In the Khotanese Sudhana story it is related that Sudhana will come upon a rākṣasī and must slay her with his sword. The Khotanese text reads at this point kāḍara jse vara ṣṭau raysga vīra jsanauña (Ch 00266.178–9 KBT 28) = kāḍąrinai vara ṣṭāṃ raysgi vī jsanñä (P 2957.118 KBT 37), which Sir Harold Bailey rendered “There he must promptly slay her with his sword” (BSOAS XXIX, no. 3, 1966, 512). MS. P. 4089a presents a variant reading for this line: kāḍara-birre raysaga vīra jsanauña (P 4089a.2–3 KBT 20). In his Dict. p. 287 Bailey renders it “with cut of sword, she must swiftly be slain”. In birre he sees a word attested only here and meaning “with cut”.

In this short article marking Sir Harold Bailey's 90th birthday on 16 December 1989 it seems appropriate to take up and develop one amongst the many fruitful insights with which he has enriched our understanding of the languages of India, Iran, and Central Asia.

In 1961 an extensive collection of Ossetic folklore was published in two volumes in Ordzhonikidze under the title ИронАдæмьι Сфæлдьιстад. The collection includes both Iron and Digoron material and a large section of volume one is devoted to texts from the Ossetic Nart Epos. Among the Digoron Nart texts there is a large number of words and phrases which are difficult to interpret. Three such cases are discussed below.

With the death of Professor Eric Stokes we lost above all a delightful man, unassuming and helpful, intellectually vital and original. He helped inspire a new emphasis upon social and economic history among a whole generation of historians of South Asia. There are many people more appropriate than I to reflect this legacy in a memorial lecture. My only claim to speak may seem to be my continuing admiration for and dependence upon Stokes's work. If I have a wider claim, it must be in the emphasis which I place in my own research upon an empirical study of ideas and their impact; there is some justification for identifying members of the School of Oriental and African Studies with this approach, and it may be associated with us even more in future. If so, our starting-point must be Stokes's great pioneering effort, in The English Utilitarians and India, to identify the intellectual basis of Indian policy-making in the first half of the nineteenth century. Yet in South Asian studies generally Stokes has had relatively few followers along that path. Among Cambridge historians this first love (if ever they felt its charms) has tended to be supplanted by a positive distaste for flirtations with the impact of ideas. If Stokes is their model, it is in his role as an analyst of agrarian society, as may be enjoyed in his contribution to the Cambridge Economic History or in The Peasant Armed, and in parts of that arguably transitional collection, The Peasant and the Raj.

The document which is published here comes from the Michaelides Collection, formerly belonging to G. A. Michaelides and now in the possession of Cambridge University Library. In addition to a substantial number of Arabic papyri this collection also contains Arabic paper documents. The paper documents are very varying in date, ranging from the Fāṭimid to the Ottoman periods. The present document is a petition from the Fāṭimid period. Some Fāṭimid documents of this type have already been published. Several unpublishedFāṭimid petitions have come to my attention. Most of these are from the Cairo Genizah and will be published as part of a corpus of Arabic Genizah documents. I am publishing the present document from the Michaelides collection separately.

The Persian province of Māzandarān has characteristics unique in the land of Iran, even among its Caspian neighbours. The landscape of mountain, forest, ricefield and sea has its special freshness and charm, worlds away from the rocky plateau and searing desert further to the south. Its beauty was appreciated among others by the Safavid Shāh 'Abbās, who built an engineered highroad hidden to-day by the forest above Gālūgāh, and maintained favoured residences at Behshahr and Faraḥābād. For the visiting stranger, the most obvious impression is that created by the perennial Māzandarān cloud, a sea of cotton tufts, as it is often described, rising steadily up the hillsides with the growing heat of the day, to sink back into the valleys with the chill of evening, or fall as soft drizzle through the hours of darkness. When the traveller ascending the mountainside reaches the level of condensation, suddenly he is in a world of total humidity, with streaming perspiration, and water running from the trees and undergrowth. Twenty minutes later he has passed through the cloudbase, and entered the bone-dry world of “Iraq”. Dry sand replaces the treacherous “yellow clay” (zarde gil) beneath his feet, and the cool breeze in an instant evaporates the moisture from his shirt.

Henry Miers Elliot's first specifically historical work on India appeared one hundred and forty years ago in 1849. Four years later his small book on the Arabs in Sind was published. Between 1866 and 1877 appeared the magnum opus with which Elliot's name has since become identified, the History of India as told by its own Historians (8 vols.), edited, arranged and completed by John Dowson.

In J.R.A.S. 1988/2 Robert E. Frykenberg assails what he calls the “myth” that Macaulay's minute on education in British India was the occasion for a radical change in policy which imposed English education on an unwilling people. He puts forward three main arguments. First, there was no radical change in policy, for the government continued to support “Oriental” education and scholarship as well as English education. Secondly, Macaulay's advocacy of English education was a recognition of the views of “forward-looking gentry in India”. Thirdly, his minute was “one more salvo in a long and running set of encounters in which the positions of some protagonists were often much more blurred than has been properly realised by later generations of historians”. What is new in all this?

Brigitte Groneberg's book is a thoughtful and discursive essay on a number of problems in the grammar, understood in the broadest sense, of a Babylonian dialect. With one comprehensive dictionary complete and another, even more comprehensive, moving in that direction, with a basic general grammar of Akkadian and several survey-grammars of the various historical stages and geographical dialects in existence, it is entirely appropriate that we should have a close study of a chronologically limited and genre-bound corpus of texts which nevertheless broaches wider questions not dealt with by the more general grammars, and approaches them from a viewpoint which is not blind to contemporary developments in general linguistics and literary studies. If this book proposes new answers to questions about the character of the Akkadian language, and suggests new ways of looking at the analysis of forms, syntax and style, then it may be accounted a success, even if not all readers will agree with all the positions taken. In a way, Syntax, Morphologie und Stil … is a successor to Erica Reiner's A Linguistic Analysis of Akkadian, which also brought modern linguistic work – in this case the theory of generative grammar – to bear on its subject, with brilliant results, but concentrated more on a systematic survey of the entire grammar. Groneberg's book is more selective in its aim.

Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921) is generally acknowledged as the scholar whose work to a great extent laid the modern foundations for the study in the West of the history, culture, and religion of Islam. Issues of considerable significance are thus posed by questions concerning the individual responsible for this seminal scholarship, including, for example, such matters as his personal background, the influences that directed the course of his intellectual development, and the perspective from which he viewed the discipline he did so much to create and to which he dedicated his life. Fortunately, much material relevant to the investigation of these topics survives. In addition to Goldziher's vast scholarly corpus, important collections of his correspondence with colleagues and friends are extant, primarily in Budapest. The material published to date includes Goldziher's letters to Immanuel Löw (1854–1944), a discussion – with important extracts – of those to S. A. Poznanski (1864–1921), the letters of Solomon Schechter (1849–1915), Max Nordau (1849–1923) and Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936) to Goldziher, and a selection from the correspondence between Theodor Nöldeke (1836–1930) and Goldziher. His 1890 memoirs and subsequent diary have also been published, and Raphael Patai has now brought to light another important document, Goldziher's Keleti Naplóm (“My Oriental Diary”), in English translation with a detailed introduction offering a psychological portrait of the author.