The purpose of this paper is to draw the attention of scholars to the existence of a hitherto unknown Arabic poem concerned with the subject of Joseph and his brethren, which was discovered in 1972 in an uncatalogued manuscript in the possession of the Department of Semitic Studies of the University of Leeds.

Although numerous Akkadian words and phrases referring to the anatomy of the human body have been discussed previously, many gaps still remain in our knowledge of this subject. A few of these still unidentified Akkadian words are discussed in this article, and tentative interpretations are supplied for them.

The second season of excavations at Shahr-i Qūmis began in August, and continued until early October, 1971. Work was resumed at mounds IV and VII, cleared in part in 1967, and new excavations were begun at two further sites, V and XIII. The directors are again most grateful for the close co-operation extended to the project by H.E. Mr. Mehrdad Pahlbod, Minister of Culture; by Mr. A. Pourmand, Director General of the Iranian Archaeological Service; and by Dr. T. Naimi, Director of the Service. Mr. B. Babek represented the Service on the excavations. In addition to the directors, those who participated in the excavations were Dr. A. D. H. Bivar, Miss E. Alexander, Mr. R. Biscione, Miss C. Marten, Mr. G. Payne, Mr. M. Roaf, Mrs. M. Sturz, and Mr. and Mrs. S. Swiny. Major support for the project was given by the National Geographic Society and the Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum.

The first season of excavations at the medieval Islamic site of Ghubayrā in Kirmān Province took place between late March and the end of May 1971. The excavations were made possible by the kind permission of the Ministry of Art and Culture, and the Iranian Archaeological and Folkloric Services. The excavators record their sincere gratitude to H.E. Mr. Mehrdad Pahlbod, Minister of Art and Culture, and to Mr. A. Pourmand, Director-General of the Iranian Archaeological and Folkloric Services; to Mr. Khurramābādī and Dr. Na‘īmī of that service; and to Mr. Enayatullah Emirloo, who came to Ghubayrā as our Representative. We render thanks too to the local office of the Department of Ferhang va Honar at Kirmān, and especially to its Director, Mr. Mehdi Zamānī. To Mr. Muḥammad Sādeq Dānesh, District Commissioner of Bardsīr, our special acknowledgements are due for his constant thoughtfulness, and his readiness to give assistance in all moments of need.

The Ṛg-Vedic hymn X. 95, describing the story of Purūravas and Urvaśī is of considerable interest and obscurity. It has attracted the attention of priests and scholars alike from the days of the Brāhmaṇas, with the result that different versions of the story have come down to us with unrestricted freedom. Geldner has recorded eight sources of the story: (i) the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa; (ii) the Kaṭhakam; (iii) Ṣaḍguru-śiṣya's commentary on the Sarvānukramaṇī; (iv) the Harivaṃśa Purāṇa; (v) the Viṣṇu Purāṇa; (vi) the Bṛhaddevatā; (vii) the Kathāsaritsāgara; and (viii) the Mahābhārata. To the above a few more works, such as the Vāyu Purāṇa, the Mātsya Purāṇa, and the Rāmāyaṇa may be added to make the list more comprehensive. However, Kālidāsa made the story more popular through one of his finest plays, Vikramorvaśīyaṃ.

A. K. Majumdar says: “It is not possible to establish on historical evidence any link between the Āḻvārs and Caitanya. … It is, however, quite possible that his parama-guru (preceptor's preceptor) Mādhavêndra Purī was influenced by the Āḻvārs.” Other authors have put forward similar suggestions, but are equally unable to substantiate their assumptions. A. Gail states categorically: “Bhakti in the form of emotional-suggestively created identification with figures from the Kṛṣṇa legend was systematically developed in the rasa theory of Bengal Vaiṣṇavism, after preparation by the Āḻvārs.” But he has to concede that no proof for this statement is available: “Nothing seems to be known of any connexion between Bengal Vaiṣṇavas and Āḻvārs.” S. Das Gupta had earlier drawn certain parallels between Caitanya's school and the Āḻvārs.

Professor A. B. Woodside's recent study of Vietnamese government and society in the first half of the nineteenth century is likely to become immediately a standard work for the teaching of South-East Asian history, as well as a point of departure for further research. It is the first attempt by a Western scholar to analyse the institutional developments of a period in which Viêt-Nam attained its greatest measure of “Confucianization” and also its greatest territorial extent as a unified country. The “Đại-Nam” of the later years of Minh-Mang (1820–41) included not only the whole of present-day Viêt-Nam, united for the first time in 1802, but also (after 1836) a large part of Cambodia as well as a portion of eastern Laos. The institutional changes of his reign included the reinvigoration of the examination system, the creation of new organs of central government, and a thorough overhaul of the machinery of provincial administration. In terms of its own previous history, it was by no means a weak or declining Viêt-Nam which found itself face to face with European power in the 1850's and 1860's. By offering a study of government and society in this period, Professor Woodside has gone some of the way towards filling a major gap in Western-language literature on Vietnamese history.

In 1970 I was privileged to hear in the rooms of the Linnaean Society the Burkill Memorial Lecture delivered by J. R. Marr. His discursive but interesting paper “An examination of some plant-names and identities in India” has now appeared in JRAS, 1972, 40–56. On the last page of that paper the Sanskrit word mālākanda is discussed, and its properties are described in a Sanskrit verse quoted from a “Malayāḷam ‘herbal’”, which apparently was published in Trivandrum in 1950. Marr provides a translation of the verse. I was, on reading it, immediately struck by the odd property attributed to mālākanda of “destroying perfumed garlands”, not at all the sort of property one normally finds in Indian medical sources.

During the course of my anthropological fieldwork among the Lahu people in the hills of north Thailand, I devoted much time to the recording and translation of ritual prayers and chants. Analysis of these texts was of fundamental importance in my studies of Lahu religious ideas, for often the ritual word made clear what remained nebulous in the ritual act or in everyday language. But apart from their usefulness in explanation, the ritual texts are intrinsically valuable as a contemporary expression of the cultural heritage of this preliterate mountain folk. It is for this reason that I record here, both in translation and in the original language, the texts of marriage prayers given to me by three elders of my study village. A brief description of the ceremony suggests the setting for these recitations. The Lahu text is given for language scholars and for future generations of Lahu, who for the most part are still unable to record their own cultural heritage. I hope my translations will give some idea of the beauty of Lahu oral poetry.