This article discusses some manuscripts copied and described by E. W. West in his Notebooks held at the Royal Asiatic Society, with special reference to the texts contained in the Pahlavi codex MK.

This contribution proposes an interpretation of a newly attested divine title of the ancient Arabian deity Ruḍaw, mkśd ‘(the one) from Chaldea’. It explores what sense this title could have had and its implications on our understanding of Ruḍaw's position in the ancient Arabian pantheon, especially in relation to Allāt. It also examines mentions of Ruḍaw in Islamic-period narrative sources and concludes that his cult likely disappeared by Islamic times; tales of the destruction of his cult site reflect the use of the ‘smashing idols’ topos to narrativize the passage from pre-Islam to Islam.

Until 1854, the date of publication of Westergaard's Zendavesta,2 Europe was unacquainted with the Iranian recension of the Xorde Avesta. In his edition Westergaard was able to make use of three Sāde manuscripts for the first time, which he himself acquired during his stay in Persia between 1841 and 1844: 6115 (K36 [= M1]) (IrXA Sāde) from 1724, 6870 (K37 [= M2]) (IrXA Sāde in NP script + Faroxšī) from the 19th century, 3100 (K38 [= M3]) (Faroxšī, very close to 3095 [Suppl.persan1191]) from 1814.3

The Middle Persian (MP) verb gumēxtan, gumēz- [gwmyhtn', gymyc-], despite its Indo-Iranian and Indo-European origins, does not offer attestations in Avestan and Old Persian. This is a very peculiar fact, because in particular a nominal derivative of this verbal stem, gumēzišn [gwmyck'], became one of the most sensible technical terms adopted in the framework of the Mazdean cosmology and theology. We can briefly recall that the gumēzišn concerns the ‘state of mixture’, the mélange produced by the irruption of Ahreman in the primordial good creation of Ohrmazd, when he pierced the heavens and entered the world.

Since H. Humbach's Baktrische Sprachdenkmäler (Wiesbaden, 1966) the main etymological proposal for Bactrian χϸονο ‘(calendar) year, (regnal) year’ has been A. Thierfelder's suggestion of a loanword from Hellenistic Greek χρόνος ‘time’. In this article the plausibility of this etymology is re-examined, and it is further argued that it should be rejected on the grounds that the formal phonological differences between the potential Hellenistic Greek source form and its presumable loan-adaptation form in Bactrian are inconsistent with what is known of Bactrian diachronic phonology.

A pre-Sasanian Middle Persian inscription on a silver bowl is published here for the first time and compared with a similar inscription published by P. O. Skjærvø in 2000 and identified by him as naming members of the dynasty which ruled Persis (Fārs) in the 1st century bce. The commentary concentrates on the word šʾtḥw, apparently a name for this type of bowl, and on the importance of these inscriptions for the history of the Pahlavi script.

Halper 331 is the fragment of a codex that has been styled the ‘oldest dated document of the Cairo Genizah’. It preserves the opening of a Jewish legal document dated to the year 1182 (Seleucid era), which appears to have been copied into this codex, probably as a formulary, not long after this date, in the late 9th century. In this article, the text of this fragment, in Aramaic and Hebrew, is edited, and its identification as the beginning of a marriage contract (ketubbah) is evaluated. Its Egyptian provenance is questioned, partly because the earliest evidence for the introduction of the Seleucid era by Jews in Egypt dates from the mid-10th century. The article surveys the history of Jewish dating methods in early medieval Egypt and the Near East, in an attempt to clarify this question. The specific date of the document deviates from the rabbinic calendar, but agrees with that of the contemporary Jewish Near Eastern sectarian groups of Abū ʿImrān al-Tiflīsī and Ismāʿīl al-ʿUkbarī; this document could thus uniquely attest one of these sectarian Jewish calendars.

Our article in this issue, “The ‘oldest dated document of the Cairo Genizah’ (Halper 331): The Seleucid era and sectarian Jewish calendars,” examines a fragment of parchment bearing a short text dated to the year 870/1 ce. One of the article's arguments concerns the protective formulas that appear in this fragment—“With a good sign for us and for all Israel, at a good hour, with an upright horn, (under) a high constellation, (so) may it be for us and for all Israel!” Similar formulas appear at the start of later Jewish marriage contracts (ketubbot) preserved in the Genizah (and later, elsewhere). But we suggest that in the ninth century, such formulas were not necessarily distinctive to ketubbot, and that Halper 331 may contain the text of some other type of legal document. In support of this suggestion, we noted two other non-ketubbah texts from the tenth century that feature similar formulas, including an inscription within a lectionary containing readings from the Prophets (haftarot) that was written in 924.

This article examines the extent of the concluding section (Y 41) of the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti in light of the manuscript evidence and the section's divergent reception in a Middle Persian text known as the “Supplementary Texts to the Šāyest nē Šāyest” (Suppl.ŠnŠ). This investigation will entertain the possibility of an alternative ritual being described in the Suppl.ŠnŠ. Moreover, it argues that the manuscripts transmit the ritual text along with certain variations and repetitions while the descriptions of the extent of each section preserve the necessary boundaries of the text as a textual composition or unit.