The system of iqṭā', the allotment of the resources of the state, income from land and elsewhere, to individuals to provide them with the means of serving the state, above all in military service, stands out from the pages of the chronicles as the dominant administrative institution of the Mamlūk period; the iqṭā' was the life-blood of the Mamlūk amīrs and the whole military apparatus of the state. All the vast amount of administrative work connected with the iqṭā' system, the assigning and control of, and accounting for, grants, was carried out by the Dīwān al-Jaysh, the Army Bureau. We see some of this work ‘through a glass darkly’ in the chronicles, and we have some very schematic accounts in the scribal handbooks that are available from the period. The operations of such ‘technical’ departments of state were not described by the writers of the handbooks with anything like the same detail as the operations of the Chancery (Dīwān al-Inshā'), because, despite a long tradition of discussion and comparison of their rival merits, which was one of the stock literary themes, the departments of financial and accounting functions were generally considered of lower standing and worth less attention than the Chancery, the bureau in which polite learning and literary talent were at a premium. Hence, examples of the prestigious productions of the Dīwān al-Inshā', treaties, foreign correspondence, diplomas, and decrees, were copied and preserved for their literary interest, in addition to, and sometimes before, their historical interest, and as models for aspiring ‘mandarins’ of the Chancery. There is a smaller, much smaller, amount of Chancery material that has survived in its original form in a few scattered collections of documents.

Tout récemment M. M. J. Kister, Professeur à l'Université de Jérusalem, a eu l'amabilité de se pencher sur les Maghāzī rasūl Allāh de Wahb b. Munabbih que nous avions publiées ensemble avec ‘La légende du roi David’ attribuée au même auteur. Nous tenons à le remercier ici vivement pour l'intérêt qu'il leur a porté. S'il nous est permis de prendre à cet endroit position vis-à-vis de ses observations, c'est tout simplement dans l'intention de montrer l'idée de base qui a dirigé l'édition des deux papyrus et qui a amené des divergences de point de vue inévitables, et non point de répondre à tout prix à un collègue que nous n'avons pas eu l'honneur de connaître personnellement, et pour lequel nous avons la plus haute considération.

Despite countless discussions, the date of Zoroaster remains a controversial problem. This is due to the fact that the testimony of the available sources is meagre, conflicting, and often ambiguous, for these are based on traditions which were put into writing long after the prophet is supposed to have lived, and contain both fictitious elements and the rationalizations of ancient savants. Of these traditions, the one now most widely accepted in the West is that which counts ‘258 years from Zoroaster till Alexander’. Formerly a number of distinguished scholars—among them Windischmann, Tiele, Geiger, Oldenberg, Bartholomae, Meyer, and Christensen—questioned the credibility of this tradition, arguing with cogent reasons that Zoroaster must be placed much earlier, probably at about 1000 b.c. In the second quarter of the present century, however, the late date gained credence, mainly on the ground that a precise figure transmitted by a people well known for their veracity must be based on historical facts. For a time this view almost came to prevail, primarily because outstanding authorities—such as Herzfeld, Taqizadeh, and Henning—gave it their support. But more recently, arguments in favour of an earlier date have again been advanced by a number of scholars. Yet the main difficulty remains, which is to explain, in the words of T. Burrow, ‘how this precise figure (i.e. 258) came to be adopted’. The purpose of the present article is to offer a solution to that problem, and to trace an older Iranian tradition that Zoroaster lived before 1000 b.c.

The considerable size of the Ādi Granth, the varied authorship of its contents, and their arrangement within the volume to suit the requirements of liturgical performance rather than those of scholarly perusal, all these may be accounted factors to be held responsible for delaying, until quite recently, its critical analysis. Certainly the delay was not warranted by the intrinsic importance of the Ādi Granth (AG), which derives primarily from its status as the living scripture of the Sikhs, secondarily from the authenticity of the transmission of its text which this status has helped to secure since its compilation by Gurū Arjan in 1604.

As was pointed out in the ‘Addenda’ (by A. H. Francke, assisted by W. Simon) to the 1929 reprint of Jäschke's Tibetan grammar (pp. 120–1), we observe an alternation of final vowel with final dental nasal or plosive in a number of closely related words. The examples adduced show sometimes a tripartite scheme, a final vowel in the case of verbs, a dental nasal in the case of adjectives, and a dental (voiced) plosive in the case of nouns, as e.g. dro-ba ‘to be warm’, dron-po (or -mo) ‘warm’, and drod ‘heat’. A bipartite pattern, which is in fact more frequent, has also been observed and illustrated by a few examples, such as za-ba ‘to eat’ and zan ‘food’.

There exists a considerable body of scholarly literature on the contributions of the Jesuit missionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the knowledge of geography in China. Much of this literature is centred around the world maps of Matteo Ricci. Studies have been made on the different editions of these maps, on the sources of information (both European and Chinese) that Ricci must have used, on the reception by the Chinese literati of Ricci's time of the maps and the world-view represented by them, and on the possible influence of Renaissance cartography on Chinese map-making. Writers differ on the importance and utility of these maps and their influence.

The tenth chapter in the Lalita-vistara, entitled Lipiśālāsaṃdarśanaparivarta, is well known for the list of 64 different forms of writing which were mastered by the Bodhisattva in his schooling. The text continues by describing how his 10,000 fellow-pupils, by reason of his supernatural power (adhiṣṭhānena), when they pronounced the individual syllables (mātṛkā), produced for each sound a symbolic or esoteric phrase beginning with the syllable in question. Thus, yadā akāraṃ parikīrtayanti sma, todā anityaḥ saroasaṃskāraśabdo niścarati sma ‘When they recited the syllable a, then there arose the sound (phrase) “Non-eternal are all the saṃskāras”’. (I refrain from attempting to improve the dubious grammar of the edition; but the sense is not in doubt.) The remainder of the Sanskrit syllabary is dealt with in a comparable manner, in the normal order, a, ā, i, ī, … ka, kha, ga, gha, ṅa … ha.

L'écriture actuelle à Madagascar ne date que du siècle dernier. En mars 1823, le roi Radama I a adopté les caractères latins et l'orthographe détaillée proposée par les missionnaires de son entourage à Tananarive, la capitale.

Il existait pourtant même avant cette date une tradition écrite en caractères arabico-malgaches, héritage laissé par les premières families arabes venues à la Grande Île au 11–13 siècle. Cette orthographe, appellée sorabe (écriture majuscule), a été gardée et cachée par la tribu Antaimoro de la côte est de Madagascar. Une vingtaine de personnes par génération apprend à lire et à écrire et transmet ces anciens manuscrits d'un caractère religieux ou historique aux futures générations.

A written law and a separate if not independent judiciary were among the most distinctive innovations brought by Islam to the Sudanic region. The history of the reception of the sharī'a and the institutions associated with it, of its modifications of the local customary law and of the changes wrought upon it by the same customary law may help to provide a framework for more general discussions of the process of islamization within Africa. The main purpose of this paper is to describe the history of the office of qāḍī, or judicial official, in the Dār Fūr sultanate, which occupied what is now the westernmost province of the Democratic Republic of the Sudan between the mid-seventeenth century and 1916. Thus I am not so much concerned with the content of the law, whether customary or Islamic, administered within the sultanate as with who administered it.

The fragments of the Sīra of Wahb b. Munabbih carefully edited by R. G. Khoury contain some misreadings or misinterpretations, several of which were elucidated in BSOAS, XXXVII, 3, 1974, 545–56. Additional corrections are suggested in the following lines.

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?

In BSOAS, XXXVIII, 1, 1975, at p. 92 I noted the anomaly in the Achinese and Mainland reflexes of the PAN base reconstructed by Dyen as *[tT]ahan: Ach. thön, töhön ‘to endure’, Cham tha:n ‘to draw back, restrain’, Röglai that ‘to set [trap]’, which imply rather *-q-. Dyen's *-h- rested on the comparison of Malay tahan ‘to restrain, to endure strain, to set [traps]’ with Tagalog tahán ‘cessation’, Samar-Leyte Bisayan táhan ‘to detain’, Bikol táhan ‘to endure more than another’. It required the assumption that Javanese tahan ‘to restrain, endure’, which also prima facie implies *-q-, was a loan ‘perhaps from Malay’.