In an article published in UF, 16, 1984, entitled ‘The ritual KTU 1.46 (= RS 1.9) and its duplicates’, M. Dijkstra proposed that to the large fragment of the ritual tablet RS 1.009 should be joined four fragments. None of these is supposed to be a physical join, neither with RS 1.009 nor with any other of the smaller fragments, but all five fragments are said to have originally been part of the same tablet. To Dijkstra's transliteration (pp. 71–2) is added a sixth fragment, RS 1.009A, about the ascription of which to RS 1.009 Dijkstra is not sure (see p. 70). The reconstruction, with assumed proper placement of each of the five primary fragments was illustrated in a collage made up of Dijkstra's own copies of the small fragments and Virolleaud's copy of the primary fragment (p. 76). My intention here is to discuss the validity of the hypothetical reconstruction. The texts given below, based on new collations, are presented here for the first time. Philological aspects of the interpretation of the texts will not be dealt with here; for such matters see my forthcoming edition of the Ugaritic ritual texts.

The treatise published here (with an annotated translation), from the codex Arabe 1450 of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (folios 176b–179a), gives a concise account of some fundamental doctrines of early Nuṣayrī theology. The literary framework of this text is a report of a few sessions held before the Nuṣayrī sage Abū Muḥammad ‘Alī ibn ‘Īsā al-Jisrī. In the treatise the date of these sessions is given as Ramaḍān 340 a.h./February 952 C.E., and the treatise itself is likely to have been written down not long thereafter.

Ibn Khaldūn runs the risk of being everything or nothing—or, at least, no more than this or that. It has long been customary to separate the Muqaddima or so-called Prolegomena from the body of the Kitāb al-'Ibar or so-called Universal History, and to treat them quite differently as an essay in the philosophy of history distinct from a much more commonplace amalgam of historical information of varying value. Regarded as no more than a vast compilation of historical knowledge in the manner of the time, this great bulk of the work has received much less attention than the much more famous introduction. By concentrating on Ibn Khaldūn's later career in Egypt, Fischel dwelt on the chapters dealing with the Mamlūks and the Mongols, and with Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Judaism. Treating him as an historian of the Marinids in Morocco, Shatzmiller has located the ‘Ibar as a whole in the dynastic tradition of Fes.4 The Marinids were a self-consciously Berber dynasty whose official histories fall into the well-established category of Mafākhir al-Barbar or ‘Boasts of the Berbers’, and it might be said that Ibn Khaldūn's classification of his material according to race merely reflected the origin of his magnum opus in a familiar literary tradition, from whose constraints he was only freed by the collapse of the political order in the Maghrib in the second half of the fourteenth century.

The purpose of this paper is to explain how changes in the social structure of the countries of the Arabic-speaking Middle East are being reflected in new patterns of dialect use. The last 30 years have seen an enormously increased interest in Arabic as a living mode of everyday communication, reflected in many dialectological, typological and sociolinguistic studies. As a result, we now have a much clearer overall picture of the dialect geography of the eastern Arab world, and the beginnings of an understanding of the dynamics of language change. Inevitably, the focus of many studies has been geographically specific, so that the area-wide nexus between social change and linguistic change has not always been seen in a sufficiently broad context. By examining three case studies documented in the literature, I aim to point up similarities in the dynamics of change which are often obscured by distracting local particularities.

The purpose of the present article, as of its predecessor, is to make known a group of fragments surviving only in the form of transcriptions in the Nachlass of Olaf Hansen. Neither the original manuscript nor photographs seem to be extant. Olaf Hansen's handwritten transcripts, which I had the opportunity to study in Kiel in 1985, are published here by kind permission of his son Lars Hansen.

In recent studies of the Tibetan epic, much effort has been spent on analysing the origins and types of material that make up the epic literature, but no study presents an overall view of Ling (Gling) society. In the paper I gave at the second Symposium on the Epic of King Gesar at Lhasa in 1991, I therefore discussed the theoretical basis upon which the whole of Tibetan epic literature is built. I demonstrated that the Tibetan epic reveals a basic principle as well as a ‘chronological order’ in its development. Without this theoretical basis, Tibetan epic literature appears as a tangled web of material which is moreover still growing in complexity.

If Clifford Geertz's definition of religion as a culturally determined system of symbols is valid, then it can be argued that the religious ideology of pre-Confucian—Early (or Western) Zhou—China is centred around the symbols of power and communication. Heaven, sacrifice, and gift-decree are some of the categories of this religious system, the majority of them reducible to the themes of a sacred hierarchy and communicative relationship between its subjects. The crucial position in this context is occupied by the concept of .

In 1983 Monika Höhlig published a pamphlet (reprinted in 1990) setting out her ideas for producing a romanized script for (North-West Caucasian) Circassian. Since the bulk of the Circassian community lives not in the Caucasus but in Turkey (or elsewhere in the Near East), her basic tenet was that, where necessary, the roman characters should have the same values that obtain for the purpose of representing Turkish—so that, for example, the letter c would represent the voiced palato-alveolar affricate []. Two further principles which guided the creation of this script were: (a) that any attempt to provide one totally independent character for each phoneme of the language would lead to an unwieldy number of new letter-shapes, and (b) that no diacritic should be employed that is not available on a Turkish typewriter.

Thanks to its variety of meanings, the word mundus had already aroused the interest of classical authors. It is in fact widely attested throughout the history of the language both as an adjective and as a noun.

The adjective mundus, -a, -um means primarily ‘propre, d’ où soigné, coquet, élégant’ (DELL, 420), but is it also found used in the rural language when the act of cleaning is involved as is proved by the occurrence in this context of the derived verbs commundō, emundō, and by the expression mundus ager. The definition given to the adjective as mundus quoque appellatur lautus et purus (in Festus, cf. DELL, 420) accounts for this particular meaning because we find expressions describing earth ready for farming as humus subacta et pura ‘earth (which has been) worked and cleaned’. The relevance and wide distribution of this meaning of the adjective in the spoken language is made apparent by the occurrence in the Romance languages of numerous derivatives, such as Italian mondo ‘cleaned, purified’ and mondare ‘to husk, thresh, weed’, or French monder ‘to clean by separating something impure’ and émonder ‘to remove dead branches, to lop a tree’.