The Funj were a people of uncertain origin who, in the early sixteenth century, established themselves in the valley of the Blue Nile with their capital at Sennar (Sinnār), and acquired the hegemony over the Muslim Arab tribes of the Nilotic Sudan. The present investigation attempts an analysis of the documentary information on the inception of the Funj hegemony. It develops certain criticisms made by Dr. A. J. Arkell in his article, ‘Fung origins’ (Sudan Notes and Records, XV, 2, 1932, especially pp. 209–13), in connexion with an hypothesis, which he has since abandoned, that the Funj were Shilluk. It does not deal with the controversial general problem of Funj origins.

A Buddhist practice existed whereby a dānapati, patron, had a manuscript of a Buddhist religious text copied, into which at the appropriate place his personal name was inserted with Sanskrit inflexion. In the Buddhist Sanskrit Sitātapatra-sūtra, the ‘Book of the white umbrella’, Stein manuscript S 2529, two personal names are inserted. In lines 45–6 occurs aṣṭānā mahāgrrahāṇā vaidhvasanakara hu ttrū 〈rakṣa rakṣa〉 mama vaṣayānasya ‘O destroyer of the eight great ravishers, hūṃ trūṃ. Protect, protect me Yaṣayāna’. In lines 48, 70, 88, 117 the name is Sīdyākaraca. Here we read:

48 auma svasta〈ka〉ra bavattū mama sīdyākaracasya

70 rakṣa rakṣa mama sīdyākaracasya:

88 ye ke cai salvā mama sīdyākaracasya ∥

117: rakṣa rakṣa mama sīdyākaracasya:

Instead of a name in line 122 occurs the word īthanāmasya ‘of so-and-so’.

The first traveller who brought copies of Pahlavi inscriptions to Europe was Garsten Niebuhr. On 2 March 1765, he arrived at Shīrāz, and on 13 March he went to Persepolis. In its surroundings he sojourned till 7 April, almost every day visiting its ruins and the monuments of Naqš-i Raj ab and Naqš-i Rustam, all of which he describes very minutely (Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und andern umliegenden Ländern, 11, Copenhagen, 1778, 121–63). In the ruins of Persepolis he found and copied the Old Persian inscriptions on which Grotefend, in 1802, based the first decipherment of the Persian cuneiform script. At Naqš-i Rajab he copied three short inscriptions, each in two Pahlavi versions and a Greek translation, of the Sasanian kings Ardashir I, Shapur I, and Hornmd; and at Naqš-i Rustam the left corner, the tails of 23 very long lines, of a Pahlavi inscription which he could not identify at all. The short inscriptions, together with two kindred inscriptions of Shapur II and Shapur III at Tāq-i Bostān, were deciphered by Silvestre de Sacy (Mémoires sur diverses antiquités de la Perse, Paris, 1793), who thus initiated the Pahlavi palaeography. Carsten Niebuhr and Silvestre de Sacy have a claim to be called the fathers of this branch of Oriental research.

The long-awaited Greek-letter inscription discovered, on 6 May 1957, by the Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan in the course of their excavations at ‘Surkh-Kotal’, the ancient Bagolango, has now been made public by M. André Maricq under the title of ‘La grande inscription de Kaniṣka et l'étéo-tokharien, l'ancienne langue de la Bactriane’, JA, CCXLVI, 4, 1958, 345–440. It is wonderfully well-preserved and, once one gets accustomed to the somewhat barbaric forms of certain letters, offers not the slightest difficulty to the reading. The difficulties lie elsewhere: this is the first substantial, and at the same time readable, document of the Iranian language once spoken in Bactria and, appropriately to a text in an unknown language, is slow in yielding its meaning to the scholar, who inevitably has to be guided partly by often contradictory internal evidence, partly by uncertain comparisons with related languages. All those devoted to Central Asian history and languages will be grateful to M. Maricq for his painstaking work and for his unselfishness in publishing this superb monument before being able to submit more than a partial interpretation.

In a book to be entitled Early Ismā'īlism I shall argue in some detail that the Ismā'īlī movement began about the middle of the third/ninth century. It was at that date that the missionaries sent out by the leaders of the movement appeared in various parts of the Islamic world; soon afterwards their successful preaching, the increasing number of their followers, and various armed conflicts with the authorities, brought the movement to the knowledge of the outside world and secured for it the first entries in the pages of the chroniclers.

Isma'īl's defeat by the Ottomans at Chāldirān—his first defeat—destroyed the legend of his invincibility. This legend was based on his pretensions to a quasi-divine status, and, after Chāldirān, the qizilbāsh, although they continued to pay lip-service to this idea, showed clearly by their actions that they no longer accorded any special reverence to the person of their ruler. They had lost their faith in Isma'īl's supernatural powers, and this impaired their fundamental relationship with him. Although in theory Isma'īl was still the murshid-i kāmil, and the qizilbāsh were his murīas, the qizilbāsh were no longer prepared to follow him with the fanatical devotion and indifference to personal danger which had been noted by a Venetian merchant in 1518, only two years before Chāldirān. Once the religious bond between Isma'īl and the qizilbāsh had been broken, and their relationship reduced in practice (though not in theory) to a secular plane, it was but a short step to disobedience to his commands and an open flouting of his authority, especially as this authority was further reduced by his virtual withdrawal from the conduct of state affairs and by the fact that after Chāldirān he ceased personally to lead his troops into battle. The oppressive rule of Amīr Khan Turkmān in Khurāsān during 922–8/1516–22, and his arrogant disregard of Isma'īl's express commands, constituted a challenge to Isma'īl's authority which he seemed reluctant or unable to meet.

There is no doubt of the ancientness of Skt. śváśura- and śvaśr- (= Lat. socer and socrus) and their general survival in Modern Indo-Aryan languages: see, e.g., Nepali Dictionary s.w. sasuro and sās. Concerning the earlier existence, however, of its vddhi-derivative, śvāśura-, as a substantive equivalent to OHG suagur, etc. (and so to be accented *śvāśurá-) strong doubt was expressed in Wackernagel-Debrunner, Altind. Gram., II, 2, § 34c.

It may be possible to study special cases of the general philosophical problem, how language and thought are correlated, by considering definite thought structures and definite languages. The difficulty, that thought seems to be accessible only or at least primarily through language, can be partly avoided by concentrating upon formal expressions of thought structures which are considerably different from ordinary language. In the following an attempt will be made to show, with the help of symbolic logic, how certain general structures are expressed in classical Sanskrit and, subsequently, how certain logical structures are expressed in the technical Sanskrit of Indian logic. The results do not prove that some logical principles depend on linguistic structures; for, evidently, the linguistic structures themselves may reflect a deeper-lying structure of thinking or ‘being’. On the other hand, if it were possible to show that some expressions could occur only in languages with a special structure—e.g. some Indo-European languages—this kind of research might throw some light on the problem of the universality of logical principles.

I. Rarotongan is a Polynesian language spoken on the island of Rarotonga in the Cook Islands. A phonemic analysis yields a nine-term consonant system comprising four voiceless plosives (bilabial, dental, velar, glottal), three nasals (bilabial, alveolar, velar), a bilabial voiced fricative, and an alveolar flapped ‘r’. There is the usual Polynesian five-term vowel system (close front, close back, mid front, mid back, open central). All vowels may be either short (one mora) or long (two morae). Long vowels and short-vowel diphthongs behave phono-logically as dissyllables and are so treated in this paper. Syllable structures are limited to V and CV.