The Islamic system of succession is destructive of family property in that it causes its division among a great number of heirs and into uneconomic units. Succession involves a great number of participants; qur'ānic and agnatic heirs participate simultaneously (not successively)—subject, of course, to the rules of priorities and exclusions—and this increases the fragmentation of the property and the shrinking of the shares of the participants ad infinitum. Islamic law does not know the principle of primogeniture. Succession is not limited to direct descendants but includes relatives of different parentelas and different degrees of kinship to the deceased.

Amongst the contributions to a recent volume commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Ugaritic studies is a paper devoted to analysis of the problems involved in description of Semitic prosody. While the data adduced there are explicitly limited to Ugaritic and Hebrew verse, the author's method entails consideration of such general matters as the definition of metre and parallelism. Since these are, as is well known, the traditional parameters in virtually every discussion of Biblical poetry, Professor Pardee's study evokes (and is clearly intended so to do) examination of all the categories and terms hitherto employed to describe the several and occasionally disparate phenomena collectively adduced as evidence of poetic composition. Historical surveys of the subject are now abundant, more or less easily accessible and not very often undertaken except as preface to special pleading on behalf of one or other of the criteria so far discerned for distinguishing poetry from prose.

The mausolea that safeguarded the remains of the Commanders of the Faithful are not preserved among the meagre remnants of 'Abbāsid Baghdād. The history of these prominent buildings can be reconstructed from historical sources, however, and their significance sketched. The evidence presented here is not new, but it may profitably be reviewed with regard to funerary practices, terminology, and the development of Islamic architectural forms.

Shaykh Khaḍir al-Mihrānī, the Ṣ؛fī guide and soothsayer of the Maml؛k sultan al-Ẓāhir Baybars (regn. 658–76/1260–77), was the subject of an article by Louis Pouzet, ‘Haḍir ibn Abî Bakr al-Mihrānî’ (Bulletin d'Études Orientales, XXX, 1978, 173–83), which is based almost entirely on the account of Shaykh Khaḍir in al-Nahj al-sadīd by the Coptic chronicler al-Mufaḍḍal b. Abi'l-Faḍā'il. Pouzet was apparently unaware that an almost identical account of Shaykh Khaḍir appears in the eighth volume of Ibn al-Dawādārī's Kanz al-durar wa-jāmi' al-ghurara. The editor of this volume, Ulrich Haarmann, discusses at length in his introduciton (pp.24–9) the relationship between the works of Ibn al-Dawādārī and Ibn Abi'l-Faḍā'il, and demonstrates that they drew independently on a source derived at one or two removes form the still largely unpublished Ḥawādith al-zamān of the Syrian chronicler al-Jazarī (658–739/1260–1338). Since Ibn al-Dawādārī completed this volume, according to the colophon, in 734/1334, while the unique (and probably autography) MS of al-Nahj al-sadīd is dated 759/1358, the version in Kanz al-durar may reasonably be assumed to be the older. A collation of the two versions, however reveals that they agree almost entirely, both verbally and in content. Two points of detail regarding Blochet's edition and translation of Ibn Abi'l-Faḍā'il, as used by Pouzet, may be noted in passing. Blochet, p. 459, line 2, reads kanīsat al-fuh؛d (tr. ‘l'église des Panthères’), a textual error for kanīsat al-Yah؛d, Șthe synagogue of the Jews’. Pouzet here tacitly corrects his source (p. 178). On the other hand, he accepts Blochet's curious rendering of bābā as ‘intendant’ (Pouzet, pp. 174–5 and n. 9), whereas it is surely obvious from the context that it has here, as often, a dervish connotation.

‘The life and achievements of Saladin constitute one of the great moments in the history of the crusades. In literature he appears most frequently as a conquering hero, who fought his enemies victoriously and in the end beat them to a standstill. But a closer examination of his actual life reveals him not only as a conqueror, but as a man who struggled with enemies of his own side who finally joined him and fought along with him under his sole command. From this angle we see him as a man who fought for his ideals, and fought, not victoriously, but in a measure that fell short of his hopes and ambitions’.

This paper attempts to identify some unexplored types of articulation in the production of some speech sounds. The main interest here lies in the way some English and Arabic sounds are produced: the vowel /a/ in English, and Arabic consonants /ε/ and /ħ/.

The appearance of Sir Harold Bailey's Dictionary of Khotan Saka brings to completion a project conceived as long ago as 1934 and initiated in 1945 with the publication ofKhotanese texts, I. The next two decades saw the appearance of five further volumes of texts (Khotanese Buddhist texts, 1951, and Khotanese texts, II–v, 1954–63) as well as of a much-admired volume of lexical commentary, Khotanese texts, VI: Prolexis to the Book of Zambasta (1967). In style and method the Dictionary closely resembles the Prolexis, demonstrating once again its author's extraordinary erudition and ingenuity, this time on a truly monumental scale.

The Dizi (as they call themselves) have hitherto been generally known as the Maji, a term derived from the name of their largest chiefdom, in which there also lies the most important Amhara town of this region. They are one of the least studied groups of south-western Ethiopia.

The following study contains a translation of al-Bīrūnī's rendering into Arabic of the third chapter of Patañjali's Yogasūtra cum commentrary. (On this point see our translation of al-Bīrūnī's rendering of the first two chapters of Patanñjali's Yogasktra). This translation is based on Ritter's edition of the Arabic text. Comparison has been made with the unique MS of Ritter's Text: KöprÜlÜ, 1589, fols. 412a–419a (writen on the margins). We have also compared the text with paralled passages and expressions in al-Bīrūnī's India.

Numerous Arab geographers and Persian literary texts refer with a variety of detail to an important desert caravanserai known as Dayr-i gachīn (Ar. Dayr al-jiss), situated to the south of Ray. The word dayr, meaning in Arabic ‘monastery’, or perhaps ‘hospice’, seems a natural term for a caravanserai. That the term could also mean a domed building and a fire temple is suggested by both the Burhān-i qāti' and the Farhang-i Ānandrāj. The Burhān-i qāti', under ‘Khwarnaq’, states:

Khwarnaq is the arabized word for Khuwarna, and this was a most excellent building which was built for Bahrām-i Gūr by Nu'mān b. Mundhir … and the other palace, which had three domes, one inside the other, and was built as a temple and a place of worship, they called Si-dayr since in Pahlavi they call a dome ‘dayr’.

For many years after its publication in 1912 Berthold Laufer's book Jade: a study in Chinese archaeologh and religion remained a standard reference work for Western scholars. In his third chapter Laufer discusses certain three-lobed jade discs (pl. I); he is in general agreement with the theories of the late-nineteenth-century Chinese scholar Wu Ta-ch'eng , who named the discs hsüan chi and suggested that they were originally intended to be used for astronomical purposes. After Laufer the discussion was taken up by other writers on jade, and was carried a stage further in a series of papers by Henri Michel, beginning in 1947, in which he presented a considerable amount of literary and scientific evidence in support of his interpretation of the astronomical purpose of the discs. Michel's theories were lent additional weight and given a wide circulation by their inclusion in Joseph Needham's survey of Chinese astronomy. Since Michel, those writers who have doubted the astronomical connexions of the discs have nevertheless tended to retain the name huüan chi, which now seems to have become established as the standard term for this particular jade form on museum labels and in archaeological reports in China as well as in the West.

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.

Some years ago I received from the India Office Library a xerox copy of a short document found at Kew among the papers of Sir Joseph Hooker, with an inquiry as to whether it was a permit for him to travel in Sikkim for the botanical research described in his Himalayan Journals (1854/1905). I knew enough Lepcha to be able to report to the India Office Library that the 42 lines of Lepcha script (romanized and translated at (II) below) were some sort of statement of accounts in East India Company rupees (kúm-pá-nyi kóm tsu; line 1); but I was not able to arrive at the sense of the text in detail until my present stay in Kalimpong again put me in touch with Lepchas, especially Mr. A. Foning, of the Kalimpong Lepcha Association, whose help it is a pleasure to acknowledge.

Zimbabwean Ndebele and Zulu might be likened, in a very broad sense, to American English and British English, in their relationship. Mzilikazi and his few followers left Zululand in 1822, and in the 1840s founded a new nation, over 1,000 km. to the north. There are certain differences in pronunciation and tone. Divergence is likely to have been bilateral: while Ndebele shows clear signs of non-Zulu influence in certain respects, Zulu on the other hand is probably not quite the same today as it was in 1822

La langue. Le bafia est une langue bantou parlée dans le centre sud de la République Unie du Cameroun, plus précisément par les autochtones de la ville de Bafia (chef-lieu du département du Mbam) et de ses environs. Cette ville se trouve à quelque 150 km au nord-ouest de Yaoundé, la capitale du Cameroun.

The Chinese Manichaean ‘hymnscroll’ was discovered by Sir Aurel Stein in Tunhuang and is now preserved in the British Library, under the number Or. 8210(2659). Apart from Chinese translations from Iranian originals, it contains three hymns in Chinese transcription. These hymns were studied and partly reconstructed by Waldschmidt and Lentz. In particular, the third hymn was identified with the Parthian fragments M259c and 529 in the German Turfan collection together with their Sogdian translation TM351 and reconstructed almost completely, W.-L. i, pp. 80–93. Verses 12 and 13 of the first hymn were identified with the common Middle Persian phrase pr'zyśt 'wd j'yd'n zm'n 'wh byẖ, W.-L. i, p. 111, n. 4. The second hymn was identified with an Iranian fragment M260, W.-L. i, p. 6, and its verses 5–7 were reconstructed by Waldschmidt and Lentz in JRAS, 1926, 116–22, 298–9.

In current Tibetan Nepal is Bal-po, Bal-po'i yul or Bal-yul. Bal-yul is found in early MSS from Tun-huang: in Choix de documents tibétains conservés à la Bibliothéque Nationals, Pelliot Tibétain (Pell T.), no. 44, mentions Padmasambhava in Bal-yul which may reasonably be seen as Nepal; Bal-yul is named also in Pell T. 1040 and 1285 in an apparently mythical setting Bal-po meaning Nepal appears in the Tibetan Annals in Documents de Touenhouang relatifs à I'histoire du Tibet by Bacot, Thomas and Toussaint (DTH), p. 13, 1. 2, and also, in my opinion, on p. 19, 1. 23. But in other instances, of which there are fourteen between the years A.D. 600 and 723, Professor Tucci considers the identification untenable because of the improbability that Tibetans, who liked to spend the summer and to hunt in high cool places, would choose to spend that time of year in Nepal (Minor Buddhist texts, II, 34, 35). That argument assumes that Bal-po implied only the valley of Kathmandu, but Hsuan Tsang, travelling about A.D. 630, attributed a much larger area—4,000 li—to Nepal and one specific place name in Bal-po—'Bri-'u-tang— mentioned in the years 699 and 725 appears to have been in reach of Zhangzhung which is generally held to be in Western Tibet around Lake Manasarowar. The possibility that all references to Bal-po are to Nepal cannot, therefore, be dismissed too readily.

In a previous article discussing the text entitled al-Lughāt fī'l-Qur'ān attributed to Ibn 'Abbās, mention was made of two manuscripts of Gharīb al-Qur'ān also attributed to Ibn 'Abbās. A recent visit to Istanbul allowed an examination of these works, leading to the discovery that, in fact, these manuscripts contain two additional copies of al-Lughāt fī'l-Qur'ān and that an independent text Gharīb al-Qur'ān attributed to Ibn. 'Abbās does not exist. A proliferation of titles has taken place regarding this text and, most significantly of course, around the figure of Ibn 'Abbās and his role in Qur'ānic lexicography.