The purpose of these ‘SIMW’, as also of some papers which have appeared under different titles in this Bulletin and elsewhere, is to clear the ground for the preparation of a Handbook of early Islamic metal work. My aim is to broaden the basis on which the writing of such a handbook (covering the period from the rise of Islam to the end of the fourteenth century) can be attempted, by submitting unpublished and significant material in the form of brief, but detailed, monographs. I hope that readers will call my attention to errors and omissions. The supporting illustrations (which, unless otherwise stated, are my own) form an essential part of such an undertaking, and I am most grateful to the Editorial Board of BSOAS for allowing a generous number of plates and line-drawings to be reproduced in each issue.

During the course of my 1953–4 tour in Arabia, I was able to see a great many new MSS, mostly of specifically South Arabian content, amongst which for example was a rare early copy of Ibn Samurah's 1E6C;abaḳāt, the same MS also containing what appears to be an unknown treatise on the grammatical scholars of Basrah and Kūfah. A photocopy of this MS is now in the Library of the School, and a brief description is in the Madjallat al-Makhtūṭāt al-‘Arabīyah, n, 2, p. 341. Fu'ād Saiyid of the Dār al-Kutub has recently published an edition of the said Ṭabaḳāt.

On 29 June 1881 letters were despatched by a Dunqulāwī ascetic and religious teacher to various notables in the Egyptian Sudan. The writer, who had previously been known as Muḥammad Aḥmad b. ‘Abdallāh, announced in these letters what had for some time been an open secret among his followers, namely that he was the Expected Mahdi. Muḥammad Ahmad was by no means an unknown figure. He was at this time approaching 40 years of age. From childhood he had been profoundly devoted to the study of Islam, Ṣufī doctrine, and the ascetic life, although, unlike a number of other Sudanese, he had never proceeded to higher studies at al-Azhar. His experience of the world was limited to the northern and central parts of the Egyptian Sudan.

This study owes its inception to Sir Percival David, who possesses among the treasures in his private collection one of the few surviving copies of a large engraved map of the world, known to students of cartography as the Map of Hajji Ahmed. Invited by its owner to translate for him the legends in the map and especially the lengthy text accompanying it, which are written in Turkish, I became aware that a close analysis of this text yielded more information than has so far been obtained about the origin of the map.

Professor G. Vernadsky, well-known as an historian of ancient Russia, recently published an Ossetic folktale, which he had obtained from a Mr. Dzambulat Dzanty, an Ossete by birth, who in his turn stated that he had heard it (and written it down) in his youth, ‘in the village of Great Iron (Bolshoe OsetinsJcoe) at the time of hay-making (xosgärdän), June, 1910’, from an ‘old white-bearded man’ by name of Khulyx [] ‘The Lame One’, who ‘was a poet himself and in some of his own works followed the pattern of the old Ossetian oral traditions’. As the old gentleman was ‘over seventy in 1910’, we cannot hope to consult him now about his sources or about the numerous strange words and expressions in the text presented, after an interval of 45 years, by Mr. Dzambulat Dzanty.

In, and since, the nineteenth century a more than passing interest inPashto verse, both literary and popular, has been shown in Europe, as thefollowing titles (not to mention a number of chrestomathies) testify:

We witness two kinds of Chinese texts in Tibetan transcription, thosewhich have the Tibetan transcription by the side of the Chinese characters—much as the Japanese syllabic script occurs by the side of theChinese characters—and those which are in Tibetan script only.

It is obvious to anyone who reads Lao Tzǔ that opposites play a prominentpart in it. There is hardly a page on which one cannot find some contrasted terms like ‘ long ’ and short', ‘ weak’ and ‘ strong ’. What may not be soobvious is the complexity of the different theories concerning these opposites.It is thepurpose of this paper to study, in some detail, these theories.

The two inscriptions which are the subject of this article are preserved in the vestibule of the Kyaikmaraw image shrine in the village of that name, which lies on the Ataran 11 miles south-east of Moulmein. That to the left of the entrance (Kyaikmaraw I) records a dedication of land to the shrine by the ruling queen of Pegu, Bañā Thau (Shin Sawbu), in A.D. 1455, and is thus the earliest dated Middle Mon inscription as well as the only one assignable to Bañā Thau's reign which antedates the co-regency of Dhammacetī. The stone to the right of the entrance (Kyaikmaraw II), which is mutilated and much weathered, is for the most part occupied by a fragmentary replica of lines 8–20 of the first, but with a different preamble, and apparently records a second dedication.

In the summer of 1951, the presence in London of an Ellice Islander, Penitala Teo, gave me an opportunity of making a sound recording in a little-known Polynesian language. The briefness of his stay, as well as other factors, did not leave time for more than a cursory analysis of his speech, but there was enough evidence to establish a prima facie case for recognizing aspirated as well as non-aspirated consonants.

This study of the nominal forms of Bilin follows the theoretical approach and expositional framework of a previous paper that dealt with the verbal forms of the language, but the linguistic statement is both phonologically and morphologically of a very different type.

The forms associated with the scatter of the noun are far less numerous than those of the verb; the maximum number theoretically obtainable from the analysis presented here is 84. Some of the forms could be regarded as composed of three elements (and in some cases four), but for a general statement it is more appropriate to treat Bilin as inflected rather than as agglutinative. For there are again phonetic features that preclude a purely segmental analysis; these include pitch pattern, but not vowel harmony, and two new features, one of reduplication, and the other involving alternating types of consonantal articulation.

Israel Friedlaender pointed out long ago that the work of Ibn Hazm,al-fisalfi 'l-nihal, was not a book but a collection of pamphlets ; not all these collections were identical. Asin Palacios published a Spanish translation of the printed text with many careful notes and Di Matteo discussed the criticisms of Jews and Christians by Ibn Hazm but neither knew the British Museum manuscript Or. 842 which differs from the print by omissions and additions. Some paragraphs on Muslim sects, absent from the print, were published in BSOAS, xn, 1, 1947, 1 ff. (This passage is in Or. 843 which is by the same hand as Or. 842.) Another addition (f. 2a) states that the Samaritan Pentateuch gives the years from the fall of Adam to the flood as 1307, the Hebrew which is accepted by both the Rabbanites and Karaites as 1650 (presumably the final 6 was lost by a scribal error), and the Greek as 2242. It adds that another sect of the Jews made the period 667 years and 8 months less 8 days. (A thousand has probably dropped out.)