bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
James Legge's metricalBook of Poetry
Authors: Pfister Lauren
Published: January 2010

Few non-Asian sinological scholars would not recognize the name of James Legge(A.D. 1815–97), partly because his voluminous translations of the Confucian canon still continue to be reprinted and used by Western sinological circles 120 years after their first publication. In China itself, Legge has recently received new attention with the republication of bilingual editions ofThe Four BooksandThe Book of Changes. Japanese readers have had rather more access to Legge's English translations ofThe Four Books, beginning with the early Meiji period and continuing into the twentieth century. Unfortunately, none of these Chinese or Japanese editions has included the extensive commentarial notes drawn from Chinese Confucian and early Western sinological sources which earned Legge his reputation as a world-class Chinese scholar in the nineteenth century.
Agriculture, Ṣūfism and the State in Tenth/Sixteenth-Century Morocco
Authors: Rodriguez-Manas Francisco
Published: January 2010

The tenth/sixteenth century was undoubtedly one of the most turbulent periods in the history of Morocco. Throughout the century the country was ravaged by civil strife, foreign occupation of some of its coastal regions and widespread social turmoil. Dynastic conflict between the two main contenders for the throne—the Wattasid vizierate and the Saՙdiyans—did not cease until the middle of the century. The prolonged warfare drained the economic resources of the country and crippled commercial activity. The crisis was especially acute in the countryside where the protracted political unrest disrupted agricultural activity. Sizable tracts of farmland were left uncultivated or were ruined by marauding gangs of brigands who plundered the peasants of their crops and cattle. As well as man-made damage, agricultural output was hit by a series of natural calamities (drought, plagues and scarce harvests), while intermittent outbreaks of epidemic decimated the population of certain districts. The results were catastrophic: famine became endemic in certain regions; previously fertile lands were abandoned and their soils became unsuitable for cultivation; trade in agricultural produce gradually ebbed; the price of foodstuffs rose to exorbitant levels and traders resorted to speculative practices, hoarding grain and other agricultural produce to inflate their value. The stagnation of agriculture led to a sharp demographic decline in the rural population and a substantial influx of migrant peasants into urban centres or rural areas less affected by scarcity. Entire rural communities were uprooted. Pauperism and mendicity proliferated in many regions as scores of impoverished peasants and herdsmen abandoned their indigenous lands and roamed the countryside in search of food.
The Brahmin and the Mongoose: The Narrative Context of a Well-Travelled Tale
Authors: Blackburn Stuart
Published: January 2010

Once upon a time, scholars believed that tracing the history and diffusion of folktales led to knowledge of a shared human culture. The enlightenment of the twentieth century, however, rooted out this superstition, with its evolutionary and devolutionary premises, and replaced it with a rigorous identification of tales, descriptions of their contents, and, more recently, analyses of the circumstances of their telling. The textual precision and ethnographic depth of these studies, not to mention the increasing number of folktale indexes, have taken us far beyond the naiveté of those nineteenth-century claims for a Buddhist or mytho-poetic origin to virtually all folk narrative. Deriving, for example, an English proverb (‘Don't count your chickens before they hatch’) from a Sanskrit story about a man whose dreams destroy him is almost as entertaining as it is untenable. One wonders, however, if, in reaction to such excesses, research did not retreat into a safer but more limited sphere by studying the stories of a single society. Without wishing to return to the hyperbole of those early folktale scholars, this essay acknowledges their comparative vision, bold hypotheses, and dedication to the international study of the folktale.
Notes on the Authenticity of the so Tan Manuscript of the LAO-TZU
Authors: Boltz William G.
Published: January 2010

Among the numerous extant manuscripts of the Lao-tzu, Tao te ching perhaps the best known, apart from the famous Ma wang tui manuscripts discovered in Hunan province in 1973 and the Hsiang erh chu manuscript from Tun Huang (important primarily for its commentary), is the long fragment known as the So Tan manuscript, currently in the private collection of Mr. John B. Elliott and through his generosity on extended loan to the University Art Museum at Princeton. The manuscript is said to have been a part of the Tun Huang finds of the turn of the century. It appears to be one of the few of those manuscripts that remained in China after its discovery rather than immediately finding its way to France, England, or some other Western country. It moved from private collector to private collector, from Peking to Hong Kong to Japan and back again, only becoming a part of the John B. Elliott collection relatively recently.
Indo-Portuguese Songs of Sri Lanka: the Nevill Manuscript
Authors: de Silva Jayasuriya Shihan
Published: January 2010

The Portuguese presence in Sri Lanka dates back to the early sixteenth century and lasted some hundred and fifty years. It gave rise to a Creole language based on Portuguese, Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole (SLPC), which Dalgado (1936) considered to be the most vigorous of the Portuguese Creoles.
Rediscovering the ‘Oriental’ in the Orient and Europe: new books on the East-West cultural interface: a review article
Authors: Braginsky Vladimir I.
Published: January 2010

The literature on the cultural interrelations of East and West published up to the present time is enormous. Even so, every new scholarly study in this field cannot but provoke interest, so important is the topic, particularly today in the era of so-called globalization. The books under review here, edited and introduced by Andrew Gerstle (SOAS) and Anthony Milner (ANU),1are based on papers presented at conferences held by the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University. The theme of the conferences—‘Europe and the Orient‘—attracted a great number of specialists in art history, musicology, anthropology and history, Asianists and Europeanists, from Europe, the United States and Australia. It is worth noting that the most of the papers are based on published works in which their authors have discussed the same or closely related topics. In presenting the principal ideas of those publications, these collections of papers form a ‘miniature library’ of works on East-West comparative cultural studies. The interdisciplinarity of the articles—their extraordinary ‘polyphony’, the diversity of their often mutually contradictory and polemical approaches, judgements and evaluations—reveals the complexity, multifacetedness and theoretical difficulties which are only too characteristic of the study of comparative culture. The reader is here provided with quite a complete picture of the contemporary state of the field, as well as of the strong and weak sides of its investigations. This breadth of coverage is one of the main strengths of the volumes.
Palatalization of Velars in the Nanking Dialect
Authors: Coblin W. South
Published: January 2010

Nankingese is today classed as a Jiānghuái Mandarin dialect. As recently reported (Liú, 1994), velar initials do not occur before high front vowels in this language except in the two vernacular words ki11 ‘give’ and k ′ i ‘go’. There is, however, a series of palatal initials, , which appear exclusively before high front vowels; and in certain instances these consonants correspond to the gutturals k-, k′-, and h- in more conservative dialect groups such as Cantonese, Hakka, and Min. This suggests that the Nanking palatals in these instances have developed from earlier velars through a process of palatalization. The present paper will attempt to trace and date this process.
Notes on Lugale
Authors: Geller M. J.
Published: January 2010

The method of editing Sumerian literary texts has been the subject of heated debate in recent years. It used to be that Sumerian text editions followed the practice of classical philologists, giving the text with an apparatus criticus of manuscript variants, but this method has an inherent flaw: the editor must either choose to use as his main text an ‘eclectic text’ combining the best readings of all the manuscripts, or select one manuscript as the best version. Moreover, although the apparatus may reveal manuscript variants, it often does not inform the reader of how much of any one line is preserved in any one text. Since Sumerian literary texts may show a considerable number of variants between duplicates, the Partitur format has been proposed and utilized, in which every line of every manuscript is given in full, although the system has been opposed on grounds of waste of space.
An eighth-century grammatical school in Medina: the collection and evaluation of the available material
Authors: Talmon Rafael
Published: January 2010

Modern scholarship dealing with the history of Arabic grammar has almost entirely neglected serious consideration of the possibility that during the very early period of the Iraqi grammatical schools, a Medinese centre of that science was a living fact. I believe that the data collected by some scholars, including myself, will now allow the conclusion that such a school really existed and probably disappeared during the first century of the 'Abbāsid regime. First, the few accounts of eighth-century Medinese grammarians in modern works will be surveyed, then the available material will be carefully studied and evaluated.
The position of thewalad zināin Imāmī Shī'ism
Authors: Kohlberg Etan
Published: January 2010

While the status of the offspring of illicit intercourse has long attracted the interest of Muslim scholars, it is a particularly significant—and problematic—issue within Imāmī Shī'ism. The problem arises from the way in which the Imāmīs view their place in the universe. A considerable body of traditions characterizes the Imāmīs as a breed apart, created of a heavenly substance and combining pure origins (nasab) with impeccable moral qualities. At the same time, there are other Imāmī traditions which portray the offspring of illicit intercourse—usually calledwalad zinā(=w.z.) —as combining impure origins with moral turpitude. The ineluctable conclusion to be drawn from these two sets of traditions is that ‘an Imāmīw.z.’ is a logical absurdity. Now it is a fact that Imāmī lawyers discuss at some lenght the status of thew.z. in this world, while Imāmī theologians ponder his fate in the next; an analysis of their views forms the bulk of this paper. As long as thew.z. is not an Imāmī, a discussion of his legal and salvation statuses presents no insurmountable problem; but what if he is, Imāmī tradition notwithstanding? The final section of this paper consists of an attempt to trace the answers provided to this question.
The Fälasha and the Stephanite: an episode from Gädlä Gäbrä Mäsih
Authors: Kaplan Steven
Published: January 2010

One obstacle which confronts any historian interested in reconstructing the history of the Bētä Esra'ēl (Fälasha) of Ethiopia is the comparative scarcity of reliable historical sources. References to the Bētä Esra'ēl in Ge'ez chronicles and gädlat are all too rare, while those in Hebrew generally lack historical value. The scattered mentions of the Fälasha in other languages prior to the nineteenth century are few and limited in scope. In light of this situation, any new source, no matter how brief, is deserving of attention and study.
A neglected pre-Han philosophical text: Ho-kuan-tzu
Authors: Graham A. C.
Published: January 2010

The book which passes under the name of Ho-kuan-tzu, ‘Master of the pheasant cap’, an otherwise unknown teacher supposedly of the third century B.C., expounds a variety of syncretism which roots the fa decreed by the ruler in a Yin-Yang cosmological scheme. It is remarkable for presenting no less than three contradictory programmes for ideal government, two of them described at length and ascribed to sage emperors missing in orthodox historiography; one is roughly classifiable as Legalist, one as Yin-Yang, the third as Taoist anarchist. It attracted little attention until recently because of lack of evidence as to its date. But with the discovery in 1973 of the Ma-wang-tui manuscripts of Laotzu it was noticed that the ‘Yellow Emperor’ documents attached to manuscript B are closely related to it; and Wu Kuang has since pointed out that the first two chapters observe the taboo on the personal name of the Ch'in First Emperor.
Military campaign inscriptions from YH 127
Authors: Yuzhou Fan
Published: January 2010

Some eight years ago, I wrote a degree thesis on the wars that took place during the reign of King Wu Ding , Shang dynasty, in which I made a comprehensive study of the military campaign inscriptions dated by most oracle-bone scholars to the first period. Since quite a number of these inscriptions were discovered in pit YH 127 at Yinxu , these formed a vital part of the sources for my study.
Qur'ān 2:114 and Jerusalem
Authors: Bashear Suliman
Published: January 2010

Qur'ān 2:114 describes those who prevent God's name being uttered in His mosques (man mana'a masājida ‘llāhi an yukhdara fīā’smuhu) as ‘most unjust’ (aẓlamu). If further states that ‘they shall not be allowed to enter them except in fear; they shall endure the curse of chastisement in this world and great torture in the aftermath ’.
The diminutives in the dīwān of Ibn Quzmān: a product of their Hispanic milieu?
Authors: Abu-Haidar J. A
Published: January 2010

The distinguished orientalist Reinhart Dozy, writing in 1849, and referring to the possible influence of Arabic poetry on Spanish romances and on the early troubadour lyrics, pronounced the whole question as ‘tout à fait oiseuse’. He went on to say about this highly controversial question: ‘nous voudrions ne plus la voir débattue, quoique nous soyons convaincu qu'elle le sera pendant longtemps encore. A chacun son cheval de bataille’.
Al-Bīrūnī's Arabic version of Patañjali's Yogasūtra: a translation of the fourth chapter and a comparison with related texts
Authors: Pines Shlomo , Gelblum Tuvia
Published: January 2010

The following study contains a translation of al-Bīrūnī’s rendering into Arabic of the fourth and last chapter of Patañjali’s Yogasūtra cum commentary. Our translation of the three preceding chapters was published in BSOAS, xxix, 2, 1966, 302–25 (henceforth abbreviated as BSOAS ch. I); BSOAS, XL, 3, 1977, 522–49 (henceforth abbreviated as BSOAS, ch. II); BSOAS, XLVI, 2, 1983, 258–304 (henceforth abbreviated as BSOAS, ch. III). This translation is based on Ritter’s edition of the Arabic text. Comparison has been made with the unique MS of Ritters Text: Kopriilii, 1589, fols. 412a–419a (written on the margins). We have also compared the text with parallel passages and expressions in al-Birunl's India.
The shrine of Imām-i Kalān in Sar-i Pul, Afghanistan
Authors: Shokoohy Mehrdad
Published: January 2010

When in 1857 Ferrier reported a rock relief, apparently Sasanian, in the region of Sar-i Pul in North Afghanistan, he left us with an enigma which is still unsolved and which has for over a century remained a subject of intense discussion for specialists. The intrepid scholars who searched around the remote and often inaccessible rocky mountains of the area found no trace of the rock relief, but A. D. H. Bivar, while searching for the relief in 1964, was the first to notice some important and yet previously little known Islamic shrines near the village of Sar-i Pul. The two most interesting monuments were the shrines (ziyārat) of Imām-i Khurd and Imām-i Kalān. The first, a small squaredomed chamber, with several inscriptions, one commemorating the martyrdom ofYahya b. Zayā (d. 125/742–3), was described in detail by Professor Bivar who suggested a mid eleventh century date for the building, and it is not discussed again here. The other shrine was briefly mentioned, and two photographs showing details of the cut stucco work of the building were given.
Bactrian Rudra
Authors: Wright J. C.
Published: January 2010

N. Sims-Williams's proposed identification of a Bactrian god μοζδοοανο as deriving from Ir. *miždvah, Vd. mī1E0D;dhvás could shed light on the role of this word as an epithet of Rudra and Siva in India. The identification would seem in turn to derive support from the extent to which in India the epithet has been appropriated by Vedic Rudra. It is even possible to identify a stratum of Sanskrit literature that shares the Bactrian conception of Mīḍhvān as a supreme god.
Ālu Kuṟumba riddles
Authors: Kapp Dieter B.
Published: January 2010

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.
Trees, snakes and gods in ancient Syria and Anatolia
Authors: Lambert W. G.
Published: January 2010

For too long study of ancient Near Eastern representational art and study of possibly related texts have been entirely separate disciplines, the one a branch of archaeology, the other of philology. This accounts for the very scanty results obtained and their frequently questionable character. In the case of Classical Greece and Rome art historians ordinarily command Greek and Latin so as to use written sources at first hand, but Near Eastern archaeologists have commonly been illiterate in their fields of study, while philologists often have limited knowledge of art and use that very amateurishly. Thus it is an occasion for rejoicing that a serious attempt has just been made on some very difficult material from Syria and Anatolia, and that one major break-through has resulted which opens up prospects of fuller understanding of certain aspects of ancient art. The author, E. Williams-Forte, is primarily an art historian with a speciality in ancient Near Eastern seals, and she has taken an interest in Ugaritic to be able to exploit that material. Her Columbia Ph.D. thesis: Mythic cycles: the iconography of the gods of water and weather in Syria and Anatolia during the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 2000–1600 B.C.) has not been published, but a lengthy article derived from parts of it has recently appeared. This starts from the tree and snake in the garden of Eden and investigates their possible Canaanite background. The original observation of major importance is that the storm god of Syria and Anatolia of the first half of the second millennium B.C., Anatolian Tarhunna, Syrian Hadad or Baal, Mesopotamian Adad, occasionally holds up a plant, branch or tree as a symbol.
The exegesis of Q. 2: 106 and the Islamic theories of naskh: mā nansakh min āya aw nansahā na'ti bi khairin minhā aw mithlīhā
Authors: Burton John
Published: January 2010

The story of the exegesis of Q. 2: 106 cannot be told briefly, on account of the quite appaling degree of muddle which has bedevilled the Muslim discusions of this verse. The greatest imaginable confusion regins as the definition of the term naskh and as to its supposed meaning(s). For that reason, it may be convenient first to set out the following formulae which represent the classical theories of naksh. There are, in fact, two such theories.
The Grand Council of the Ch'ing dynasty: a historiographical study
Authors: Huang Pei
Published: January 2010

The Grand Council (Chün-chi ch'u ) of the Ch'ing dynasty was an efficient, autocratic institution. It operated under direct imperial supervision, outside the regular administrative channels, performing its function in swift and confidential ways. Its operations enabled the Ch'ing rulers to expand their powers, strengthen their control and, most important, perpetuate their autocratic rules. Because of its versatile performance, the Grand Council enjoyed the monarch's trust, and a long existance.
Le pilier et la corde: recherches sur la poesie maure
Authors: Taine-Cheikh Par Catherine
Published: January 2010

Voici une dizaine d'années encore, bien peu de travaux avaient été consacrés à la poésie en Mauritanie ou du moins au ġne, la poésie en dialecte hassāniyya. Nous n'avons toujours pas I'équivalent pour le ġne du fameux al-Wasīt que le mauritanien Sid Ahmed Ould Alamīn publia en Egypte au début du siècle et qui comporte une anthologie du ši'r, la poésie mauritanienne en arabe classique. Cependant, ces dernières années, beaucoup de poésies dialectales ont été recueillies et transcrites, quelques-unes sont publiées, d'autres devraient I'être ou ont fait I'objet de mémoires À I'École Normale Supérieure de Nouakchott (cf. bibliographic).
Portrait of a medieval India trader: three letters from the Cairo Geniza
Authors: Goitein S. D.
Published: January 2010

The first comprehensive survey of Geniza documents about the trade on the route to India was published by me in Speculum, A Journal of the American Medieval Academy, 29, 181–97, in April 1954. At that time I was able to give a report about 130 Geniza papers related in one way or another to the India trade. Soon after the article was published, a distinguished institution offered me the opportunity to publish the material in full. I accepted with enthusiasm and set feverishly to work. But slowly it dawned upon me that one should not try to solve problems by sagacity at a time when new sources that could provide factual answers to those problems might lurk around the corner
Famine death without loss of honour in ancient Arabia and Yemini Arhab
Authors: Serjeant R. B. , Arhab Yemeni
Published: January 2010

On 6 December 1966, with Muhammad al-'Ubaydī, son of the naqīb of Shākir, as Leader of my escort, I went to Sūdah in Arhab, a Black lava Mountain, the place belonging to 'Iyāl al-Sihaym. We had passed by Jabal al-Riyām and Sirwā. The tomb of Sālih was on the north side, a domed building This tomb had, or used to have, 'ushūr, tithes paid to it. In the houses which were on the south side there was only one man, the rest ofthe villagers being women. The men were away at the war or perhaps employed in San‘ā’. Water was short here and I believe (though this is not in my notes) brought from quite some distance. Sūdah had the Look of a hungry place. Yet in the area there was much driwing on the rocks, some quite recent, including a Hebrew graffito which too had the appearance of being recently made, and it seems that Jews used at one time to Live here.
Two Sino-Tibeto-Burmese notes
Authors: Luce G. H.
Published: January 2010

In Old Burmese I find nothing comparable to pai (Karlgren, Gram. Ser. 781—pk), which is found first, it seems, on two Yin bones. But I find something possibly as old, and certainly more widespread in the Sinitic family. OB ryā (I add the level tone numbering) is certainly the same as Tibetan brgya ‘hundred’. The letter r is absent from Chinese, except in Karlgren's plausible reconstructions of rhyme-finals in his classes VI and XI (Gram. Ser., pp. 20, 25). After study of the many initial rs in OB, I think ryā might well go back to something like *di-g in OC. Another ryā in OB means ‘ploughed field’; and I connect this, without hesitation, to ch'ou (d'ôg, GS 1090 1) which means just this: the character is thought to be a drawing of a furrowed field. Cut out the ‘field’ and we have left shou ('ôg, GS 1090 g) ‘longevity’, i.e. 100 [years]. Are these lines the furrows on the centenarian's face?
Dattātreya
Authors: Raeside I. M. P.
Published: January 2010

The object of this brief account is primarily to make available the Mahānubhāva evidence on Dattātreya—most of which, where it is published at all, is published in Marathi. The little written on the subject in the West is either out-dated or extremely sketch, and fails to distinguish between what is said of Dattātreya in the early Mahānubhāva texts and the tales of the later material. At the same time it is necessary to provide some kind of context by referring to the Puranic evidence and also to the more recent developments of the Dattātreya cult which is confined almost entirely to western India—Gujarat, Maharashtra and northern Karnataka. These sections are far from exhaustive for there are more trails than can be pursued in the course of one article.
The affinities of Kuy
Authors: Shorto H. L.
Published: January 2010

The appearance of substantial dictionaries of Kuy and Bruu, both compiled by native speakers under the auspices of the Indigenous Languages of Thailand Research Project (Sriwises, 1978; Thongkum and Puengpa, 1980), allows us to observe a significant measure of agreement between the lexicons of these two Mon-Khmer languages. There is a good deal of similarity also between their phonological systems, notably in respect of the vowels.
Edward G. Browne's Turkish Connexion
Authors: Chelkowski Peter
Published: January 2010

The famous British orientalist E. G. Browne, a physician by training, was interested in Turkish language and literataure long before he became Professor of Arabic at Cambridge. It was at Cambridge that he wrote most of the works in the field of Persian studies, which were to bring him recognition as an outstanding Iranologist. But Browne's sense of affinity with the Turks endured from the time of the Russian-Turkish war of 1877–78, when he was only 16, until the end of his life in 1926. In 1914 he wrote in his introduction toThe press and poetry of modern Persia: ‘Curiously enough it was the Ottoman Turks, a people far less original and talented than either the Persians or the Arabs, who so far as the Near East is concerned, introduced the hitherto unknown ideas of ‘the Fatherland’ (watan), ‘the nation’ or ‘people’ (millat) and ‘liberty’ (hurriyyat) and who succeeded in giving to these old words this new and potent significance.’
Sīstān in British Indian frontier policy
Authors: Greaves Ross L.
Published: January 2010

Sīstān (Sijistān or Sāgistān) came within the scope of British Indian frontier defence during the Napoleonic era. Lord Minto sent out missions to the Punjab, Sind, Baluchistan, Afghanistan and Persia in order to acquire reliable information about the borderlands. Captain Charles Christie and Lieutenant Eldred Pottinger in 1810 explored the route westward into Persia from Baluchistan. Christie separated from the others at Nushki and travelled to Herat via Sīstān before joining Pottinger in Iṣfahān. According to Christie: Seistan is a very small province on the banks of the Helmind, comprising not more than five hundred square miles, bounded on the north and northeast by Khorasan, on the west by Persia, and on the south and south-east it is separated from Mukran by an uninhabited desert.
Gentilics and appellatives: notes on Aḥābīš Qurayš
Authors: Wansbrough John
Published: January 2010

The role of metaphor in the generation of descriptive terms is a commonplace of lexicography. Agency is usually identified as analogy, and the transfer itself analysed in terms of real or imagined similarity, e.g. ‘goth’ = barbaric, ‘gypsy’ = migrant, ‘vandal’ = destructive. Strictly defined, these exemplify metonymy, a species of metaphor found particularly in toponyms and gentilics. Development of such epithets as'‘arab’, ‘deutsch’ and ‘sūdān’ may be seen as a complementary process, wherein the common attribute is given a specific referent. Thought it is no longer, since Jakobson, deemed quite proper to define metonymy as metaphor, a symbolic and often arbitrary element in the transfer might be thought to justify that interpretation, as for instance in the gentilic Iberian or the appellative Qadariyya. While ultimately of less significance than context, etymology is seldom neglected in such investigations, may, indeed, become a dominant feature, as in the perennial discussion of ḫāpirū: 'ibrī = ‘hebrew’. It is my intention in the following lines to examine the incidence and possible origins of an appellative well known from early Arabic historiography.
Translucent insights: a look at Proto-Sino-Tibetan through Gordon H. Luce's Comparative word-list
Authors: Matisoff James A.
Published: January 2010

The great South-East Asian linguist and epigrapher, Gordon H. Luce, devoted many decades of his long life to the decipherment and analysis of the inscriptions of Old Burma. He had long intended to draw on the unparalleled wealth of materials in his files to produce a comparative lexicon of ‘prestandard Old Burmese’ (OB). As Professor Henderson explains in her moving introduction, Luce's advancing years and failing eyesight caused A comparative word-list of Old Burmese, Chinese and Tibetan (CWL) to be less ambitious in scope or polished in format than Luce would have wished. Even so, the CWL is a mine of fascinating comparative material, not only for OB, where Luce's first-hand expertise was second to none, but also for Archaic Chinese (AC) and Written Tibetan (WT), where he had to rely for his data on Karlgren's reconstructions and Jäschke's dictionary.
Notes on a Middle-Arabic ‘Joseph’ poem
Authors: Beeston A. F. L.
Published: January 2010

Tales of the Prophets, in prose and verse, are a well-marked genre in Arabic literature. These productions were designed for a popular audience of mixed character, not solely for the intellectual élite. Side by side with the literary manifestations of the genre, there was a long tradition of oral recitations on these themes by professional quṣṣāṣ, which range along with popular epics like the Sīrat 'Antar, etc. All these have a ‘Homeric’ quality, in that while there was a rough approximation to an ‘established’ text, no one author can be pinned down; they are the end-product of innumerable recitations over the centuries, each of which may have contributed something to them. Recorded specimens of this folk-literature are scanty, and are difficult to assess linguistically, since the Arabic script is extremely ill-adapted for recording non-literary language, and the mere attempt at recording it in writing imposes a deceptive veneer of ‘classicism’ on its appearance. A piece in verse is therefore particularly valuable, because the metrical structure reveals a good deal about how it was read.
Bi-polar terms of address in Kuwaiti Arabic
Authors: Yassin Mahmoud Aziz F.
Published: January 2010

Bi-polarity is the use of the same term to denote both speaker and addressee. It is possible to distinguish broadly three types of bi-polar term in Kuwaiti Arabic (KA). The first type is characterized in form by the use of the monolexic kin-terms: /yuba/ ‘father’, /yumma/ ‘mother’, /yaddi/ ‘grandfather’, /yadda/ ‘grandmother’. The second type consists of the vocative particle /ya/ + the KA kin-term for brother /?ax/ + 2nd person pronominal suffix. The third type of KA bi-polar term consists of the joining word /wa/ ‘and’ + the personal pronoun /ana/ ‘I’ + one of the monolexic kin-terms + 2nd person pronominal suffix. In this paper a comparison is made between these three types of bi-polarity exploring the relationship between their respective forms and functions.
Le nom en Afar du sud
Authors: Morin Par Didier
Published: January 2010

Cette description se fonde sur des observations faites en plusieurs points du Territoire français des Afars et des Issas (Goda, Mabla, ‘Àlta, Gamàrri notamment), de 1973 à 1975, et sur le témoignage d'informateurs originaires, pour certains, de l'Àwsa. Ceux-ci nous ont permis d'acquérir la certitude qu'un même dialecte était parlé dans la zone comprise entre le delta lacustre de l'Awash (Kalo) et le golfe de Tadjoura. Il semble aussi que l'afar méridional s'étende en amont même de Ba'àdu et jusqu'au piémont éthiopien, (Dòk'a, Dawwe et Awra); d'autre part, il est attesté au nord, à Baylūl, mouillage au delà duquel commence l'afar septentrional. Si nous n'avons pu encore enquêter personnellement dans ces régions, la classification proposée par Mahafly nous paraît toutefois approximative. Il est hasardeux d'isoler l'Awsa des régions côtières. De nombreux faits historiques (comme en témoignent les traditions orales) et sociologiques fournissent la preuve du contraire. Les tribus ‘asayammàra établies au nord et à l'ouest du Territoire français atteignent le Kalo au cours de leurs migrations saisonnières. Les Debne de la plaine du Gōba'ad, en transhumant par Anḍaḍkàlu au sud du lac Abḥe, touchent le pays gal'êla qui, au début de ce siècle, s'étendait à la majeure partie du Gōba'ad. De plus, les famines, les affaires de sang ont souvent été jusqu'à un passé récent à l'origine de l'exode de tout ou partie d'un groupe tribal. Les guerres pour la conquête de la vallée de l'Awash ont également opéré des bouleversements démographiques importants. Le déplacement vers l'ouest des Mōdayto ou des Badoyta-m mēla en est une illustration. On pourrait aussi mentionner les relations commerciales, occasions d'une dissémination de plusieurs tribus spécialisées dans les opérations de transit, tels les Ḥasōba que l'on retrouve tout au long d'une piste caravanière allant de Bāte à Ambabbo, près de Tadjoura.
Tamil and Japanese?
Authors: Miller Roy Andrew
Published: January 2010

Surely no one involved with comparative Dravidian, or Altaic, or Elamite, or even simply with historical linguistics in general, would question the exhortations to linguistic virtue laid down by K. V. Zvelebil (BSOAS, XLVIII, 1, 1985, 116–20): every scholar in the world who is interested in these questions at all will agree that, touching upon the genetic affiliation of Tamil and Japanese, ‘hypotheses have emerged that deserve more careful and sympathetic attention’ (p. 116), and also that ‘it would be premature, sweepingly to dismiss … a hypothesis [of non-accidental connexion between Japanese and Tamil (Dravidian)] as impossible and fantastic’ (p. 117). But over and above these unexceptionable generalities, Zvelebil's note reflects his tacit assumption that the Japanese linguistic forms and English glosses in Ōno Susumu's Sound correspondences between Tamil and Japanese (Tokyo, 1980) are valid, and reliable as evidence for the comparativist. Unfortunately, this is not true.
Religious thought and practice in Vaikhānasa Viṣṇuism
Authors: Gonda J.
Published: January 2010

The question as to how many individuals in one of the religious communities of ancient and modern India at a given historical moment understood all the meanings and implications of their traditional ritual symbolism may to a considerable extent be irrelevant, but the relation between religious practice and the philosophical or theological doctrines underlying it is of outstanding interest. Whereas we are, as far as this relation between thought and practice in Vedic religion is concerned, placed in favourable circumstances because the Brāhmaṇas explaining the thought solve many problems arising from a study of the sūtras describing the ritual acts, ritual texts compiled in the Hindu period, and even those which originated in the centuries of transition, often force us to apply modified methods of investigating these connexions. A special importance attaches to those documents, which, from one point of view that is often shared by the indigenous tradition, may be regarded as late representatives of Vedism, and from another as early products of Hinduism characterized by the prominence of other gods and the appearance of other cults. Among these texts those issuing from the religious community of the Vaikhānasas, which, as a small but important group, continues to exist in the South of India, are of special interest because they embody the tradition of a society of Indian devotees which at first constituted a Vedic school belonging to the Taittirīya branch of the Black Yajurveda, and in the transitional period and the centuries after came to transform itself into a community of devout worshippers of Viṣṇu.
On border guards in OtoΓ (Ordos)
Authors: Serruys Henry
Published: January 2010

The notebooks of the late Antoine Mostaert (BSOAS, XL, 2, 1977, 338) contain two documents from Otoγ banner in Ordos, from 1907 and 1921 respectively, on the necessity of having border guards in order to prevent banditry. The letter of 1907 mentions an act of banditry committed by a group of Chinese Muslims. How frequent such crimes were around 1907, I do not know; but with regard to the ‘commission’ of 1921, the reader should know that the early 1920's were extremely turbulent years in Otoγ: as the result of a number of murders committed there, Mongols fought among themselves and at the same time had to face repeated irruptions of Chinese bandits and soldiers often more likely to behave like bandits than like upholders of the law. In a forthcoming paper, I hope to publish a number of documents relative to those murder cases and the impact they had on the daily lives of the people. In the meantime these two documents on the formation of border guards may be of some interest.
A note on the inscriptions on two Chinese rugs in the Victoria and Albert Museum
Authors: Bawden C. R.
Published: January 2010

Among the many attractive rugs illustrated and described in H. A. Lorentz's book on Chinese rugs are two pillar rugs, one of which bears a dedicatory inscription in Chinese, the other a dedicatory inscription in Mongol. The rugs apparently form a pair. They are of the same size, the design of each, an encircling dragon, is a mirror image of that of the other, the borders are identical, and the positions of the inscriptions correspond. The shades of colour, too, are the same, indicating contemporaneous manufacture. Yet, on the face of it, the two inscriptions refer to two distinct donations, and they have been so interpreted by the author. The date in the Chinese inscription is the first month of summer in the year i-yu in the reign of Ch'ien Lung, that is 1765, while the date in the Mongol inscription is the first month of summer in the female-blue hen year in the reign of Badarayultu Törö (Kuang Hsü), that is 1885. Mr. Lorentz quotes expert opinion to the eifect that, the dates apart, the two rugs look as if they must have been woven at the same time as each other and be of late date. The inference is, he says, that both were made in 1885. Yet, he says, after describing the Chinese inscription: ‘The puzzle is that the Mongol inscription in the other rug declares that this rug was presented by a different person one hundred and twenty years later!’. He offers an ingenious explanation for this dilemma, suggesting that the second donor, for he is of the opinion that two donations did indeed take place, at an interval of 120 years, caused an earlier rug to be copied, in order that he could present a pair, rather than a single item. The donor's idea would have been, to quote Mr. Lorentz: ‘I herewith submit the copy of a famous rug dedicated in 1765, to which I add another such rug with my own dedication, presenting thus a pair’.
Achinese And Mainland Austronesian
Authors: Shorto H. L.
Published: January 2010

Achinese and the Austronesian languages spoken on the South-East Asian mainland (‘Chamic’) are known to have borrowed numerous words from Mon-Khmer and to show other effects of Mon-Khmer contact. Systematic comparison especially of their historico-phonological peculiarities makes it appear that they are closely related, irrespective of this, within Austronesian. Such a postulated relationship is at variance with the findings of lexicostatistics. It is suggested that the discrepancy results from the very high incidence of Malay loans in Achinese.
The Realm Of King Yusuf (Dhu Nuwas)
Authors: Beeston A. F. L.
Published: January 2010

The Syriac document recently published by I. Shahîd in The martyrs of Najrân: new documents (Bruxelles, 1971) opens with the following passage:
A further note on Magan and Meluḫḫa
Authors: Hansman John
Published: January 2010

In a recent article treating the location of ancient regions attested in early Sumero-Akkadian texts, the present writer proposed to identify the country of Meluḫḫa with a part of eastern Baluchistan in modern Pakistan (BSOAS, xxxvi, 3, 1973, 559–70). It was, however, also suggested that the name Meluḫḫa ‘may have been applied at times to regions which extended to the east of there’.1 This theory was not developed in the article because the possibility could not then be demonstrated factually.
Robert Charles Zaehner
Authors: Lambton Ann K. S.
Published: January 2010

Professor R. C. Zaehner, who died suddenly on 24 November 1974, was, at the time of his death, Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics in the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls. He was born on 8 April 1913 of Swiss parents who had emigrated to England. He was educated at Tonbridge School and won a classical scholarship to Christ Church. After taking a second class in Classical Moderations, he transferred to Oriental Studies, specializing in Persian, and took a first class in 1936. In the years prior to the outbreak of the second World War, he continued his study of Old and Middle Persian under Professor (later Sir Harold) Bailey. As part of his war service he spent the years 1943–1947 at the British Embassy in Tehran, where his knowledge of Persian and understanding of Persia were of immense value. He made a large number of Persian friends, by whom he was regarded with enormous respect and affection. He returned to Oxford, where in 1950 he became University lecturer in Persian.
On a New Edition of the Dīwān of Ḥassān B. Thābit
Authors: Kister M. J.
Published: January 2010

The aim of the editor, Walid ‘Arafat, 'to produce as complete a record as possible of the poetry ascribed to Hassān b. Thabit in the different recensions of the Dīwān and in other sources together with the scholia in the Dīwān, additional notes from other sources and editorial comments’, as stated in his preface (p. 1), has been pursued by him with praiseworthy perseverance, zeal, and dedication. Ten different manuscripts of the Dīwān have been closely examined and evaluated (introduction, pp. 10–23). The poems of the Dīwān have been accordingly divided in the following manner: poems 1–225 from the MS Ahmet III, 2534 (T) form the main part of the Dīwān; poems 226–63 from MS Ahmet III, 2584 (TA) form the second part of the Dīwān called al-Ziyādāt; the poems 264–372 are additions gathered from other sources (ziyādāt min ghayri makhtūtāt al-Dīwān). The ‘Introduction’ contains sections dealing with the life of Hassān (pp. 3–7), former editions of the Dīwān (pp. 7–10), recensions of the Dīwān and its MSS (pp. 10–23), and the authenticity of the poems (pp. 23–31). In his sharp criticism of the authenticity of a great many of the poems ascribed to Hassān, ‘Arafat often refers to his own articles, basing his conclusions on an analysis of the style and composition of these poems, the historical circumstances and developments, and the statements of early Muslim scholars.
The Kuṣāṇa Trilingual
Authors: Bivar A. D. H.
Published: January 2010

The publication by Professor Gérard Fussman of the trilingual Kuṣāṇa inscription at Dasht-i Nāvur in Afghanistan is a major event both for historical and linguistic studies. Appropriately termed by Paul Bernard ‘the Rosetta Stone of Afghanistan’, the find is impressive for its novelties, especially (in addition to Bactrian and Kharoṣṭhī) a well-preserved version in wholly unknown script and language. Yet unlike its namesake, it does not immediately solve all problems.
The Meanings of the TermGotraand the Textual History of theRatnagotravibhāga
Authors: Ruegg D. Seyfort
Published: January 2010

The wordgotrais frequently used in the literature of Mahāyāna Buddhism to denote categories of persons classified according to their psychological, intellectual, and spiritual types. The chief types usually mentioned in this kind of classification are the Auditors making up theśrāvaka-gotra, the Individual Buddhas making up thepratyehabuddha-gotra, and the Bodhisattvas making up thebodhisattva-gotra. In theSaṃdhinirmocanasūtrathese three types constitute altogether differentgotras, which thus coincide with the three separate Vehicles (yāna) as recognized by the Yogācārin/Vijñaptimātratā, school. To these three some sources add the further category of the undetermined (aniyatagotra), which is made up of persons not yet definitively attached to one of the three preceding classes; and the non-gotra(agotra), that is the category made up of persons who cannot be assigned to any spiritual class. Each of the first three categories is thus comprised of persons capable of achieving a particular kind of maturity and spiritual perfection in accordance with their specific type or class, the Auditor then attaining the Awakening (bodhi) characteristic of the Śrāvaka and so on. Especially remarkable in this connexion, and somewhat anomalous as agotra, is the non-gotra, i.e. that category of persons who seem to have been considered, at least by certain Yogācārin authorities, as spiritual ‘outcastes’ lacking the capacity for attaining spiritual perfection or Awakening of any kind; since they therefore achieve neitherbodhinornirvāṇa, they represent the same type as theicchantikasto the extent that the latter also are considered to lack this capacity.
The Nasi-Ras Abbäbä Arägay Truce according to two Amharic Sources
Authors: Kane Thomas L.
Published: January 2010

Books dealing with the recent history of Ethiopia such as Greenfield'sEthiopia, a new political history, or Del Boca'sThe Ethiopian war, 1935–1941, state that a few works in Amharic have been written about this period. Though the number is not considerable, many books have been written on this subject, most of them by survivors of this conflict. Since they represent primary sources for the Ethiopian point of view, they are of great value, but there are several factors which complicate their utilization.
Aspects of Epistolary Verbal usage in Ugaritic and Akkadian
Authors: Pardee Dennis , Whiting Robert M.
Published: January 2010

In a recent brief survey inBiblische NotizenPardee has defended the concept of an ‘epistolary perfect’ in Hebrew letters. In that survey he examined each of the usages of a ‘perfect’ verbal form (i.e. ‘suffix conjugation’ orqātat) in the extant corpus of Hebrew letters most of them extra-Biblical. Those forms which described completed acts prior to the writing of the letter were separated off from those which described aspects of the epistolary acts themselves such as ‘writing’ ‘sending’ and ‘commanding’ and the latter were termed ‘epistolary perfects’. In the present study we wish to examine the epistolary conventions observed in Ugaritic and in Akkadian. As in Pardee's previous study Ugaritic ‘perfect’(qtt)forms and Akkadian preterite(iprus)and perfect(iptaras)forms will be examined in order to determine the conventions governing their usage in letters.
Waqfsand ṣūfī monasteries in the Ottoman pollicy of colonization: Sultān Selīm I's waqf of 1516 in favour of Dayr al-Asad
Authors: Layish Aharon
Published: January 2010

A folktale current among the inhabitants of Dayr al-Asad, a little village in Western Galiee on the Acre-Safad road, repors that in the early sixteenth century a Ṣufī shaykh named al-Asad was once travelling towards Safad, when he came upon some inhabitants of cha Christian village of al-Bi‘na, which then contained a monastery (dayr) and a Crusader church, and was insulted by them; moreover, while he was praying by the village spring, a lion (asad) appeared and devoured his donkey. Nething daunted, the shaykh put his saddle on the lion's back, mounted and galloped eastward until he suddenly found himself face to face with the Sulṭān Selīm I (or according to others, Süleymān ‘Qānūnī’), Thesulṭān, to indemnify him for the insults of the Christians and in recognition of his courage and resourcefulness, permitted him to settle at Dayr al-Bi‘na. Some say that th shaykh returned to the village on the lion’s back after thesulṭān had expelled the Chrisians. Thereupon, so the story continues, Christian Dayr al-Bi‘na became Muslim Dayr al-Asad. The Christian Population established established a new settlement, called al-Bi‘na, about half a kilmetre south of Dayr al-Asad. There is today at al-Bi‘na a smal Christian minority, which in the opinion of the people of Dayr al-Asad originates from Dayr al-Bi‘na.