Four versions of an episode in the Sumerian composition ‘Gilgamesh and Huwawa’ are discussed here. The encounter of Gilgamesh and Huwawa is interpreted in terms of Gilgamesh playing the role of a visitor received in audience at a foreign court. His gifts aim at inviting Huwawa to reciprocate, and thereby give up his protection. Gilgamesh especially exploits Huwawa's social isolation and lack of noble ancestry by offering him his two sisters, one in marriage and one as a concubine. he version in which the two sisters are the only offer makes most coherent sense. In another version the inner logic was distorted when the list was expanded to at least six offers.

TIM IX 47 (IM 62827) was first published by J. van Dijk, in Šumer, 15,1959, PI. 2, and edited in the same volume, pp. 8–10.1 had a chance to collate the text in the spring of 1990 when I visited the Iraq Museum, Baghdad.1 Since this led to some improved readings, which may clarify a difficult episode in the Sumerian composition ‘Gilgamesh and Huwawa’, a complete edition of the tablet is presented here.2 With a few exceptions my readings are in agreement with van Dijk's copy.

Scholarly assemblies in the Arabic intellectual tradition served as forums not only for entertainment butalso for spectacular events of both literary and historical significance. Al-Sīrāfī (d. 368/979) related how at one such literary seance, which was organized at the instance of Ibn Durayd (d. 321/933), a participant read these verses, attributed to Adam, the progenitor of mankind, lamenting the murder of Abel by Cain:

The land and all those on it have altered the face of the earth has turned dusty and vile. Anything of beautyand splendour has altered and the smile of the lovely face has waned.

The observation that the rhyme letter carries, in breach of the standard rule, different desinential vowels, namely, ḍamma in one line and kasra in the other, provoked a reaction from Ibn Durayd who said ‘This is a poem said at the beginning of the world, yet iqwā' was committed in it.’

But of course in Arabic historical lore, Ishmael, the son of Abraham, is said to have been the first to speak Arabic; and Adam is believed to have spoken Syriac. Factors which encouraged false ascriptions and the outright forgery of poetry have been discussed in various published works and the subject need not detain us here: suffice it to say that the foisting of these lines on Adam, and indeed the entire anecdote, might well be seen in terms of myth, in the sense defined by Jolles (Wahrsage), invented for the sake of a historical perspective.

In a recent work, Paul Dresch gives us an admirable study, hard to praise too highly, well researched, engagingly written, with mercifully little of sociological jargon. His field contact and knowledge of the (Zaydī) tribes of the northern Yemeni Arab Republic is of the kind of experienced political officers in the former Aden Protectorates like the well-known late Major Ian Snell and ‘Johnny’ Johnson, to which he adds the ability to relate his findings to the Arabian cultural background. Dresch makes use of Arabic documents, printed or MS, and uses the valuable evidence of political verse that I do not recall seeing utilized by other writers on Yemeni society. It is a pleasure to see Arabic correctly vocalized and transliterated, not mangled and distorted. A glossary of the technical terms of tribal law would have been of great value to scholars— many of these are known but more than a few, special to the region, are not. (Can one hope to see these in a further publication?)

The Akhbārī/Uṣūlī controversy within Twelver Shī‘ism has been portrayed in Western-language scholarship primarily as a scholastic dispute over jurisprudential methodology which came to fruition only in eleventh/seventeenthcentury Ṣafawid Iran. Uṣūlism is generally characterized as having stressed recourse to rationalist, subjective forms of analysis—particularly the principle of ijtihād (independent judicial reasoning)—on legal questions where the revealed sources were deemed wanting. Akhbārism has been portrayed mainly in negative terms, as having forbad recourse to speculative reasoning in favour of reliance solely on the Twelver-accepted revelation— the Qur'ān and the sunna, the latter especially including the akhbār (sg. khabar), the Arabiclanguage body of statements of and narratives about the twelve Shī‘īImāms, the last of whom disappeared in 260 A.H./A.D. 873–874.

Over the past several centuries, the town of Vrindavan in Uttar Pradesh has celebrated the loves of the pastoral god Kṛṣṇa and his beloved Rādhā. Numerous saints and devotional authors have contributed to the rich cultural heritage of this Hindu holy land, all doing much to strengthen its position as a centre for one of the most important streams of religious feeling in India. However, despite the theological claims of universal liberation from mundane preoccupations said to result from such religious feeling, the Vaiṣṇavism of Vrindavan shows the same susceptibility to human rivalry that can be detected in other religious movements. This rivalry takes the form of controversies which have not yet been entirely resolved. In this article and another which follows it, I undertake to address a triad of such controversies, well aware that the matters are still sensitive ones for both the parties involved: the Rādhāvallabhī followers of Hita Harivaṃśa, and the Gauḍīyas, followers of Caitanya Mahāprabhu. The chief matter contested by these devotees is the authorship of a book well-loved by both sects: the Rādhārasasudhānidhi (RRSN), ascribed to Hita Harivaṃśa by his followers in the Rādhāvallabhī tradition and to Prabodhānanda Sarasvatī by the Gauḍīyas. Before treating this question, however, one is obliged to confront two others: one concerns the identity of Prabodhānanda, the second that of Hita Harivaṃśa's relation to the Gauḍīya school. Both of these personalities are claimed by each of the sects to have, at one time or another, accepted allegiance to their own group.

The recent publication of the complete translation of the Yogasūtrabhāṣyavivaraṇa (also known as Pātañjalayogaśastrabhāṣyavivaraṇa and Bhagavatpadīya; henceforth abbreviated as Vivaraṇa) into English by Trevor Leggett is the latest contribution to the study of this intriguing and significant Sanskrit philosophical text. Prior to this publication (whose first two chapters were separately published already in 1981 and 1983 respectively) only a few excerpts thereof have been translated by Hajime Nakamura, into Japanese. It is a measure of the growing interest in the original text that it has attracted several astute preliminary studies, notably by P. Hacker, T. Vetter, W. Halbfass and A. Wezler in the West, and H. Nakamura in Japan.

As it stands, the title of the printed English translation reads: ‘The complete commentary by Ṥaṅkara on the Yoga Sūtra-s-a full translation of the newly discovered text.’ This is regrettably likely to be misleading in more than one way.

Though it would be almost impossible to trace who first applied the term ‘Avant-Garde fiction’ (Xianfeng Xiaoshuo ) to a recent trend in Chinese fiction since 1985, it is an appropriate name in many respects. All the previous schools of fiction in modern China—Wound fiction (Shangheng Xiaoshuo ), Reform fiction (Gaige Xiaoshuo ), Re-thinking fiction (Fansi Xiaowen ), or Roots-Seeking fiction (Xungen Xiaoshuo )—received their names after their respective subject matters. The naming of Avant-Garde fiction itself seems to indicate that Chinese fiction has grown out of its thematic age to enter a new phase of life beyond themes.

The earliest authors of Chinese Avant-Garde fiction—Can Xue , Ma Yuan , Hong Feng , Zhaxi Dawa , Mo Yan and others—are all based in remote areas far from the centres of modern Chinese civilization. This led some critics to the conclusion that literary modernity was at odds with modern urbanized culture. Hardly had such an argument been put forward when, towards the end of 1987, there appeared a new group of Avant-Garde writers—Su Tong with The escape of 1934 (Yijiu sansi nian de taowang— :), Sun Ganlu with The letter from the postman (Xinshi zhi han Ge Fei with The lost boat (Mizhou) and Yu Hua with One kind of reality (Xianshi yizhong)— all of them based in the Yangtze Delta, the most prosperous area of modern China. This would suggest, at least, that Chinese avant-gardism is not entirely dependent on economic-geographical conditions.

Many years ago the late Dr. Samuel Stern brought to my attention an item preserved among the Geniza documents in the Cambridge University Library. I remember that we used it as part of the illustrative material for a joint course of lectures on medieval Islamic administration, during which I, very much the junior partner, benefited greatly from his experience and store of knowledge. Stern himself intended to publish this piece, but had also brought it to the notice of Dr. Hassanein Rabie who used it, not entirely accurately, in his The financial system of Egypt, A.H. 564–741/A.D. 1169–1341 Rabie did not publish the text and, as far as I know, no one else ever has, although Geoffrey Khan has briefly referred to the titulature of the addressee. It seems worthwhile to do so now, after such a long interval, because of the intrinsic interest of this document.

Pelliot Tibétain (Pell. T.) no. 997, in Choix de Documents Tibétains, Biblioth`que Nationale (Paris, 1978), concerns the inventory of the property of Yu-lim gtsug-lag-khang in the Kva-cu district on Tibet's north-east frontier with China. It is in two parts. The first gives instructions for the revising of the existing inventory which had apparently suffered from some laxity in the past; the second is the fragmentary and somewhat damaged list of the subjects, cattle, crops and movable property, domestic and agricultural, of the lha-ris—the monastic estate. Sadly, it does not include the images, religious vessels, ornaments, etc. of the chapel.

Heaven has its material for slaughter. Among animals, they are the sheep, the pigs, the chickens and the ducks; among men, they are the short and slight, ugly, mean-eyed, short-stepped, garrulous, effeminate, stupid people.

As is well known, the Secret History is the only surviving source on the rise of the Mongol empire produced by the Mongols themselves, yet controversy continues to surround its value, its purpose, even its date. The fullest and earliest attested version of the text does not even survive in the Uyghur script employed by the Mongols, but only in a transcription into Chinese characters, accompanied by Chinese translation; a transposition carried out at an unkown date under circumstances which are not entirely clear. Chinese sources, it is true, have been used to throw a certain amount of light on the transmission of the Secret History, notably in a lengthy and detailed article published forty years ago by William Hung,1 but as the summary by F. W. Cleaves of the problems surrounding this evidence in the introduction to his translation of the Secret History makes abundantly clear,2 much has remained a matter for conjecture.