the image of timelessness, and, indeed, of Arabia's yesterworld. It does seem to many that the highlands (the central mountain ridge stretching from about 50 miles north of Aden far into Saudi Arabia) are the most stubbornly traditional part of Yemen.

Students of the early history of Arabic grammar may note with surprise that, until now, studies dealing with the possibility of Greek influence on the emergence of that Islamic scholarly discipline have hardly ever made an issue of the fact that the Hellenistic grammatical tradition as well as the Greek philosophical legacy differ significantly from the Arabic grammatical tradition in their conception of the main parts of the sentence.

Hartwig Derenbourg in his Notes critiques sur les manuscrits arabes de la Bibliothèque Nationale de Madrid, (1904), described MS. no. DXCIII of the catalogue of these manuscripts compiled by F. Guillén Robles in the following terms:

Le seul ouvrage Chrétien en pur arabe (DXCIII), est un unicum de première importance, les Canons de l'Eglise chrétienne hispanique à la fin du VIIe siècle de notre ère, dans un exemplaire du milieu du XIe.

In his pioneering article “The Patterning of Root Morphemes in Semitic” (1950), J. H. Greenberg tabulated the frequency of every possible pair of Arabic consonants in each possible position (I–II, I–III, II–III) over a total of 3775 triliteral verbal roots, alternative statistics, for positions I–II only, were presented by J. Kurytowicz (1973), who, unlike Greenberg, excluded weak roots (i.e. those containing semivowels or geminated consonants) and admitted denominative verbs in the simple stem. Tabulations for Hebrew were prepared by K. Koskinen (1964), who included nominal roots, and excluded weak roots. The analyses by these three scholars have won deserved renown, but still more patterns can be detected in the rich data. Despite the differences of approach, the data are used here without modification, so that the results can be readily verified.

The year 1260 marks the beginning of a sixty year conflict between the Mongols of Persia and the Mamlūks of Egypt and Syria. Over this period several large-scale battles were fought in north and central Syria in the course of Mongol invasions of that country. In addition, throughout most of this period, a more or less continuous border war raged on both sides of the Euphrates River, in north Syria and south-west Anatolia. Twice the Mongols were successful in occupying most of Syria: in 658/1260 and 699/1299–1300. In both cases the Mongol conquest lasted for only a few months, but in each instance this was more than enough time to launch raids into what was then south-west Syria, also variously known as the Holy Land, Palestine and the Land of Israel. In the absence of any other central authority over the ma jority of this territory, it can be said that in a sense Palestine twice also enjoyed the “benefits,” again temporary, of Mongol occupation.

The last two letters of Emperor Tewodros II of Ethiopia, which were among the most important he ever wrote, have long been a subject of speculation. They were dictated at his mountain fortress of Mäqdäla (Magdala) on April 11 and 12 1868, and despatched to Sir Robert Napier, leader of a British expeditionary force, immediately prior to its capture of the citadel and the Emperor's dramatic suicide on April 13.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that large parts of Ibn Baṭṭūṭuta's description of his travels in Palestine were in fact copied, with certain abbreviations and deletions, from the records of another Muslim traveller, Muhammad b. Muḥammad al-‛Abdarī.

The collections of oriental material in the Library of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine have been described in a previous issue of this journal. They include, among the Semitic language material, a few Syriac manuscript fragments which comprise nine leaves from the Ecclesiastical History of Socrates and a XlXth century letter.

The Ecclesiastical History of Socrates commences with the accession of Constantine in 306, following the cessation of Diocletian's persecution of Christians, and traces the history of the church through the reigns of the seven following eastern emperors, the seventh and final book covering the years of Theodosius the Younger (408–450) between his accession and his 17th consulate (439).

Political as well as military experience in India, was the making of Arthur Wellesley. In 1797 he landed at Fort William, Calcutta, an unknown Colonel of twenty-seven, a rank achieved by aristocratic connection and by purchase. In March 1805 he sailed from Fort St George, Madras, a Major General and a KCB. The battle of Assaye in September 1803 with other military events of that year had laid the foundation of British paramountcy in India. The story of the Assaye campaign has been told many times; the attempt is here made to highlight some political interactions that flowed from a major delegation of authority to Arthur Wellesley by his brother Richard.

While I was conducting linguistic and ethnographic field research among the Pālu Kuṟumbas of the Nilgiri Hills, South India, in the spring of 1976, I managed – but not without some difficulty – to obtain a single mantra from one of my main informants. In general, the manduraga:ra-s or “black magicians”, the only persons in the tribe who know mantras and use them ritually, are extremely reluctant to reveal even a particle of their secret knowledge to outsiders. They fear that a magic formula or ritual loses its potency as soon as it is divulged to another person. Nevertheless, I pressed my informant Gïḍḍanu (born c. 1946), son of the headman of Toḍiki, who held the office of black magician, to communicate at least one mantra to me. It was only after long deliberation and hesitation that he finally consented to comply with my request.

In the Preface to the first edition of his essay On the Aborigines of India, B. H. Hodgson set out two main purposes of his research: to show when and why the pre-Aryan aboriginal population (“Tamulians”) were dispersed to their apparently scattered distribution; and to describe their “positive condition, moral and material” so as to show “the point of advancement which the aborigines have reached in thought and action”.

India, it is often pointed out both by Indians and by others, is the world's largest democracy, not simply in terms of the sheer number of people who participate in elections but also because of the continuous stream of open political activity. Democracy is not just a label that has been applied to the country at the whim of an individual or clique but is manifestly something that is alive and well. In the last decade alone, there have been two changes of government at the national level, and the government in New Delhi currently coexists, more or less willingly, with non-Congress ministries in several major states. There have indeed been voices to suggest that India in its present economic circumstances cannot afford the luxury of uncontrolled political activity. One of the arguments, for example, put forward for a presidential system has been that the level of “unproductive” political activity would be reduced. It could certainly be argued that the relatively sluggish rate of economic growth that has been maintained over the past four decades is linked to political constraints. That question, however, is not the theme of this article. For better or worse, India's democracy is here to stay, and one of the most important tasks for the historian or the political scientist, is to try to identify the factors that have given it its apparent staying power.

Tumshuqese is the name proposed by Emmerick, on the analogy of “Khotan: Khotanese”, for the language spoken in the region of Tumshuq, on the northern edge of the Tarim basin in the Xinjiang Uigur Autonomous Region of China. It is closely related to — though in many respects more archaic than — Khotanese, a Middle Iranian language (like Sogdian, Bactrian, Khwarezmian, Middle Persian and Parthian), the language of Khotan, a country and city on the southern border of the Tarim basin (see, e.g. Emmerick, 1979, 1–5).

This is a corrected version of the diagram published on page 21, volume 1, 1987 to illustrate Michael Weitzman's article, “Statistical patterns in Hebrew and Arabic roots”. It is very much regretted that the diagram as previously published was incomplete.

The appearance of a new translation of the Itinerarium of William of Rubruck (1253–55) furnishes an opportunity to review the work done on this, possibly the most valuable of Western sources on the Mongols. By comparison with the mission of his fellow-Franciscan John of Plano Carpini some eight years before, that of Rubruck to the court of the Great Khan Möngke has been singularly unfortunate. An account of the earlier mission (the so-called “Tartar Relation”) was being drawn up in Poland even before Carpini had rejoined Innocent IV at Lyons, and at least two other variant recensions are known to exist, over and above the numerous manuscripts of the standard version. Rubruck's report, on the other hand, couched in the form of a long letter to St. Louis, languished for three and a half centuries before it was rescued around 1600 by Hakluyt; and there are only five manuscripts.