A total eclipse of the sun is rare enough in any one place and spectacular enough to leave a profound impression on those who observe it. From very early times it was regarded as a portent of disaster and carefully recorded. Advances in the field of geophysics, together with the advent of the high-speed computer, have made it possible to compute early solar eclipses with a new degree of precision, and we may now expect to find a significant correlation between literary and astronomical evidence for solar eclipses in areas where a sufficiently representative bloc of literature has survived. The region around Has Shamra (ancient Ugarit) is one such area, and it was decided to compute the principal solar eclipses visible there during the period covered by the Ugaritic texts (c. 1450–1200 b.c.), and scan the texts for possible references.

Structural anthropology is the attempt to describe the data of social anthropology, especially kinship and myth, by means of structural models. It has been pioneered by Professor Claude Lévi-Strauss and applied to the Old Testament by Dr. Edmund Leach. Obviously, the work of Leach is of most direct interest to Old Testament scholars, but it is impossible either to understand or evaluate it without reference to Levi-Strauss. Accordingly, this paper will begin with the latter before turning to Leach's articles on the Old Testament.

It has always been said of Mehri that it has no dual forms of the verb. Thus Bittner, in what seems to be the most recent statement on the subject, says, discussing Śḥeri dual forms, that they ‘umso interessanter sind, als das Mehri im Bereiche des Zeitwortes keinen Dual besitzt’. It had, however, been suggested tentatively by Leslau, and later more positively by Wagner, that Ḥarsūsi (Ḥarsi) had dual forms of the verb.

The curious fact has long been known that the greatest single festival of the Zoroastrian year, Nō Rōz, is celebrated twice over, with almost identical observances, on two separate days, namely Rōz Ohrmazd of Māh Fravardīn, and Rōz Hordād of the same month, i.e. on the first and sixth days of the first month of the year. As al-Bīrῡnī recorded, writing c. A.D. 1000: ‘On the sixth of Fravardīn, the day Hordād, is the Great Nō Rōz, for the Persians a feast of great importance’. The first of this month was celebrated as the Lesser Nō Rōz. Sasanian melodies were named for both Nō Rōz ī wuzorg and Nō Rōz ī xwurdag; and later the two days were also known respectively as the ‘special’ Nō Rōz (Nō Rōz-i xāṣṣa) and the 'general’ Nō Rōz (Nō Rōz-i ‘āmma). Among the Parsis the Great Nō Rōz ‘is kept with as much pomp and rejoicing as…New Year's Day’; and in Persia orthodox priests still do not recite Rapithwin Gāh, the daily prayer which marks Nō Rōz and the return of summer, until noon on Rōz Hordād of Māh Fravardīn, on which day the faithful there gather together for communal services to celebrate the beginning of the new religious year.

Khwarezmian linguistic studies have progressed but slowly since their inception in 1927, when A. Z. V. Togan published his discovery of some Khwarezmian (hereafter Xw.) sentences in an Arabic fiqh book. W. B. Henning's first article appeared after nine years and a quarter of a century later H. W. Bailey could still refer to ‘the slowly emerging Chorasmian’. The latest bibliography cannot boast more than two dozen titles. It is our tragic loss that Henning, having studied all the available Xw. material in the course of four decades, should have left ready for publication only the first 260 entries (from '– to ' kiv) of the Khwarezmian dictionary on which he was working at his most untimely death. Of course, Togan's publication in 1951 of the facsimile of a manuscript of Zamakhshari's Arabic dictionary Muqaddimatu 'l-adab, almost completely glossed in Xw., made the greater part of the extant Xw. material generally available, but, not least because of the labour involved, few have cared to duplicate or anticipate Henning's work. Now suddenly, however, in the words of a colleague, ‘everyone has become a Khwarezmologist’, through the publication of a transliteration and translation of this same linguistic material by Johannes Benzing.

Clauses of the kind described in this article as topic clauses occur commonly in both spoken and written Malay. However, such clauses have not so far been fully accounted for in formal analyses of Malay syntax, nor, except in Miss M. B. Lewis's recent book, have they been described by the use of Topic as an additional element in clause structure. The purpose of this article is to give a much fuller description of such clauses, and to suggest that analyses of them using Topic as an additional clause-element have advantages over the alternative analyses in terms of Subject, Predicate, and Complement alone.

The religion of Cao-Dai is fundamentally, and deliberately, syncretic. Since it includes Christ and Moses (but for some reason, not Muhammad) in its pantheon, the Western student might be tempted to see it as essentially an attempt to bridge the gulf between East and West by finding a sort of middle way between Christianity and Buddhism. It is possible that some Caodaists who have acquired a thorough Western education in France but maintained their religious belief do in fact see it in those terms, but most of the Caodaist literature indicates that the real basis of the syncretism is an attempt to bring together the three religions of the Sino-Vietnamese tradition. In this attempt, Christianity has only a peripheral position, and nothing has been adopted from Christian teachings that would seriously clash with the underlying doctrinal tolerance of East Asian religions. The most important feature of Caodaist syncretism is that it brings together elements of Taoist spirit-mediumship with a concept of salvation that was originally Buddhist. If any one of the three Sino-Vietnamese religions may be said to be dominant in Caodaism it is religious Taoism; but since the Caodaists themselves frequently refer to their religion as ‘reformed Buddhism’, that is a point which must be demonstrated rather than taken for granted. I propose to analyse some of the most obvious elements of Caodaism under four headings: spirit-mediumship; the Cao-Dai and other spirits; salvation and the apocalyptic aspect; and hierarchy and organization. A concluding section will deal briefly with the possible relationship between Caodaism and certain religious sects in China.