In 1989 Jadranka Gvozdanović published data of the ‘Yakkhaba’ transitive verbal paradigm. In the present paper these data are identified as Yakkha, re-arranged and interpreted. Comparisons are made with other Kiranti verbal agreement systems and with my model of the Proto-Kiranti verb.

1. Yakkhaba, Yakkha and Yakthungba

Kiranti languages are native to eastern Nepal and the western fringe of Sikkim. The Kiranti branch of the Tibeto-Burman is characterized by verbal morphologies which by Tibeto-Burman standards may be called complex. The Kiranti languages are traditionally divided into Limbu, Yakkha and the Rai languages. Limbu, at the far eastern extent of the Kiranti homeland, has several dialects, of which (Weidert and Subba, 1985) and Phedāppe (van Driem, 1987) are the best described. Yakkha occupies an intermediate position and is spoken in the vicinity of Cainpur in Saṅkhuvā Sabhā district on the slopes east of the Arūṇ river. Rai (Nep. Rāī) is a highly heterogeneous group of languages. This has to do with the fact that the name Rai, although convenient, is not a proper linguistic designation, but represents what in Nepal is perceived to be an ethnic grouping.

It is well known that the Khārijites rejected genealogical qualifications for the caliphal office. As they saw it, the most meritorious Muslim should be elected whatever his ethnic origins might be; personal merit overruled considerations of descent. Modern Islamicists regularly imply that they also held personal merit to overrule considerations of status libertatis: the Khārijites allegedly held the most meritorious Muslim to be eligible for the caliphal office ‘even if he were a black/Ethiopian slave’. But this has long been known to rest on a mistake. The mistake goes back to Goldziher who based himself on a Prophetic tradition exhorting the believers to obey the amīr ‘even if he be an Ethiopian slave (‘abd ḥabashī); but as Goitein and Lewis have pointed out, the tradition in question has nothing to do with Khārijite views on the caliphate. So why does the claim persist? The answer is that al-Shahrastānī also credits the Khārijites with the tenet that the imām may be a black slave (‘abd awḥar), or at any rate a slave (Cureton's text has ‘abd aw ḥurr).

The primary purpose of this paper—apart from a personal concern to offer a token of affection and respect to a friend and colleague of many years’ standing—is to consider two analytical models (one drawn from early Christian history, the other from the history of science), and to suggest ways in which these may help us to interpret the data of religious, and in particular Muslim, change in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Futūḥ al-Shām of al-Qudāmi, now lost, is not listed by Brockelmann or by Sezgin although it is one of the earliest works of futūḥ: its author lived in the second half of the second Islamic century. A few excerpts from this book, taken from Ibn ՙAsākir (d. 571/1176), Ta'rīkh madīnat Dimashq and Ibn Hajar (d. 852/1448), al-Iṣāba fī tamyīzi 'l-ṣaḥāba, provide some insight into the author and the book.

Ibn ՙAsākir's monumental work (see ‘Abbreviated references’ below, under TMD) is now available, in addition to the volumes which have so far been edited, in the form of a commercial facsimile edition. Its Mukhtasar, by Ibn Manzūr, is also available in a scholarly edition. Only a few years ago, apart from the edited volumes (which only cover a small part of this voluminous biographical dictionary), one had to rely on the incomplete and at times unreliable Tahdhīb of this book prepared by ‘Abd al-Qādir Badrān. This situation has now changed fundamentally and the easier access to this book will, one hopes, give new impetus to research in those areas where Ibn ‘Asākir excels, such as the conquest of Syria and Palestine.

Although the existence of 12 Armenian manuscripts in the Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies has been known to scholars for some time and partial listings of their contents have appeared, they have not as yet been the subject of any more detailed publication. The collection features only one gospelbook which, in consequence of losing its original binding, also lacks its final colophon which would inform us precisely on such matters as date, provenance and, where appropriate, patron.

From other data the copyist can be identified as Movsēs. Moreover, since he describes himself simply as scribe (grič‘), we may deduce that he occupied only one of the minor clerical orders. He refers to assistance he received in lining the manuscript, which probably explains the awkwardness of the openings of two of the gospels where, despite the page being arranged as usual for two columns of writing, the scribe has elected to ignore the divisions and treat it as one. Similarly, his reference to his teacher confirms the impression left by his employment of the diminutive grč‘ak at one point that he was still under instruction in the art at a monastery. This is further compatible with the comparatively low level of technical excellence exhibited by the illuminations. Paleographically, the codex might be assigned to the seventeenth century, a date supported by some of the later grammatical forms which appear in the surviving colophons.

One of the fundamental innovations of the early Church was the abolition of an ancient, venerable institution—divorce, the practice of which was as widespread as marriage itself. The explicit ban on divorce found in the Gospels ran counter to legal systems of the known world, with one notable exception: among the sectarian group whose rules are enshrined in the Dead Sea Scrolls, a stance against divorce can be verified, implying that a legal innovation of early Christianity can be tracked back to its origins in Sectarian Judaism.

By the time Christianity was emerging, marriage and divorce had already co-existed for a long time; in Mesopotamia marriage contracts had for two millennia been anticipating the possibility of divorce, with litigation governing the dissolution of marriage and division of properties. The best evidence, however, for the precursors to late Hellenistic (i.e. pagan, Jewish, and Christian) legal practice derives from a group of Neo-Babylonian marriage contracts dating from the seventh to third centuries B.C.

The dream near the beginning of the tale plays an important role in the Keret epic from Ugarit. Keret, suffering from deep depression after the death of his wife and his children in a series of tragic incidents, cries himself to sleep. This is stated in the text as:

šnt tlun wyškb ‘Sleep overtook him while he lay,

nhmmt wyqmṣ slumber while he crouched’; (CTA 14 i 33–35).

Lying in the crouched, curled-up position usual in incubation, he dreamt. The narrative concerning the dream begins with:

wbḥlmh il yrd ‘In his dream El descended,

bḏhrth ab adm in his ḏhrt the Father of Man’ (11. 35–37).

The rapid pace of the change sweeping through the Arab world over the last few decades has profoundly affected both its various cultural products and its writers' perception of their national identity, social role and the nature of literature. The aim of this paper1 is to discuss the major changes in the sociopolitical reality of the Arab world, the cultural frame of reference and the responses of one of the major literary genres in modern Arabic literature: the novel. It is assumed here that there is a vital interaction between the novel and its socio-cultural context, in that novels encode within their very structure various elements of the social reality in which they appear and within whose constraints they aspire to play a role. Their generation of meaning is enmeshed in a variety of cultural, psychological and social processes, and their reception therefore brings into operation an array of experiences necessary for the interpretive act.

In societies where oaths and vows are taken seriously the problem inevitably arises of how to escape from them when necessary. The story of Jephthah and his daughter in Judges 11.3Off. illustrates what might happen if no escape mechanism is sought. In both the Bible (Num. 30:3) and the Qur՚ān (5:89) we are told that we must fulfil our oaths and vows, but both scriptures also set out acceptable ways of atonement for certain occasions when fulfilment proves impossible (cf. Lev. 5:1 ff. and Qur՚ān loc. cit.). The atonement might then serve as an escape route for someone who is bound by an oath or vow which he can no longer keep. Other ways out were also provided by the law and its interpreters (sometimes known in Islam as the ahl al-ḥall wa՚l-՚aqd, ‘those who loose and bind’): the words used might be held to be invalid; recourse might be had to the principle that we cannot be held to vows which are beyond our capacity or are contrary to God's law; our state of mind at the time we made the vow (whether in anger, jest, or mental distraction) might be taken into consideration, etc. The tension thus generated between the desire to stress the seriousness of oaths and vows on the one hand, and the need to be realistic in recognizing human weakness on the other, could be considerable.

Unlike most of the medical works of Maimonides (1135–1204), which enjoyed wide circulation both in their original Arabic form and in Hebrew or Latin translations, his Epitomes of Galen seem never to have become widespread or popular. Whereas his other medical compositions are usually extant in a good number of manuscripts, and in their original language are often available in both Hebrew and Arabic script, the manuscript attestation of Maimonides's Epitomes of Galen is rather meagre. Steinschneider, whose splendid works remain the basic tools of reference for all research in this field, devotes to the Arabic Epitomes a mere three lines and lists only three manuscripts containing them (in fact, containing only a small part of them); Hebrew translations are not known to have been made, and not one of the Epitomes appears to have found its way into Latin. In 1966 two further manuscripts, both of them fragments from the Taylor-Schechter collection in the hand of Maimonides himself, became available when S. M. Stern published his ‘Ten autographs by Maimonides—fragments of medical works, responsa, letters and prescriptions’ in Maimonidis Commentarius in Mischnam … Vol. III, Corpus Codicum Hebraicorum Medii Aevi, ed. R. Edelmann, Pars I (Hafniae, 1966),11–29. The first two of these ten autographs are fragments of the Epitomes of Galen, to the publication of which Stern prefixed a fine discussion of the contents of these Maimonidean Epitomes and a summary of what is known about them.